Alma Thomas's late blossoms: an African-American woman artist who emerged in the mid-20th century, Thomas was a pioneer throughout her career. A current exhibition suggests, however, that her greatest achievement may have been the nature-inspired abstract canvases she painted in the 1970s, at the end of her life - Alma Thomas: Phantasmagoria Paintings from the 1970s/Michael Rosenfeld Gallery/New York

Art in America, Jan, 2002 by Joe Fyfe

A good place to begin thinking about Alma Thomas's ravishing late work might be the moment in 1964 when, close to paralysis and bedridden, the 73-year-old artist found herself staring at the hollyhock shadows she had known her entire life and calculating how to use them in her paintings. A year earlier, she had seen the late Matisse cutouts at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Matisse's work had prompted her to paint an acrylic-on-canvas version of his collage The Snail (1953), in which nearly all the original colors were reversed. Thomas named her painting Watusi (Hard Edge), after Chubby Checker's dance hit "The Watusi." As well as marrying high modernism with the popular culture of black America--then entering the American mainstream--the title she chose noted Matisse's debt to African art.

During the same period, Thomas created a group of figurative works, the "March on Washington" paintings, in which the flat planes of Matisse seem to have been transformed into protest signs being held aloft by a crowd of demonstrators. Soon, this same planar element reappeared in some of her paintings and watercolors as a squarish brushstroke, abstracting the shape of flowers. Subsequently it turned into a multipurpose shardlike shape that mutated as needed into an allover mosaic pattern.

Thomas's late work, of which a concise selection has been made for a traveling show titled "Alma Thomas: Phantasmagoria, Major Paintings from the 1970s," consists of some 50 paintings done between 1972 and 1978, the year the artist died. During this time, Thomas was in her 80s and suffering from arthritis. Like the paintings that Renoir, another arthritis sufferer, did in his old age, her work of the 1970s is filled with an almost adamant joie de vivre. Renoir, we are told, had his brushes tied to his hands. Thomas would rest her large, lightweight canvases on two tables, then wedge herself between them so that she wouldn't fall over while she worked.

The paintings in the current show range from 4 to 6 feet high and 3 to almost 5 feet wide. (Thomas also executed diptychs and triptychs that run up to 14 feet in length, although none of these are in the exhibition.) Typically, one strong color tessellates on a white ground, but there are many variations, such as the red-on-yellow Oriental Sunset (1973) or the dark-gray-on-white Phantasmagoria (1973). Staccato marks abound, trafficking between a gestural brushiness and a gentle graphic snap. Sometimes Thomas's foreground patterns seem practically readymade, as in Early Cherry Blossoms (1973), an allover painting constructed from abbreviated vertical strokes whose widths match one of two sizes of standard flat brushes. The painting's tightly knit pink strokes seem backlit by the white ground streaming between the narrow cracks. Elsewhere, Thomas will introduce flat shapes with more irregular contours, such as the undulating field of cobalt blue rectangles, triangles and arcs in Garden of Blue Flowers Rhapsody (1976).

Paint opacity is achieved slowly by applying acrylic in thin layers. In Red Scarlet Sage (1976), a variety of mosaiclike cadmium red shapes are pieced over a pale cream ground that shimmers around the edges with touches of electric blue. The light seems to fall on the composition evenly, from an outside source, like sunlight on a patio. Painting, here, is a matter of conducting the reflected light of the surface by covering it with the red shapes and negotiating from partial to full saturation of the red, while regulating the flow of the various shapes out to the edge of the canvas.

Thomas's bright colors and complicated patterning have been attributed to an intuitive ability to evoke aspects of West African visual tradition, but perhaps a more overt debt is to Byzantine mosaics. By the artist's own account, her paintings were chiefly inspired by natural phenomena, from hollyhock shadows to Washington's cherry blossoms to atmospheric effects of light. She was also interested, however, in the ways that technology can influence perception. She often spoke of space travel ("When I am painting space, I'm with the astronauts," she told students) and referred to what orchards in bloom looked like from an airplane.

Born in Columbus, Ga., in 1891, Thomas moved with her family to Washington, D.C., in 1907. Starting in 1925, she spent 35 years teaching at a local junior high school and painting in her spare time. During summers she attended classes in art education in New York and became an authority on the crafting of marionettes. While in New York, Thomas frequented the Cotton Club in Harlem, dressed in her distinctive bright clothing. She also kept up with the latest developments in art, visiting galleries, including Alfred Stieglitz's An American Place. In 1943, Thomas helped found the Barnett-Aden Gallery, the first modern art gallery in Washington and the first gallery to exhibit white and African-American artists together.

From 1950 until she retired from teaching in 1960, Thomas studied painting at Washington's American University. In 1957, she was a student of Jacob Kainen, who considered her "already an artist" and continued to act as her mentor after she finished her studies. Other colleagues and acquaintances included Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis and Morris Louis, as well as Sam Gilliam, who, in an interview for this article, recalled that Thomas was "a lot of fun, she would come to every opening." Gilliam believes that Thomas's intention to, as she put it, "produce something significantly different" required the bravery to disrupt her long relationship with Washington's black intelligentsia. This group, centered around Howard University, included collectors of Thomas's early paintings, but they were biased toward figurative art and couldn't keep up with her move toward reductive abstraction.