The Tate Modern is exhibiting a retrospective of Dora Maar. Maar’s art was obscured by her relationship with Picasso. The Dallas Museum of Art closed in February a show featuring Ida O’Keeffe. Ida had been overlooked because of her sister casting a long shadow. Back in 2013, I wrote about Paul Fontaine at the Martin Museum in Waco. In Fontaine’s case, as with many artists after their death, a family member picked up the mantle to try to show the artist’s visual expressions. Such is also the case with the current show of art by Victor Thall at the Longview Museum of Fine Art.
Victor Thall has all the hallmarks of someone in the right place at the right time and surrounded by the people we read about in art history books. Except he has been omitted or just plain missed by the academics, museums, and collectors. In part, it might have been self-inflicted, because his personality wavered from very social to quarrelsome. Maybe his move to California was too early and isolated him from the growing art world in New York. Or maybe he didn’t fit in the narrative that was being written at the time. After all, only so many artists in a generation can get a great deal of attention. Like other art institutions, the Longview Museum of Art asks us to rethink the past and consider Thall’s work. They are asking if we missed an opportunity to consider him as an important part of the art historical narrative.
Walking around the exhibition, you see several developments in his work that reflect much of the Modernist story. An early painting of Thrall depicts an urban scene with bright colors and thick impasto application of paint. I was reminded of the Post-Impressionist or even the Fauvist artists of the early 20th century. I get the feeling Thall was greatly influenced by Henri Matisse during his mid-career of painting. The figures and scenes play in the same language as Matisse. Both were seeking a simple, naive approach to image-making. Many Modernists attempted to tap into the raw creativity of children, the insane, and cultures that were “unspoiled” by Modernity. I see this investigation of the naive through Thall’s career before he became fully invested in abstraction.
Thall’s wasn’t an Abstract Expressionist, even though he was around Willem De Kooning and Arshile Gorky in the 1930s. However, his abstract art plays in the realm of the importance of the gesture. You can easily imagine the action of his arm extended with a brush charged with paint pushing against the wood panels. His paintings were not as heroically monumental as the Abstract Expressions, but you can feel he was capturing the spirit of his age in his abstract work.
Longview Museum of Fine Arts will feature Victor Thall through February 22th. You will find this show well-curated, including items related to the artist and also works by his star student. Learn about this exciting discovery all the way out in Longview, Texas.