I mposing with narrative complexity and chromatic brilliance, Nativity Scene is an extraordinary example of Bob Thompson’s visionary artistic practice. Conflating the tradition of classical European painting and the lived Black experience in post-war America, Thompson’s work engages with universal themes of justice, struggle, joy and collectivity. Executed circa 1964, the present painting has been a cornerstone of the Abrams Family Collection for decades, and marks one of the most significant examples within a spectacular oeuvre cut short by Thompson’s tragic death at the age of twenty-eight. Included in the recent critically acclaimed retrospective Bob Thompson: This House is Mine (2021-23), which travelled to Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, High Museum of Art, Atlanta and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, this painting exhibits Thompson’s distinctive figurative style and dazzling color palette at its finest.

In Nativity Scene, a group of silhouetted figures are presented in kaleidoscopic hues across a horizontal frieze-like plane. Depicted in crimson, sky blue, magenta and canary yellow, the sinuous forms melt into one another and into a lush surrounding landscape. As the title suggests, the composition is vaguely reminiscent of a nativity scene, as a central figure lies by a kneeling horse, an angel hovering above holding a young child. Figures gather on the periphery of the composition watching over the scene, their patience and wonder recalling the imagery of the Adoration of the Shepherds. The central figure’s horizontal position also alludes to the Dormition of the Virgin, or the moment of Mary’s death. Fra Angelico’s interpretation of this scene offers a compelling reference point, both in the static frieze-like quality of his composition, his use of saturated hues, and his ability to depict at once peace and mourning. Biblical imagery of the Early Renaissance and Old Master periods captivated Thompson over the trajectory of his career, calling his reimagination of such scenes ‘variations’ in a 1965 interview. As critic Jackson Arn writes in The New Yorker, “Thompson’s art is often vague, deeply dependent on famous European sources, and yet impossible to mistake for anything but itself… [his works] contain hundreds of motifs snatched from the Western canon, wedged into dense compositions, and coated in bright colors. The results are too calm for parody and too self-secure for homage” (Jackson Arn, “Bob Thompson’s Fraught Dance with the Old Master’s”, The New Yorker, May 2023 (online)). Thompson’s soulful paintings underscore a rigorous engagement with the Western art historical canon, as he sought to re-evaluate and question representational codes. Indeed, his brightly colored figures in such classical scenes allow Thompson to powerfully rewrite history.

Thompson is a celebrated colorist, his paintings marked by a varied use of rich, contrasting hues reminiscent of the Fauves. The composition of the present work is punctuated by multicolored figures and an overt absence of black, white, pink or brown. As artist Rashid Johnson wrote in his essay for the Colby College Museum of Art catalogue, “Thompson’s protagonists flow unencumbered through colorful landscapes, redefining topographies and authoring their own fates. How has Thompson created this agency for his characters? Can it be that these amorphous figures have fewer limitations as a result of their multicolored existence? Depicted in blues, reds, and yellows, maybe they have shed the fear that often accompanies the Black soul as it negotiates the dark histories of certain natural landscapes” (Rashid Johnson, “Put Outside,” Exh. Cat., Waterville, Colby College Museum of Art (and traveling), Bob Thompson: This House is Mine, July 2021 - January 2023, p. 127). As Johnson suggests, Thompson’s message is highly nuanced. While his work alludes to the absence of Black figures in great masterpieces of the European canon, it also suggests a lack of representation of their plight over centuries and into the artist’s own time.

Thompson grew up within the confines of the Jim Crow era in the American South. Only ten years before the present work was executed, the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Supreme Court ruling ended segregation in schools, paving the way for a new generation of Black activists and artists. Thompson was one of many young Black Americans challenging history and grappling with a new-found sense of freedom. Scholar and art historian Adrienne L. Childs further explains Thompson’s kaleidoscopic use of color in signifying race: “Rather than filtering decidedly Black figures and themes through his source images as did [Romare] Bearden and [Robert] Colescott, Thompson’s multicolored bodies decentered and defused the potent political signifier of the Black body” (Adrienne L. Childs, Ibid., p. 65). Reconceptualizing images from the Western canon within his own unique ‘variations,’ Thompson sought to explore a meaningful dialogue between the notion of contemporary Blackness and the grand tradition of European art history.

While color is central to Thompson’s practice so too is rhythm. The improvisational methodology of jazz music had a profound impact on Thompson’s painterly language, as outlined by art historian Judith Wilson in the exhibition catalogue for Bob Thompson’s 1998 show at the Whitney Museum of American Art: “Both honoring the Western painting tradition through frank and frequent quotations and irreverently subverting, supplementing and generally adapting it to his own purposes, Thompson uses Old Master sources in a way that seems analogous to the familiar improvisational strategies of the African American music he loved” (Judith Wilson, “Garden of Music: The Art and Life of Bob Thompson,” Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Bob Thompson, September 1998 - January 1999, p. 64). Growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, Thompson would listen to recordings of Charlie Parker, Theolonious Monk, and Miles Davis, and later he listened to music in his studio while he painted, his brush moving to the rhythm and sound of legends such as Ornette Coleman, Nina Simone, Charlie Haden and Moondog, all of whom he counted among his close friends. Thompson’s love of jazz is evident in some of his most celebrated paintings, such as The Garden of Music (1960), and Homage to Nina Simone (1965). In his essay, “Bob Thompson and the Invisible,” curator and drummer Robert Cozzolino wrote, “So much of Thompson’s work emanates sound: Music flowing through the figures like notes arrayed on a score, pitches and rhythms, call-and-response” (Robert Cozzolino, “Bob Thompson and the Invisible,” Exh. Cat., Colby College Museum of Art (and traveling), Bob Thompson: This House is Mine, July 2021 – January 2023, p. 155). The sinuous lines of Nativity Scene indeed reverberate like a melody, a kinetic energy palpable on the surface of the composition.

Lying at the heart of the Abrams Family Collection, Nativity Scene remains one of the few paintings of this size and quality left in private hands, with comparable works in museum collections across America, from The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C., and The Art Institute Chicago. Acquired directly from the artist nearly seven decades ago, Nativity Scene illuminates Thompson’s radical depiction of assertive bodies and a ceaseless interrogation of history, ritual, religion, and joy.

Artist

Bob Thompson