#Bob Thompson

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Bob Thompson

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery

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Artist I Like Series 

Bob Thompson 1937-1966 an African-American figurative painter known for his bold and colorful canvases, whose compositions were influenced by the Old Masters. His art has also been described as synthesizing Baroque and Renaissance masterpieces with the jazz-influenced Abstract Expressionist movement.

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Bob Thompson and Eddie Groothuis

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Bob Thompson

Mars and Venus (after Poussin). 1964

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Bob Thompson (1937-1966) “Garden of Music”  [oil on canvas. 1960] 

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Bob Thompson (American, 1937-1966), Portrait of Lorenzo Hale, 1961. Oil on paper, 41.3 x 33.7 cm

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An Allegory

Bob Thompson

1964

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Bob Thompson - Untitled

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Bob Thompson - An Allegory, 1964

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Bob Thompson, Triumph of Bacchus, 1964, oil on canvas, 60 1/4 × 72 1/8 in (153 × 183.2 cm)

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Bob Thompson An Allegory, 1964 Oil on linen 48 × 48 in

[nobrashfestivity]

Bob Thompson spoke the language of jazz, of riffing and improvisation. He played drums, and in New York he befriended bass player Charlie Haden, saxophonist Ornette Coleman, and other experimental musicians spearheading the “free jazz” movement. He knew writers like Allen Ginsberg, too, and by the late 1950s he was attending some of the first “happenings,” in which artists of all kinds would perform spontaneously with the participation of the audience.

Thompson was a bohemian, in other words. But he had a thing for Renaissance and Baroque art, and when he moved to France in 1961 it was to study these works at the Louvre museum in Paris and elsewhere. In art school, he had begun to copy the paintings of Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesca, and other Old Masters, and when he moved to Europe he began to turn them on their head.

Several paintings in Mia’s show riff on “bacchanal” paintings of the Baroque era, which not so subtly evoke the sex, drinking, and merriment of myth. (A real Baroque painting, featuring cads and their willing victims, is included as context.) One of them, Homage to Nina Simone, shows nude men, women, and children grooving to music in an idyllic, park-like landscape — a twist on Nicolas Poussin’s painting Bacchanal with Lute-Player, from around 1630, which Thompson had seen in the Louvre.

Thompson had been on a tear, returning to New York with a huge trove of paintings like this, which established him as a kind of genre unto himself: the black artist who deconstructed old white art for a hipper, groovier time. Like Jean-Michel Basquiat in the 1980s, his talents broke barriers even as they enabled his vices. The charms of the art world — money, fame, drugs — were held out to him, and he turned none of it away. He loved to party. He had a heroin addiction. He lived fast, and died fast.

Thompson painted his tribute to Nina Simone, the talented and tragically unstable singer and pianist, in 1965. The following spring, in Rome, he overdosed on heroin and died. He was 28.

source medium.com/ painting:  Bob Thompson’s “Homage to Nina Simone” from 1965.

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ARTIST: Bob Thompson

[pookiestheone]

Bob Thompson and Harry Heflin Uncensored photo

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(via Diga Diga Doo by Bob Thompson with His Orchestra and Chorus)

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