Yvonne Thomas at Cornell DeWitt - New York - Brief Article

Born in France in 1913, abstract painter Yvonne Thomas has been uninterruptedly making her own brand of magic for as long as anyone can remember and is still going strong. She was a student of Hans Hofmann and, as an important abstractionist, showed often at the star-studded Stable Gallery during the 1950s. This recent two-part show at Cornell DeWitt followed a recent spate of exhibitions. The first half featured several large canvases in oil from the 1950s and '60s, when Thomas was more action oriented, as seen in the spirited multicolored Western Journey (1960) or the green-hued Debate of the same year with its flurry of brash, choppy strokes, clumped together like a large bouquet about to collapse, shedding brushmarks instead of petals.

In the show's second installment, which included several watercolors and black-ink drawings, the half-dozen recent acrylic paintings were more composed, more considered, with a radiant presence replacing the former urgency and bravura. All the paintings demonstrate the same sense of division between what might be designated foreground and background, interlocked positive and negative areas that shift as you read them, all the while maintaining the supremacy of the surface.

Landscape, or at least nature, is the main reference in an easy synthesis of painterly abstraction with more allusive forms that have a kinship with the imagery of painters like Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove and Milton Avery. The paintings--mostly medium-sized--are vivid, with the color often applied flat in jigsaw-puzzle-shaped sections. These areas are then overlaid with a curious but beautiful, whitish veil-like layer, as if to remind us that her scenes are fictive. We see her world through a glass, lightly.

Atlantic Tide (1999-2001) is the largest and most imposing of the new group. A gorgeous red ocean is rumpled by a ghostly tide, a gray stretch of sand beneath, a scrap of deep blue sky above; all is seen from an angled bird's-eye view, looking down at half water, half flooded beach. Shades of Venice (2001), a study in blues, is again bisected; the streaky sea seen from above occupies more than half the field, while encroaching geometric clouds obscuring a pink Venetian facade fill up the remainder.

Forest Exotic (2001) is the clearest example of the way Thomas juggles positive and negative. Her characteristic puzzle shapes, here brushed and diaphanous, fill about half the canvas; they are opposed by an irregularly edged area of matte olive green populated by a number of vertical bands--trees--of uneven length. Both sides vie for visual dominance in ways that recall the intriguing exercises in Rudolf Arnheim's classic 1974 study, Art and Visual Perception. A small beauty is Winter Garden (2001), a hothouse glimpse of rose, green, blue-green and grays iced in white. The image reminds you of the special freshness of flowers in winter against a backdrop of snow clouds and frozen ponds--as well as the special freshness of artists who have spent a lifetime painting and still find in it something new and renewing.

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