Bob Thompson
Bob Thompson
1937 - 1966
African American painter. Thompson spent much of his short-lived professional career in Europe, where he discovered in churches and museums the classical, religious and mythological themes that informed his embrace of figure painting and Western mythology. He studied at the University of Louisville’s Hite Art Institute (1956–8) where he began his figurative abstractions. He spent the summer of 1958 in Provincetown, MA working under the influence of Jan Müller (1922–58) and with RED GROOMS in his performance art and Happenings. In the fall of 1959 he moved to New York City. He married Carol Plenda, a clothing designer, in 1960 and left New York for a two and half-year sojourn in Europe funded by a Walter Gutman Foundation Grant and a John Hay Whitney Fellowship. They settled first in Paris, then Ibiza. Thompson studied the Western painters of the classical tradition such as Goya, Titian, Piero della Francesca and Poussin. The couple returned to New York in 1963 and Thompson quickly joined the Martha Jackson Gallery where he exhibited regularly and reached critical and popular success by 1964. Consumed by depression and alcohol and drug problems for most of his adult life, the couple left New York for Italy in November 1965 with the hope of overcoming his addictions. Tragically, he died of an overdose the following May at age 29.
Thompson’s career lasted only nine years, during which time he produced over 1000 paintings and developed a unique style often described as a Renaissance composition executed in a Fauvist style. His new figurative style was in reaction to the dominance of abstract art, yet adapted abstract art’s spontaneity, scale and expressive use of color. He carefully studied the French, Italian and Spanish masters when conceiving his expressionistic paintings. He took portions or sometimes entire compositions from the great masters’ religious, historical or mythological paintings and reworked them into his flat color areas in a drama of bold exaggerations and unnatural colors to distort their human, animal or phantom forms (e.g., Triumph of Bacchus, 1964; New York, Whitney). Scholars have theorized that Thompson, as an African American man in a white male-dominated art world, applied bright colors to his figures as a manner of allegorically wrestling with the demons of race and bias that afflicted his own time and country. [Marisa J. Pascucci. "Thompson, Bob." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 11, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T2086136.]
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