Bob Thompson

Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Bob Thompson (1937–1966) earned critical acclaim in the late 1950s the figurative complexity and chromatic intensity of his paintings. Over his short yet prolific career, he developed a unique figurative style in reaction to the dominance of abstract art while incorporating its spontaneity, scale, and expressive use of color.

Over a mere eight years, he grappled with the exclusionary Western canon, developing a lexicon of enigmatic forms that he threaded through his work. Human and animal figures, often silhouetted and relatively featureless, populate mysterious vignettes set in wooded landscapes or haunt theatrically compressed spaces. Thompson reconfigures well-known compositions by European artists such as Piero della Francesca and Francisco de Goya through brilliant acts of formal distortion and elision, recasting these scenes in sumptuous colors. On occasion, familiar individuals appear: the jazz greats Nina Simone and Ornette Coleman, and the writers LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) and Allen Ginsberg.

Thompson was inspired by the play of good and evil, which creates both order and chaos in the relationships of man, animals, and nature. In his vision, nude female figures express nature's sensuality, while birds symbolize power and freedom as well as his preoccupation with the ultimate flight of death. Whether sensual, spiritual, or tortured, Thompson's paintings are metaphors of both the rational and irrational forces of nature.

His paintings have been showcased at prominent institutions including New School for Social Research (1969) and the Speed Art Museum (1971). More recently, his work featured in Bob Thompson: This House Is Mine at at the Colby Museum of Art (2021). Thompson's work belongs to esteemed collections worldwide such as those of the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.