Rediscovering Bob Thompson and His Influences
By Tess Dunkel, Digital Marketing Intern, High Museum of Art
In the mid-twentieth century, the art world was a smaller, more exclusive place and one that was dominated by White artists, primarily men. Black artists emerging in the decades following the Harlem Renaissance were encouraged and perhaps expected to challenge racial stereotypes and advance an appreciation of African American culture, folk roots, and ancestry through representations of the Black American experience, picturing its joys and triumphs as well as its adversity and struggle for equality. Bob Thompson (1937–1966) was an outlier, as his work ostensibly contained few images that related directly to the Black experience, nor did the content of his work seem to relate to the consciousness-raising efforts of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Freedom Movement. Instead, Thompson’s work was inspired by traditional European painters, from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century. To shed light on his artistry and his sources, we’ve highlighted some works below.
Thompson had grand ambitions to contribute to a rising generation of figurative expressionist painters. The work of German painter Jan Müller was his first source of inspiration. Similarities between Thompson’s early paintings and Müller’s work include flat planes of color and brushy, expressive paint handling. Echoing Müller’s The Trysting Place, Thompson’s Allegory depicts a defenseless female figure descended upon by masculine figures on horseback. Their hats and assertive gestures connote a sense of authority, accompanied by what appear to be acts of aggression.
Thompson’s The Execution mirrors the composition of Fra Angelico’s Beheading of Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian and includes a few notable changes. In his own style using bright, flat planes of color, Thompson depicts Angelico’s figural group to the left, beheaded figures in the foreground, and austere landscape, as well as the executioner in mid-swing. However, he depicts the blindfolded, condemned man in Angelico’s painting as the victim of a lynching.
In Bob Thompson’s drawing Study for St. George and the Dragon, his subject is the legend of St. George overcoming evil in the form of a monster. The legend of this Christian saint tells of a princess sent to her death as a sacrifice to the dragon. St. George arrives on horseback and rescues the princess by fatally impaling the dragon. The subject of a heroic male risking life and limb for a beautiful, passive woman was a popular romantic motif from medieval times to the nineteenth century. Here, Thompson based his painting on Tintoretto’s adaptation of the legend of St. George, perhaps finding in Tintoretto’s composition an especially powerful illustration of the power relations between princess, hero, and dragon.
In Tintoretto’s composition, the escaping princess occupies the foreground. The sky provides a heavenly juxtaposition to the horrific acts taking place in the distance. St. George is seen combatting the dragon, yet this incredible event, ostensibly the main event, is depicted in the background. In the middle ground lies the body of a previous victim, representing the dragon’s menace. Thompson chose to depict the escaping princess nude. St. George is poised to strike the dragon, whose jaws are agape in the direction of the princess, suggesting that the real threat is directed toward the woman — perhaps a comment on the sexual politics of the Western world.
Thompson painted Blue Madonna while he and his wife, Carol, were living in Paris, perhaps explaining the distinct stylistic choices that set this painting apart from the rest of his works at this time. The Virgin Mary is pictured on the far right, saintly poised, while Thompson’s signature dark figure sporting a broad-brimmed hat appears opposite her. Although unique among his early works, the painting includes the familiar motif of bystanders lurking unclothed in the woods, perhaps representing portents of danger. Thompson’s composition suggests that of Maurice Denis’s Landscape with Green Trees, yet Thompson’s is a free-wheeling pictorial interpretation of motifs and styles from the Renaissance to early modernism.
Thompson’s The Carriage is a vivid scene combining themes from Old Testament stories and classical myths, echoing Poussin’s Autumn or the Grapes Brought from the Promised Land from the series The Four Seasons. The classical painting depicts armed scouts returning to their encampment with grapes, pomegranates, and figs from the “land that floweth with milk and honey.” Thompson mirrors this composition, alluding to Poussin’s narrative of labor, harvest, masculinity, and salvation. However, Thompson replaces Poussin’s bundle of fruits with a body, possibly a woman, unclothed and overturned upon the carriage. Faceless, the figure seems to represent a familiar motif in Thompson’s work, that of the helpless or vulnerable fallen prey to the impulses of powerful men.
This exhibition presents seventy of Thompson’s paintings, demonstrating the complete arc of his short, eight-year-long career. Organized by the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine, and traveling to three venues, Bob Thompson: This House Is Mine rediscovers this influential but little-known artist. The exhibition is on view at the High through September 11 on the Second Level of the Anne Cox Chambers Wing.
