Artist Alma Thomas’s Painting Quietly Omitted From White House Collection

Watusi (Hard Edge) by Alma Thomas; Image via The New York Times

When the Obamas announced their picks for the revamped White House art collection this fall, the choices sent the art world, the political world, and the culture world into a tizzy of critical angling. Every art work chosen was scrutinized for its message, for its content, and for its associations as well as its artist’s history and affiliations.

The list of works was varied in style and period, but it included many modernist and abstract works from artists such as Joseph Albers and Mark Rothko. Jasper Johns was on the list, as was the famous Italian shut-in Giorgio Morandi. Several African American artists were included in the collection and the National Museum of the American Indian sent over a selection of ceramic works. All the pieces in the new White House collection were chosen from national museums in Washington D.C. through a process of back and forth between the Obamas, the White House curator, William Allman, decorator, Michael C. Smith, and the curators of the prestigious local art institutions.

Aside from the lukewarm responses from art critics, the paintings became fodder for right-wing pundits and reactionaries. As ARTnews executive editor, Robin Cembalest, points out, “One popular target was Ruscha’s 1983 canvas ‘I Think I’ll…,’ a flock of ‘maybe’s’ on a sea of red–which, according to who’s looking, exemplifies either a ‘lack of authority’ (as conservative pundit Michelle Malkin put it) or ‘a psychic inclination that accepts paradox and allows that the world is not only good or evil’ (as New York critic Jerry Saltz responded).”

One choice in the collection, however, seems to have drawn enough attention that it has now been quietly omitted from entrance into The White House. The artist in question is Alma Thomas, an African American woman whose paintings were the first to hang in The Whitney. Thomas’s painting, “Watusi (Hard Edge),” a re-imagined late Matisse, has now mysteriously been taken off the White House list. The painting had been destined for Michelle Obama’s office, but according to a quote in The New York Times from Semonti Stephens, the deputy press secretary for Mrs. Obama, “the decision not to put it there was made only because its dimensions did not work in the space in which it was to hang.”

Is the removal of the painting a reaction to the incessant right-wing commentary? Or did it merely not fit? In early October, Free Republic dismissed the Thomas painting as a fraud. Yet somewhat paradoxically, another Thomas painting remains on The White House list.

via Critics Nix Obamas’ Pix Mix .