Bob Thompson
An expression of a pastoral idyll after the French Painter Nicholas Poussin, whom Thompson greatly admired, Mother and Child is a more muted scene from an artist known for his electric palette and compositional complexity. Characteristic of Thompson’s figuration, the titular pair are without detail, reduced to their barest forms, woman and infant described in fluid blue lines, half-hidden beneath their overpainted flesh. The surrounding landscape is composed of planes of colour that seldom overlap, leaving a thin seam between each shade. While the painting is reminiscent of Christian iconography, to the artist, the female nude was intimately entangled with nature as an art historical ideal and became a recurring motif in much of his work. A painting of identical composition and title made the same year offers a saturated counterpart to this work’s subdued tones.
b.1937, Louisville; d.1966, Rome
In his brief yet prolific career, Bob Thompson rehearsed and revised European art history’s canon, pairing scenes borrowed from such diverse sources as Giotto and Gauguin with a distinct formal sensibility notable for its chromatic intensity. His brilliantly saturated palette, bold figuration and graphic style cast him in opposition to the trajectory of abstract expressionism then in vogue in 1950s New York. Thompson did not look to mimic the scenes he transcribed but rather to reclaim or subvert the biblical or mythological stories they retold, transposing them to the political present of mid-century America. Raised in the Jim Crow South, the violence against people of colour under segregation is a persistent feature in many of his works. So, too, is the rise of the counterculture movement. The figures that populate his compositions, while often reduced to silhouettes of flat colour, include among them Thompson’s contemporaries and acquaintances: Beat poets, jazz musicians, and fellow artists. His paintings are at once religious allegory and social commentary, historical study and political gesture. But they are also wonderfully expressive experiments in colour, form and feeling. Of his work, Thompson said, “I cannot find a place nor category in which to put my paintings nor a name to call them.”