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.

The Right Angle

THE NEW CRITERION, June 2021

The Right Angle

On Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler

After the Bible and Shakespeare, one of the most reproduced books in the English language is Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler. No surprise there: the seventeenth-century fishing how-to is as alluring today as when it was written. Walton’s understanding of the behavior of freshwater fish remains remarkable for the depth of his acuity and the intimacy of his language. No one else could describe a trout or a pike or a perch in such living terms as Walton. Published amid the turmoil of the Interregnum, the book also offers an escape from the failings of man into a more companionable world of fish and freedom, a particularly English freedom revealed in Walton’s observations and candor. Whether as a “Brother of the Angle” or mere “Pretender,” rare is the reader not hooked by this “Compleat” discourse on, as its subtitle suggests, the “Contemplative Man’s Recreation.”

Walton sets Angler as an extended “Conference betwixt” a fisherman (Piscator), a hunter (Venator), and a falconer (Auceps): “You are well overtaken, Gentlemen!,” Piscator begins. “A good morning to you both! I have stretched my legs up Tottenham-hill to overtake you, hoping your business may occasion you towards Ware, whither I am going this fine fresh May morning.”

The three become confiding friends who soon reveal that complaints about fishing are nothing new. Venator says that he has “heard many merry Huntsmen make sport and scoff at Anglers.” Auceps admits that he too has “heard many grave, serious men pity them, ’tis such a heavy, contemptible, dull recreation.” As each sportsman proceeds in “commending his recreation,” Piscator sets the hook for reeling in his audience to the joys of angling:

O, Sir, doubt not but that Angling is an Art; is it not an Art to deceive a Trout with an artificial Flie? a Trout! that is more sharp-sighted than any Hawk you have nam’d, and more watchful and timorous than your high mettled Marlin is bold?

A Trout! For most, a fish is a fish, but Walton makes a friend of his forage as great fishermen do. He respects the mind and manners of his creel as he would a visitor and guest.

Piscator goes into an extended consideration of the connections between fishiness and Godliness, one that should leave the reader with little doubt that the one true church is waterside and the one mode of veneration is angling. Of the twelve Apostles, Jesus “chose four that were simple fishermen,” as Walton writes. Not only that, but “when our blessed Saviour went up into the mount, when he left the rest of his disciples, and chose only three to bear him company at his Transfiguration, that those three were all Fishermen.” Why fishermen? Because “he found that the hearts of such men, by nature, were fitted for contemplation and quietnesse; men of mild, and sweet, and peaceable spirits, as indeed most Anglers are.”

The hook is clearly set. As if there were any lingering doubt of a fisherman’s divine favor, “I might tell you that Almighty God is said to have spoken to a Fish, but never to a Beast; that he hath made a Whale a Ship, to carry and set his Prophet Jonah safe on the appointed shore.” In this extensive dialogue on the life aquatic, Walton’s discourse suggests that Melville’s latter-day fish tale may have been another product of The Compleat Angler’s influence.

Mixed in with many discussions of flies and worms, of just where to set the hook and when to reel it in, are Walton’s affecting chapters on fish species: The salmon is “accounted the King of freshwater fish”; the tench is the “Physician of Fishes”; the perch is a “very good, and very bold biting fish”; the eel is the “most daintie fish . . . The Queen of palat pleasure”; and the carp is the “Queen of Rivers; a stately, a good, and a very subtil fish.” We learn such details that “in Italy they make great profit of the spawn of Carps, by selling it to the Jews, who make it into red Caviare; the Jews not being by their Law admitted to eat of Caviare made of the Sturgeon, that being a Fish that wants scales, and (as may appear in Levit. 11.) by them reputed to be unclean.” As for the trout, “He may be justly said, as the old poet said of wine, and we English say of venison, to be a generous fish.” Pikes, meanwhile, are “maintained by the death of so many other Fish, even those of their own kind.” This apex predator is the “Tyrant of the rivers, or the Fresh-water wolf, by reason of his bold, greedy, devouring, disposition; which is so keen.” As for just what to do with such a “solitary, melancholy and a bold Fish,” Walton offers up a recipe:

First, open your Pike at the gills, and if need be, cut also a little slit towards the belly; out of these, take his guts, and keep his liver, which you are to shred very small with Time, Sweet-Marjoram, and a little Winter-savoury; to these put some pickled Oysters, and some Anchovies, two or three; both these last whole (for the Anchovies will melt, and the Oysters should not) to these, you must add also a pound of sweet butter, which you are to mix with the herbs that are shred, and let them all be well salted.

The recipe continues on from there. Walton truly set out to make his Angler “Compleat,” resulting in an amiable book that is a tackle box of information.

The title page to the first edition of The Compleat Angler.

Born around 1593, in the town of Stafford in the English West Midlands, Walton was a staunch Royalist whose works and deeds looked back to the pastoral age of his Jacobean youth. He published the first edition of The Compleat Angler in 1653, “in the most troubled years of the early Commonwealth,” writes John Buchan, who edited a 1901 edition of the work, in his introduction. Through 1676, Walton revised and updated his treatise in five editions. In addition to Angler, he also wrote several “Lives,” such as the one of his friend John Donne. Buchan describes these biographies as “all with this old-world, Jacobean flavour, churchmen all, members of the church quiescent, devout, learned.”

As a young tradesman, Walton ran a small shop in London’s Fleet Street, but Royalist losses pushed him back out to the countryside—as it happens, to a small plot by a stream. Here, “few long lives have been so free from conspicuous misfortune,” Buchan observed. “He had sorrow in his own family, and to one of his peculiar temperament the Royalist reverses must have come as real afflictions. But in the main he lived his easy life of books and angling undisturbed.”

In one episode, Walton was entrusted with a royal jewel known as the “lesser George,” which he secreted away from Cromwell’s London until the Restoration. Otherwise he was a “man of letters pure and simple,” Buchan notes, “the main incidents in his career are the dates of his book, and any attempt at biography is a monotonous chronicle.” In writing his introduction, as the author of spy thrillers, Buchan might have wanted a little more out of his subject. Instead Walton lived out ninety years surrounded by friends of “quietistic temperament,” for which the “strong rude wind of the outer world rarely disturbed those peaceful dovecotes; gentle meditation, mild and sincere devotion, innocent pleasures—such was the order of their days.” Upon his death in 1683, Walton left his cottage, now a museum, to the benefit of his Stafford neighbors so that it might generate income “to buy coals for some poor people that should have most need thereof in the said town.”

Walton wrote as impeccably as he lived. His Angler was not the first fishing book, but it was the one to breathe that “very spirit of innocence, purity, and simplicity of heart,” commented Charles Lamb: “It would sweeten a man’s temper at any time to read it.” Wordsworth dedicated two sonnets to “Walton, sage benign.” Walter Scott wrote that Walton “had so true an eye for nature,” but only wishes he had “made this northern tour” to Scotland. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica stated, “There is hardly a name in English literature, even of the first rank, whose immortality is more secure, or whose personality is the subject of a more devoted cult.” Buchan concurred, noting that “The Angler has been so praised for centuries that a modern writer must refrain from eulogy and seek only the bare phrases of justice.”

In the sixteenth century, the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner published his 4,500-page, four-volume encyclopedia of the animal world to which Walton often refers. A 1577 book called The Arte of Angling, which was only rediscovered in partial text in the 1950s, carries more than a few similarities to Walton’s own, signaling likely source material. Yet no other nature writer quite “seems always to speak with the living voice,” as Buchan notes, “and it is the living voice that is wanted in a country book.”

Through its “deftness of phrase, the use of mellifluous words, the pleasant cadence of the sentences,” Buchan writes, The Compleat Angler “remains a model of ease and charm.” The “beginning of true angling literature,” the book was the “first to give the sport a halo of letters which it has never lost.” More than a “quaint medley,” Angler in its own day was the “most valuable treatise on the practice of the art, and that still it is not wholly superseded.” But Walton also offers fishing as philosophy and meditation. For Part II of The Compleat Angler, which appeared with the fifth edition,Walton’s friend Charles Cotton extended the franchise by writing a longer discourse on fly fishing: “Here’s a Trout has taken my Flie,” a newbie fisherman laments at one point. “I had rather have lost a Crown. What luck’s this! He was a lovely Fish, and turn’d up a side like a Salmon.” To which Piscator responds: “O Sir, this is a War where you sometimes win, and must sometimes expect to loose. Never concern your self for the loss of your Flie; for ten to one I teach you to make a better.” After all, as Walton writes,

he that hopes to be a good Angler must not only bring an inquiring, searching, observing wit; but he must bring a large measure of hope and patience, and a love and propensity to the Art it self; but having once got and practis’d it, then doubt not but Angling will prove to be so pleasant, that it will prove to be, like Vertue, a reward to it self.

In our own time of troubles, Walton continues to unfold, as Buchan wrote, the “heart and soul of the angler—not necessarily the sportsman, but the angler—a man who loves books as well as his art, who sees nature through the glass of culture, the townsman and the gentleman.” I have not been alone in taking up a renewed interest in fishing over this pandemic year. My Connecticut bait shop still speaks of the “great minnow shortage” of 2020 as more of us became a “Brother”—and Sister—“of the Angle.” Walton is therefore a writer for our age, a needed addition to the pockets of fishermen and non-fishermen alike. “We may say of angling, as Dr. Boteler said of Strawberries, Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did,” Walton concludes, “and so (if I might be judge) God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than Angling”—just as no other writer made such a book about the angle.