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Bob Thompson (painter) American, 1937 - 1966 Tree, 1962 oil on canvas overall: 198.6 x 274.8 cm (78 3/16 x 108 3/16 in.) Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth 2000.39.3 |
Object 8 of 9
The career of Bob Thompson has been likened to a meteor for his brilliant but brief life in art, which ended in 1966.1 A man of boundless energy and joie de vivre, but little moderation, Thompson died in Rome at age twenty-nine, worn down by a life of hard living and excess.
Thompson, a Kentucky native, received his formal art training at the University of Louisville from 1957 to 1959. There he was exposed to European influences from émigré teachers such as Ulfert Wilke, a German artist who was also versed in the New York School styles of abstract expressionism. Traces of these early impressions appear repeatedly in his work. Thompson started out as an abstract painter, but shifted toward figurative expressionism after a visit to Provincetown, in 1958, where he encountered the painterly representations of Jan Müller and Gandy Brodie.
The following year Thompson settled in New York City, where he frequented jazz clubs and cut a stylish figure in the downtown music and art scene, befriending the jazz notable Ornette Coleman, and artists Red Grooms and Jay Milder. In many respects, his paintings from that time onward are quotations from traditional works, much like the riffs of his musical contemporaries. With Grooms and Milder, Thompson participated in this country's earliest happenings2 -visual art/theatrical events analogous to jazz's improvisational performances. In turn, Thompson translated many of the theatrical aspects of his related interests into his paintings.
Thompson married in 1960 and together with his wife sailed the following year to Europe on the Queen Elizabeth. The couple made their way from London to Paris, and then Spain, where they settled in Ibiza, surviving for two years on a John Hay Whitney Fellowship. In Europe, Thompson continued to translate old master compositions in his personal palette of highly intense, unmodulated color.
During his time in Paris, in 1962, Thompson produced Tree. This fauve-hued painting presents a disturbing, hallucinatory scene of interpenetrating zoomorphic creatures and ghoulish specters. Looming on the left and monitoring the situation is a formidable winged female figure. Thompson admired Goya's work, particularly his group of fantastic and moralistic etchings, Los Caprichos (1799). These psycho-sexual, often violent, satires became the source for several of Thompson's works, notably Tree. For the composition, he combined two consecutive plates from Los Caprichos: Volaverunt (They flew away), which serves as a model for the left half, and Quien lo creyera! (Who would have believed it!)3 for the right. Typically, the layout is derived directly from the original, but the characters have been altered to create a new narrative. In the left half, Thompson converted Goya's dejected, banished adulteress into the strong angelic figure by transforming the cape into a set of wings. This heroine, the only figure in Tree with resolved human features, may be based on Thompson's s wife, Carol, who had red hair and was a readily available model.4 Thompson armed the figure with the trunk of a tree, thus giving the painting its title and serving to unify the two scenes in its diagonal placement. Thompson morphed all of Goya's human figures, except the angel, into primitive animalistic forms, emphasizing their bestiality and sexual violence. Their graphic, masklike visages at once evoke folk art and Thompson's African heritage.
Thompson's s idiosyncratic method of appropriating old master works differed from the tongue-in-cheek program of his contemporaries in the 1960s. His work more closely relates to Picasso's early Moderniste translations of the old masters, which included Goya, and Matisse's allusions to the pastoral landscapes of Poussin and Claude. Still, Thompson was unapologetic about his reliance on the old masters: "Why are all these people running around trying to be original when they should just go ahead and be themselves and that' s the originality of it all, just being yourself....it hit me that why don't I work with these things that are already there...because that is what I respond to most of all....I looked at Goya and I found...this woman exactly as I would draw her...."5
Notes 2. Allan Kaprow's 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, and Red Grooms' The Burning Building, both in 1959.
3. Los Caprichos (1799), pls. 61, 62.
4. This information is based on telephone conversations with Carol Thompson and Judith Wilson on 30 June 1999.
5. Jeanne Siegel, "Robert Thompson and the Old Masters," Harvard Art Review I (1967), 12.
1. Stanley Crouch, "Meteor in a Black Hat," Village Voice 48, 2 December 1986; Lizetta LeFalle-Collins makes a related comparison in Novae: William H. Johnson and Bob Thompson (exh. cat., California Afro-American Museum] (Los Angeles, 1990). Judith Wilson likens Thompson to a "lone dark star" in Los Angeles 1990, 23, and in Bob Thompson (exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art) (New York, 1998), 27. 1 am indebted to Judith Wilson, assistant professor of African American studies and art history at the University of California at Irvine, for so generously providing information on Bob Thompson and Tree, including exhibition history and references. Our understanding of Bob Thompson and his work owes much to her groundbreaking scholarship. I am also thankful to Carol Thompson for her time in discussing her late husband's work; to Michael Rosenfeld, of the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in New York City and to Jacqueline Francis, Wyeth Fellow in American Art, National Gallery of Art, 1997-1999, for her insights.
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