Yvonne Thomas was born in Nice, France and moved to America to study at Cooper Union, the Art Student’s League, and the Subject of the Artist school. She studied alongside renowned abstract painters such as Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Robert Motherwell and became close friends with Willem De Kooning and Marcel Duchamp during her time in France. Like the other early Abstract Expressionists, Thomas was a follower of Automatism, the idea that an artist can express their innermost thoughts and feelings through free, uninhibited, action-painting.

Yvonne Thomas explored the symbolic potential in color through both gestural and structured paintings, simultaneously embracing and rejecting the grid. Her paintings combine aspects of both color field painting and gestural abstraction. She was a member of the Artist’s Club, exhibited in the famed “Ninth Street Show” in 1951 along with Alcopley, and was included in numerous shows at the Sable, Tanager, and Betty Parsons galleries. Recently, her work was featured in the historic Denver Art Museum’s 2016 exhibition, Women of Abstract Expressionism.