Yvonne Thomas

1913-2009

The works of Yvonne Thomas in the 1950s were prime examples of Abstract Expressionism. However, her brand of AbEx was soft and lyrical, not defiant like those of the male artists who painted with her. Her brushwork was rhythmic and not slashing. Her colors were subtle and sometimes close in value.  Her subjects were riffs on landscapes. She embraced color “the strongest joy and enigma” and used a range of pigments in works that progressed logically in a series.

Thomas was born, Yvonne Navello, in Nice, France and arrived with her family in the United States. They eventually settled in New York City. She studied briefly at Cooper Union but turned to commercial work as a fashion illustrator during the Great Depression. In 1938, she studied at the Art Students League and in 1948 joined the short-lived Subjects of the Artists School on East 8th Street where participants were considered ‘collaborators’ rather than traditional teacher-and-students.

In 1950, Thomas studied with Hans Hofmann at his school in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In the following year, she exhibited in the legendary “Ninth Street Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture” and from 1953 to 1957 exhibited at all five of the Ninth Street shows. She was one of the few women invited to join The Club, which was only for male artists when it was formed in 1949. 

In the mid-1950s, she broke away from the strict Cubist structures to paint works that were more expressive and more free. Her 1954 “Summer Fantasy” is a painting that shows the distillation of a Mediterranean summer and becomes a depiction of heat.  The silvery greens are the color of olive trees. Her upbeat “February,” painted in the same year, shows colors of pale greens, yellows, and blues. Her 1952 “Warriors” and her 1955 “Nocturnal” reveal a darker, more complex view of the world.  Deep blues and blacks are cut by a sour green, and her strokes are more sharp.

Her works from the early 1960s are transitional.  She was experimenting with new techniques such as troweled-on buttery, bright monochromatic forms that stand out in low relief as in her 1963 “Untitled.”  Some paintings have clearly outlined images of striated lines, an example of which is “No. 3,” painted in 1961. In 1965, she developed a more geometric and structural approach. 

Her work is in the permanent collections of the Seattle Art Museum, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Fonds national d’Art Contemporain, National Gallery of Art, New York University, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, New York’s Riverside Museum, and others. 

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