THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, September 9, 2021
Bursting With Color Late in Life
A review of ‘Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful’
A traveling show brings together over 150 objects to explore the vibrant abstract work of the Washington painter who developed her iconic style in her 60s
Norfolk, Va.
Alma Thomas developed her unique abstract painting style only after retiring at age 68, in 1960, as a Washington, D.C., junior-high-school teacher. She called her forms “Alma’s Stripes” for their tessellated brushstrokes. Bold, rainbow daubs of paint weave together patterns of stripes and circles on canvas. Colors swirl and shimmer in these dazzling compositions. Vibrant hues react against one another. Active brush marks play off a tension between figure and ground. Suddenly garnering Thomas museum shows in New York and Washington, the paintings turned the unknown artist, a Black woman then in her 70s, into a trailblazer sought after by the country’s major collections. But where did it all come from? “ Alma W. Thomas : Everything Is Beautiful,” a new exhibition co-organized by the Columbus Museum in Columbus, Ga., and the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Va., looks to fill in the background.
Alma Thomas’s ‘Blast Off’ (1970) PHOTO: CHRYSLER MUSEUM OF ART
Curated by Seth Feman of the Chrysler and Jonathan Frederick Walz of the Columbus, the show adds an abundance of context while exhibiting some of Thomas’s best-known works, such as “Blast Off” (1970) and “Starry Night and the Astronauts” (1972), both inspired by the American space program. With over 150 objects spread across multiple thematic sections, Thomas’s paintings, drawings and early sculptures, ranging from the 1920s until a year before her death in 1978, are presented here alongside her photographs, letters, furniture, examples of the art that influenced her, and even her own handmade dresses and dolls. A 336-page exhibition catalog, featuring 17 essays on topics ranging from Thomas’s graduate studies in marionettes to her passion for gardening, gives extra meaning to the “everything” of the show’s title. Now on view in Virginia, the exhibition will continue on to the Phillips Collection in Washington and the Frist Art Museum in Nashville before finishing in Columbus.
Born in Columbus in 1891, Thomas as a teenager moved with her family north to Washington. She enrolled in Howard University and became its first fine-arts graduate in 1924. She earned a graduate degree in education at Columbia University and remained a student even as she taught, enrolling in courses in abstract painting at American University in the 1950s.
Alma Thomas with two students at the Howard University Art Gallery (1928 or after) PHOTO: THE COLUMBUS MUSEUM/CHRYSLER MUSEUM OF ART
Thomas contended with arthritis just as she set out on her own abstract course. The condition became so acute she had to soak her hands in hot water before she could paint. Yet she was inspired by the late work of Henri Matisse, another artist who investigated color despite his infirmities. “Watusi (Hard Edge),” Thomas’s transitional painting from 1963, among her first in acrylic and the first to find her working in colorful abstract forms, pays direct homage to “The Snail (L’escargot),” Matisse’s cutout from just a decade before. Thomas pursued similarly distilled abstractions for the rest of her life.
A sculptor, costume designer, puppeteer and painter—in first a realistic and then abstract mode—Thomas ended up reflecting much of her earlier output in her distinctive breakout work starting with “Air View of a Spring Nursery” (1966). Through the show’s photographs of her Italianate townhouse and Washington neighborhood, we might see how the ashlar bricks of St. Luke’s, her local Episcopal church, reappear in the horizontal bands of this composition. Likewise her dress patterns can mirror the pieces and seams of “Orangery” (1973). The paving stones of her backyard garden path echo the sinuous forms of “Grassy Melodic Chant” (1976). The exhibition invites a search for such visual clues.
Alma Thomas, 'Air View of a Spring Nursery,' (1966) PHOTO: CHRYSLER MUSEUM OF ART
At times the presentation here focuses on the social at the expense of the aesthetic. An abundance of ephemera from the Thomas archive in Columbus leaves the show cluttered. A section meant to show the differences between Thomas and other Washington Color School painters, including Gene Davis, Sam Gilliam, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, better illustrates their affinities. To frame an opening room around a 1971 protest about racial exclusion at the Whitney, in which Thomas took no part, also distracts from the artist’s own achievements.
“I’ve never bothered painting the ugly things in life,” Thomas once observed. “No. I wanted something beautiful that you could sit down and look at. And then, the paintings change on you.” Her activism was pictorial rather than political. She identified as a painter of color chromatically more than racially. When asked if she considered herself a Black artist, she replied, “No, I do not. I am a painter. I am an American.” She read up on the theories of Bauhaus teacher Johannes Itten and energized her compositions through the use of complementary colors, such as between the red and blue of “Mars Dust” (1972).
Thomas appealed to the universal promise of modernism even in an age of protest. “Thomas ignored Black Consciousness all the while benefiting from it,” one critic, the retired Princeton historian Nell Irvin Painter, claims in an essay for the catalog. Yet “Everything Is Beautiful” cannot help but reveal the transcendence of Thomas’s paintings. Look closely and you can, in fact, see where it comes from. When the Phillips Collection acquired Paul Cézanne’s “The Garden at Les Lauves” in 1955—a seemingly unfinished landscape of colorful blocks included in this exhibition in a section called “The Field”—Thomas internalized the lessons of this work, with its minimum of forms building up into an all-over whole, just half a mile from her home. Cézanne “gave me the idea of using color to structure a painting,” she said. As with modernism itself, the story of Alma Thomas really starts with him.
Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful
Chrysler Museum of Art
Through Oct. 3