Yvonne Thomas

One of only a handful of women to be included within the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, Yvonne Thomas combined the intuitive mark-making of the movement with a keen eye for the expressive possibilities of color. Thomas studied at Cooper Union and the Art Students League of New York. She would later join Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still at the short-lived Subjects of the Artist school, an experimental program that would strongly influence the trajectory of her career. She was an established painter when she participated in the famed “Ninth Street Show” of 1951 alongside two other female AbEx trailblazers, Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell. Although she always saw her work as rooted in the American modernist vernacular, Thomas remained connected to the art and culture of Europe where she spent formative years as a child; she maintained close friendships with fellow European émigré artists including Willem de Kooning and Marcel Duchamp.