Loud, Proud, and Painted

Instead of Ms. Thomas’s development, the show highlights her elaborate working process, revealing the progress of various images from photographs to collages to paintings. Also on hand are four examples of the densely furnished living room sets that Ms. Thomas uses for her photo shoots. Their amazing patchworks of fabric, wallpaper and fake wood paneling emphasize the extent to which she relies on, but also transforms, reality with her sense of color, light and surface (although one or two sets would have made the point and left more space for paintings).       

The show steps back further with a touching 23-minute documentary that Ms. Thomas made this year about her mother, who is in some ways the origin of the notions of black beauty so central to her art.       

The catalog essays dwell excessively on Ms. Thomas’s revisions of French painting, and to a certain extent they are justified. Her quotations are notable for going beyond mere one-liner mimicry or conceptual appropriation; they radically de-Europeanize and contemporize their sources, as Roy Lichtenstein did with his Pop Art versions of Matisse’s “Dance,” only more so. But this doesn’t do justice to Ms. Thomas’s omnivorousness. She has been inspired by a range of black artists, including the Conceptual photographer Carrie Mae Weems, the painters Jacob Lawrence and William H. Johnson, and of course that genius of collage Romare Bearden.       

From a foundation of Pop Art, Ms. Thomas resuscitates and extends movements like Photo Realism, New Image Painting and Pattern and Decoration. (Her big portraits, especially, would have enlivened the predictable Warhol show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.) She fuses the strategies of the photo-based work of the Pictures Generation and the collage-prone art of its loyal opposition, the Neo-Expressionist painters, much the way David Salle did, but with a more urgent and specific message. In this regard she can be compared not only to Jean-Michel Basquiat but also to the German painters who emerged in the 1970s, especially Jörg Immendorff, whose freewheeling satirical paintings about his country’s Nazi past and its postwar division had a similar sense of necessity.         

As a black woman who loves women, Ms. Thomas is in a double bind, and she makes the most of this in order to transcend it. Through the scale and material capaciousness of painting, she celebrates, decorates and really venerates the black female body by making it and its lavish surroundings bracingly tangible. She doesn’t so much depict a universal humanity as practically force it into the viewer’s place, where it implicates, illuminates and bedazzles.       

Where Ms. Thomas goes from here will be interesting to see. Her interiors seem slightly routine, although a jangling one of Monet’s yellow dining room is marvelous. Her landscapes, whose piled forms borrow from Cézanne and David Hockney, improbably muster much of the vehemence of her figurative works, demonstrating the inspiring notion that any tradition can be wrestled into a new, undeniably pertinent form of expression. All it takes is that the right artist get her hands on it.

“Mickalene Thomas: Origin of the Universe” runs through Jan. 20 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park; (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org.

Article Appeared @http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/28/arts/design/mickalene-thomas-origin-of-the-universe-at-brooklyn-museum.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&pagewanted=all&adxnnlx=1350324693-b3a1qt/8umeWduWJGTL1EQ&

Also Appeared @http://blackubiquity.com/sports-a-entertainment/item/10250-loud-proud-and-painted

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