How Alma Thomas’s Radiant Paintings Plotted a New Course for Abstraction

In 1963, Alma Thomas set out to turn Henri Matisse on his head. Two years before, in 1961, she attended a show of Henri Matisse’s late-career gouaches at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. There, she saw The Snail (1952–53), in which cut-and-pasted squares of colorful paper are arranged in a spiral-like shape, abstractly alluding to a gastropod without ever outright showing it.
Thomas got to work, effectively recreating the iconic Matisse gouache with a twist. Her version, titled