Yvonne Thomas

Yvonne Thomas was one of the few women recognised as leading figures in the Abstract Expressionist movement. She once said that the movement gave her ‘a sense of adventure and invention.’ Born in Nice, France, Thomas moved to the United States in 1925 and later enrolled in the Art Students League. In 1948, she abandoned a career as a fashion illustrator to pursue painting. The same year, Thomas joined the experimental Subject of the Artists School where she developed friendships with other celebrated Abstract Expressionist painters such as Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Of the Subject of the Artists School, Thomas said that she felt like she had ‘finally come home.’

From the mid-1950s, Thomas loosened from the Cubist structures that had dominated her earlier style and began to employ a more gestural approach to painting. Her subsequent work has been celebrated for its lyrical harmonisation of colour and form. Using characteristically broad and expressive brushstrokes, Thomas would intuitively explore the emotive effects of combinations of colour. In Composition II, Thomas presses shades of light blue, cream and beige together. In their near-uniform tone, the central colours complement and balance one another – a harmony that is underscored by darker shades of blue and brown creeping through their boundaries. These borders are themselves changeable and some of the forms in Composition II appear contained only by a difference in the quality of brushstroke. Thickly and unevenly laid paint adds texture to the work, a further dimension on which tension and (dis)harmony between forms is explored.

The first solo exhibition of Thomas’ work was held in 1956, after which time her work was continually exhibited throughout the United States, until her death in 2009. Most notably her work was included in all five editions of the Ninth Street exhibition series, a now historic collection of artist-led exhibitions that cemented the dominance of Abstract Expressionism as the leading movement of the mid-twentieth century. Thomas’ work is held in numerous public collections including the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C, the Fonds National D’Art Contemporain, France and the Seattle Art Museum, Washington.