Major Alma Thomas retrospective at the Phillips shows breadth of her achievement

The exhibition proves that Thomas’s achievement of magnificence was exhausting received. She was not a seer or mage who instinctively channeled magnificence. She labored for it and didn’t at all times obtain it. The concept that Thomas morphed all of a sudden right into a genius upon retirement lingers, maybe, as a result of there’s a important change, and enchancment, in her work within the Nineteen Sixties. In her early abstractions, she struggles to unify the washes of shade, which so impressed the Washington Colour College painters, with the exploration of line and marks. Her early landscapes, city scenes and figures are sometimes awkward. A room that explores different painters lively in mid-century Washington clearly reveals Thomas grappling with painters, together with Jacob Kainen, who had, on the time, a stronger imaginative and prescient.