Comments on: Alma Thomas: On the Shoulders of Giants

By: June

June — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 03:38:17 +0000

Is there anyone on this planet that believes that “Watusi” is Alma Thomas’ strongest work of her career? It must have been the only painting by this genius of an artist, who if born a white man, would have been considered an equal genius to Morris Lewis/K. Noland, available for the Obama’s since it isn’t.

By: Nancy

Nancy — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 19:27:58 +0000

What a marvelous quote. I’m adding it to my commonplace book and might just use it in a future post. Of course, previous generations of painters trained by copying the old masters. I don’t know when that fell out of favor but I remember copying plaster busts of Greek and Roman statues when I studied drawing as a teenager – and that was in the last century! I think there’s a place for copying during the learning process and even after; I read somewhere that many artists go back to the old masters to renew and refresh. But the distinction that TS Eliot made between mature and immature is even more valid today.

By: Christine

Christine — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 23:19:36 +0000

Liz, While it’s clear that most of the noise in the blogosphere about Alma Thomas is politically and racially motivated, the idea of artists “copying” the work of others is an interesting one to address. While doing some reading about the Bauhaus while preparing my post on Gunta Stolzl, I came across a painting by Roy Lichtenstein entitled Bauhaus Stairway (1988). It was based on a work of the same title, painted by Oskar Schlemmer (1932) that in turn was based on a 1927 photo that Lyonel Feininger took of the Bauhaus weavers on the steps to the new building in Dessau. Schlemmer and Lichtenstein openly acknowledged their debt to the work that inspired them and all three are valid, and original, works of art.
In The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1922), poet T.S.Eliot wrote an essay about playwright Philip Massinger (1583-1640) in which he said: “One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.”
Christine

By: Nancy

Nancy — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 19:36:06 +0000

I remember when I saw her work in person, years ago in Wash DC (I think). The work is so vibrant and joyous and her story so powerful that I was very touched. The fact that the finger-pointers aren’t touched shows what they have in place of a heart and a brain- something that resembles a small, hard rock. Re: the copyright issue. It looks like Fairey’s non-attributed borrowings are being found out but it’s too bad that what he’s stolen from Cuban and Chinese artists (among others) won’t give them any more money or public recognition. It’s too bad that it’s the wealthy art guys that muddy the waters for more honest and less well-off artists. When I read that article about Hirst, I was disgusted and Koons disgusted me from the first.
Alma, however, is a far different matter.