Alma Thomas Painting Owned By Bill Cosby Is Being Sold

Christie's announced that it would sell a brilliantly hued painting by the artist Alma Thomas at its New York postwar and contemporary night sale one month from now. With an estimate of $2.2 million to $2.8 million for A Fantastic Sunset, it is certain to smash the present record for a work by the artist, set simply last May when Azaleas (1969) sold for $740,000 at Sotheby's.

A Fantastic Sunset by Alma Thomas

The online catalog essay for A Fantastic Sunset notes that the work's just past proprietor (other than the St. Louis-based distributor) was a private collection in Philadelphia. While he isn't named by the auction house, display books and educational materials reveal the personality of this earlier proprietor: disgraced previous entertainer Bill Cosby. Before he was condemned to three to 10 years in a maximum-security jail for tranquilizing and sexually assaulting a woman in 2004, Cosby and his better half Camille lived in a home only outside of Philadelphia. (Christie's declined to remark on the painting's proprietorship history.)

Bill Cosby Art Collection Smithsonian

Quite a bit of that collection was promised to the Smithsonian, and in 2015, the Museum of African Art in Washington, DC, staged "Conversations: African and African American Artworks in Dialog," a blockbuster show that featured 62 works from the collection and was subsidized by the Cosbys—however at the time the historical center was accused of concealing the wellspring of financing. As the show opened, the Smithsonian faced backlash from pundits who smelled pay-for-play and chastised the exhibition hall for not addressing the fact that in excess of 50 ladies had around then accused Cosby of sexual assault.

Christie's Art Auction

The work also appears in educational materials planned to teach youthful guests to the presentation about the takes a shot at the display. One such exercise plan features A Fantastic Sunset as its lead image, and clarifies underneath that it is from the "Collection of Camille O. and William H. Cosby Jr." While such materials show that Cosby claimed the work up until the presentation shut in 2016, the provenance recorded by Christie's proposes he has sold it from that point forward. It's by all account not the only work the disgraced entertainer has offloaded amid mounting legal issue: In November 2018, two months after he was condemned for sexual assault, it was revealed that Cosby and his better half were offering art to pay for legal charges, including two works by Thomas Hart Benton that could be worth as much as $14 million. Alma Thomas' painting will be sold at Christie's New York the evening of November 13. The artist's work has been gaining attention as of late, although her secondary market has ample space to develop.

Alma Thomas Paintings

Alma Thomas developed as a rich colorist, abstracting shapes and examples from the trees and blooms around her. Her new palette and procedure—significantly lighter and looser than in her previous illustrative works and dull deliberations—mirrored her long investigation of shading hypothesis and the watercolor medium. As a dark woman craftsman, Thomas experienced numerous boundaries; she didn't, in any case, go to racial or women's activist issues in her specialty, accepting rather that the imaginative soul is autonomous of race or sexual orientation. In Washington, D.C., where she lived and worked after 1921, Thomas got related to Morris Louis, Gene Davis, and other Color Field painters dynamic in the territory since the 1950s. Like them, she investigated the intensity of shading and structure in iridescent, scrutinizing paintings.

Iris, Tulips, Jonquils, and Crocuses by Alma Thomas

Completed: 1969

Medium: Acrylic on canvas

Size: 60 × 50 in, 152.4 × 127 cm

Starry Night and the Astronauts by Alma Thomas

Starry Night and the Astronauts brings out the open span and heavenly examples of a night sky, yet notwithstanding its story title, the work could likewise be perused as an elevated perspective on a watery surface, playing with our feeling of drenching inside a generally level picture plane. The watcher is inundated not just in the feeling of a natural field that this painting accomplishes, in any case, yet in addition to experience with Thomas' procedure: the surface here is obviously built stroke by stroke. In the meantime, the looks at the crude canvas between every essential shaded imprint appear as distinctive as the applied paint itself—as though the synthesis were illuminated.

Completed: 1972

Medium: Acrylic on canvas

Size: 60 × 53 in, 152.4 × 134.6 cm

Autumn Leaves Fluttering in the Breeze by Alma Thomas

Completed: 1973

Medium: Acrylic on canvas

Size: 40 x 50 in, 101.5 x 127.0 cm

Wind and Crepe Myrtle Concerto by Alma Thomas

Completed: 1973

Medium: Acrylic on canvas

Size: 35 x 52 in, 89.0 x 132.2 cm

Snoopy Sees Earth Wrapped in Sunset by Alma Thomas

Completed: 1970

Medium: Acrylic on canvas

Size: 47 7/8 x 47 7/8 in, 121.6 x 121.6 cm

White Roses Sing and Sing by Alma Thomas

Completed: 1976

Medium: Acrylic on canvas

Size: 72 1/2 x 52 3/8 in, 184.1 x 133.0 cm

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