Bursting With Color Late in Life

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

New Worlds

THE NEW CRITERION, September 2021

New worlds

On a discovery of fifteenth-century Venetian glass beads in Alaska.

Venice can be a furnace, as anyone who visits in midsummer will tell you. Beyond the heat of the Adriatic sun, the lagoon city is also a furnace for culture. This is why we still visit: to experience those ingredients of East and West, of Rome and Byzantium, of Europe and Asia and past and present, that melted together and crystallized through art and architecture into islands of faith and fortune.

Out of that heat came many miracles. In the fifteenth century, Venice’s glass factories on the lagoon island of Murano produced a particular miracle that has only now come to light. One day, over five hundred years ago, a guild of Murano glassmakers combined a mixture of silica, plant ash, lime, cobalt, and copper. They fueled their furnace with alder and willow wood. They added their grains of silica made from the sands of Crete and Sicily and the quartz of the local Ticino and Adige rivers. Turned malleable through the ash, strengthened by the lime, the silica melted into molten glass that was lustrously colored like a milky blue cloud, the result of the material’s exposure in heat to the cobalt and copper. The glassmakers then extracted the mixture. They stretched it into a thin cane, or drawn tube, until it was no more than half an inch thick. Then they cut the tube into tiny segments and reheated the pieces in a special rotating furnace. This final process smoothed over the edges, until the glass cuttings became polished and round.

What emerged that day were translucent cerulean globes of a dreamy, oceanic radiance. Then as now they were the coveted creation of that particular Venetian genius for melding art and technology into objects that are unlike anything else in the world. Bisected with tiny holes, the beads were designed to be tied together. Little did the glassmakers of Murano know quite how far those ties would take them.

The glassmaking guilds of Venice developed their proprietary techniques for manufacturing rosary beads—paternostri—of extraordinary beauty. In the markets to the east, beyond Renaissance Christendom, these same glass beads became prized as veriselli—imitation gemstones. Two centuries before, the Venetian Marco Polo had famously opened up the worlds of Asia, returning with paper and stories of the Silk Road. Now it was the glass of Venice, an alchemy of art and artifice, that was making its way to the Orient.

Out of the furnaces of Venice, those blue beads ended up traveling farther than even Marco Polo could have imagined. In the months and years after their creation, a handful of the beads followed the Silk Road routes to the east. Down the Adriatic and around the horn of Greece, past the Black, Caspian, and Aral Seas, the beads moved hand over hand into China. Then to the north and east, they passed into aboriginal Asian territories. Eventually they reached the tribal lands along the northern Pacific. Now at the western edge of the Bering Sea, at the outer edge of Asia, the beads went again by boat. This time they were traded along indigenous fishing routes. Now in the hands of prehistoric Eskimos, they crossed the Bering Strait, a journey of over fifty miles by kayak—remarkably, into present-day Alaska.

It wasn’t until 1741 that Vitus Bering, a Danish cartographer in the service of Russian explorers, first made contact with the native peoples of southern Alaska. The sea and strait dividing the Asian and North American continents are named in his honor, and his discoveries ended the region’s prehistoric period by opening the door for Russian traders. The Murano beads, entering North America sometime in the 1400s, predate the arrival of European contact there by centuries.

Venetian beads found in northern Alaska. Image: Kunz & Mills / American Antiquity.

Following native trade routes along the Noatak River, Eskimos carried these beads up from the Chukchi Sea and the Kotzebue Sound. Eventually they reached the crest of the Continental Divide at a place called Punyik Point, a site in the Arctic tundra along the north shore of Etivlik Lake suited for caribou hunting and trout fishing. Here along the western Brooks Range, the Colville River begins its Arctic journey among the shrub-willow patches to the Beaufort Sea to the north east.

Judging by their well-worn appearance, the Venetian beads were prized, rubbed, and held close. The Eskimos likely divided them, now tied with local twine and mixed in with cold-hammered copper jewelry of native manufacture, among a family clan living in different temporary dwellings. One day, they hid the beads along with their local jewelry behind the benches and in the entry tunnels of the temporary winter shelters they had dug into the earth. Then, for reasons we can only imagine for a nomadic people who left no written record, they departed and never returned for their unique possessions. Maybe there was a catastrophe. Maybe they were simply unable to retrieve them. Over the seasons, as the shelters collapsed back into the earth, the beads came to rest among the caribou bones. They were only rediscovered and identified over five centuries on, matching beads found at two other Arctic sites, all connected by the drainages of nearby rivers.

When the archaeologists Michael L. Kunz and Robin O. Mills announced the finding of these Venetian beads in February 2021 in the journal American Antiquity—the result of decades of research and field investigation at three archaeological sites—they speculated that the objects were among the earliest evidence of European culture in the Americas. Through radio-carbon dating of the locally sourced twine discovered among the neighboring jewelry, and what is otherwise now known about the nomadic dwellings in which they were found, they concluded that the beads most likely arrived in their resting place sometime in the middle of the 1400s. The two archaeologists called their discovery the “first documented instance of the presence of indubitable European materials in prehistoric sites in the Western Hemisphere as the result of overland transport across the Eurasian continent.” That means the beads entered the North American continent many decades before Columbus’s arrival in the West Indies in 1492—an event that also brought Venetian beads to the New World.

It took a leap of faith for those beads to cross the ten-thousand-mile route from the Venetian lagoon to Punyik Point. It also took a leap and many years of research for archaeologists, digging for over half a century around the outlines of what remained of those small nomadic dwellings, to realize quite what they had found. Yet seeing those beads today, as extraordinary as it now seems, it is still possible for us to understand the dynamics that delivered them over such vast distances to be traded among such disparate peoples.

We speak too little of beauty. Yet, time and again, the wealth of culture, and the creativity to embed that culture into things of beauty, has the power to surprise. In the affections of art, of music and dance, even of captivating ideas, humanity extends its reach against the odds. Beauty can draw the lines of culture over vast distances, making the most unexpected connections. It can also be all that remains, not just of value, but of values, long outlasting the people who created, conveyed, and protected it. If only we would recognize culture qua culture, as something to be prized for its richness and coveted for its complexities outside of the diktats of the present moment.

There was a time, even in the lifetime of many readers today, when the arrival of European culture in the Americas was considered a cause for celebration. Perhaps this celebration was too unalloyed and too unchallenged, but American civic identity has long recognized the events around it as world-defining, on the order of the first humans stepping out of Africa, and not unreasonably so. In another time, the discovery of the Venetian beads of Punyik Point might have been heralded along the lines of Columbus’s first landfall, or the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving. Beyond Viking outposts in Greenland and Newfoundland, which might date to 1000 A.D., everything that European civilization has touched in the Americas started at Punyik Point, with tiny glass beads seeding the crest of the Continental Divide. The story invites wonder, not at conquest, but at culture and its astonishing powers to connect worlds we otherwise insist are unconnected.

We live at a moment when the historical overlay of European culture onto the Americas has never seemed more tenuous. The regular attacks on its symbols and rituals now feel like concerted acts of extirpation, with energies that seem to burn for nothing less than the annihilation of Western culture down to the roots of the American soil. The culture of the West has not always been here, the arguments go. It is alien, compromised, bringing with it a set of foreign ideals that have not nearly been met. Native peoples have also lived in the Americas for thousands of years—if not since the beginning of time, as oral traditions may teach, then at least for longer than anyone can remember, through the ice age, through periods when even the landscape looked quite different and the continents of America and Asia may have been connected. And these critics are right, at least about the West’s relatively brief presence in the Americas. Six hundred years is but a moment compared to six thousand years, or thirty thousand years.

The discovery of the Venetian beads should, in fact, remind us of this impermanence. It is precisely this impermanence, the bead-like preciousness of culture, that needs care and protection. Western culture often exists as an intervention—a cultivated garden, a voice in the wilderness, a remote settlement. Some of its most lasting moments have been on the margins, where cultures are set in relief and the divisions between settled and unsettled are most deeply felt. Western culture can be best expressed in these extended, exploratory, colonizing forms—as refugees from the Trojan War setting foot on the coast of Italy, or American astronauts touching down on the lunar surface, or Venetian beads adorning a family of Eskimos. This is why the culture of the Americas has been so remarkable in its heterogeneous, modern form. Those Venetian beads signaled the beginning of a moment that has enriched the world of culture.

The discovery of the Venetian beads should also suggest the true complexity of that exchange. Western culture arrived here as an interchange, an import to the Americas as much as an export of Europe. If only we would recognize and protect that culture today as well as its Asian and Mesoamerican custodians did half a millennium ago. The five-hundred-plus-year history of European contact in the Americas may be a blink of the eye, but consider what has been achieved in that short time. No matter how it may end, consider also that the future of the Americas will be buried together—
Native and European jewels mixed among the caribou bones.

For the prehistoric people of northwest Alaska, even if they could not have imagined the Basilica of San Marco with its celestial domes, they knew they had something remarkable in their tiny globes of sky, crystallized in Mediterranean sand. The same goes for the unimaginable chain of hands that connected these people through those beads, from the Arctic tundra of Punyik Point all the way back to the Murano glass guilds of fifteenth-century Venice.

Meet the Medici at the Met

The Spectator, June 2021

Meet the Medici at the Met

Bad politics often make good art. That’s especially true when the art is tasked with making sense of political senselessness. A preview of The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512–1570 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Someone turned up the lights on portraiture in 16th-century Florence. Lyrical poetry went hard rock. Colors became high key. Posers now scowled at the oil-on-canvas flashbulbs, giving attitude, hands on hips, codpieces a-thrusting. Not that they even cared about looking as good as they do. Sure, they got dressed for the occasion, but notice the sprezzatura, the indifference in their eyes to the whole affair.

That was the maniera moderna, the new mannerism in art, and no one captured it better than Agnolo Bronzino. Whether it’s the ‘Portrait of a Young Man with a Book’ (mid-1530s), his haughty painting in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or ‘Lodovico Capponi’ (1550-55), his side-eye romancer at the Frick Collection, these figures are boys interrupted. One has a finger in his book. The other fingers a medallion of a woman as he looks up, in adolescent annoyance, from the Snapchat of the day.

In The Renaissance in Italy (1875-86), John Addington Symonds called such faces ‘hard and cold as steel’. Somerset Maugham said Bronzino’s paintings showed a ‘supreme and disdainful indifference to the passion of others’. In the Florence of the Medici, this was just the point. The boys were back in town.

Bad politics often make good art. That’s especially true when the art is tasked with making sense of political senselessness, such as the fraught alliances of cinquecento Florence. Intrigues, assassinations, depositions, shifting enemies, family feuds, pandemic plagues and big money: 16th-century Florence had it all. The wonder and power of Florentine art came out of the scramble to clarify a present that was anything but clear. In Florence and beyond, there were Reformations and counter-Reformations. There was holy Rome and the Holy Roman Empire. Henry VIII wanted his annulment. Meanwhile the second of two successive Medici popes, Clement VII, had to take refuge in Castel Sant’Angelo after the mutinous troops of Charles V sacked Rome in 1527. That period around the League of Cognac and the Diet of Worms must have been hard to swallow. Even the Pope couldn’t figure it out.

Art worked on the front lines to give form to the new formulations. You had to see it to believe it. It helps when you have some of the greatest artists of the period, and arguably any period, available for hire. It also helps when you have florins to burn and the keys to the most famous bank in history. Medici money could not always buy Florentine love. But Medici millions went far in buying Florence’s greatest artists and establishing the look and feel of the Medici’s dynastic power as the family returned to the city as ducal rulers.

Bronzino, Portrait of Lodovico Capponi, 1550-55, on view at “The Medici: Portraits and Politics”

A major loan exhibition opening in June at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art looks to make sense of this artistic sense- making. The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512–1570 brings together over 90 works by artists from Raphael, Jacopo Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino to Benvenuto Cellini, Francesco Salviati and Bronzino. Such an exhibition at any time would be an achievement. To organize one now amid continuing pandemic closures is a triumph. At a moment when much of the Met’s staff cannot even return to work in person and must face the world remotely, these challenges must be near insurmountable. Fortunately, considering many of these paintings originally came out of a period of bubonic plague, a little coronavirus should be nothing for these portraits to shake. Art cannot live by Zoom alone, even if many of our museum executives still do.

The Medici: Portraits and Politics follows up on the Met’s 2011 exhibition The Renaissance Portrait: From Donatello to Bellini. It also serves as a final tribute to Keith Christiansen, the John Pope-Hennessy chairman of the Met’s Department of European Paintings. The great curator is retiring after over 40 years at the Met, and after facing a not insignificant amount of hardship following statements he made during the riots of summer 2020.

Christiansen first conceived of this show in better times, as a small conversation between a portrait of Carlo Rimbotti from 1548, acquired by the Met in 2017, and the Met’s ‘Portrait of a Young Man with a Book’. As the scope of the exhibition grew to its current size, Christiansen brought in Carlo Falciani, a professor at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, as guest curator. Falciani contributes many of the words to the exhibition’s weighty and not altogether sprightly catalogue.

The 1500s saw Florence devastated and divided, switching back and forth between republican rule and Medici leadership. The city’s most powerful banking family was sent packing more than once. After the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent in 1492, France invaded Italy, the Medici lost standing in Florence under Lorenzo’s son Piero the Unfortunate and the family went into exile for the first time. In 1497, the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola ignited the ‘bonfire of the vanities’. In a conflagration in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria art, books and musical instruments were burned in a censorious conclusion to the high life of the quattrocento.

Yet those Medici good times were not only a memory. The family, the money and the art would all eventually return to what should have always been a Medici town — and if you had any doubts, the art is there to prove it. Under its republican ruler, Piero Soderini, Florence continued with the austere aesthetics of Savonarola through the first decade of the 1500s, but it was about to get a shot of color and light.

The Medici’s exile lasted until 1512, when the family returned to Florence under Lorenzo’s second son, Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, who in 1513 became Pope Leo X. The Medici set about reestablishing dominion over Florence’s other oligarchic families through a renewed cultural campaign that sought to promote the words and look of Florence to Italy and beyond. Florence, after all, was the birthplace of Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch along with Giotto and Brunelleschi. The native son Michelangelo received Medici honors in death, even though he had had little to do with the family in life.

After an anti-Medici faction again took control of Florence in 1527, the family returned in 1530, this time as a ducal dynasty for keeps. Alessandro de’ Medici clocked in as the first Duke of Florence until his assassination by a distant cousin, Lorenzaccio (‘bad Lorenzo’), in 1537. Then young Cosimo I stepped in to consolidate Medici power in a reign that continued over three decades.

For our Instagram age, the Medici’s portraits of power seem right up to date. Details are filtered, tweaked up, smoothed over and glamorized. Bringing his more Roman style to the canvas, Salviati left some crumbs of naturalistic imperfections. His remarkable ‘Portrait of a Young Man with a Dog’ (c. 1543-45), from a private collection, could have been painted yesterday. Bronzino, Pontormo’s favorite student, meanwhile licked his plate clean. His stunning ‘Young Woman and Her Little Boy’ (c. 1540-45), on loan from Washington’s National Gallery, looks like it was painted tomorrow.

The Italian art historian Giulio Carlo Argan called Mannerism ‘nothing less than the passage of art from a sphere of theology and knowledge to that of existence’. The sitters here are indifferent because they are of the moment, at once both realized and idealized. Those dynastic upstarts who manage to succeed in history often have a successful artistic program at their back. Look to the Rome of Augustus, when portraiture dispatched with the republican veneration of old age for a new smoothed out idealism of imperial youth. Or consider art under Napoleon, when the School of Paris found a new employer to pay wages and benefits after its artists ran up student debts in the Revolution.

Cosimo I was likewise an ‘authoritarian duke’, writes Christiansen in his catalogue introduction. He managed, despite his youth, to ‘upstage the old oligarchic families that had mistakenly thought they could manipulate to their advantage’ a 17-year-old who had been imposed upon them by Emperor Charles V. Here was a ruler who ‘realized the ways in which he could employ the arts — literary as well as figurative and architectural — to promote his court and elevate the cultural hegemony of Florence in Italy and beyond’. Artists under Cosimo mixed traditions old and new to create the look of the now. As in the art of Bronzino, it’s all there to see, lights on high, so you can’t miss a thing.

The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512-1570 can be seen at the Metropolitan Museum, New York City from June 26. The catalogue is edited by Keith Christiansen and Carlo Falciani (Yale University Press, $65). This article was originally published in The Spectator’s June 2021 World edition.