Bob Thompson

Bob Thompson was born Robert Louis Thompson in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1937. He began pre-medical studies at Boston University and left them to study painting at the University of Louisville. In the summer of 1958 he worked at the Seong Moy school in Provincetown, where he met Red Grooms and the circle of young figurative painters around Jan Müller’s widow Dody, and that autumn he moved to New York. On the Lower East Side he lived among jazz musicians and poets, took part in the first Happenings and had his first solo exhibition in 1960, the year he married Carol Plenda.

A Whitney Foundation fellowship in 1961 took the couple to London and Paris, and from there to Ibiza. In the museums of Europe Thompson studied Poussin, Piero della Francesca, Titian and Goya, and he made their compositions the armature of his own pictures.

His mature work restages bacchanals, depositions and allegories of the old masters with flat, faceless figures in pure reds, blues and yellows, accompanied by birds and beasts, in a manner that owes as much to Matisse, Gauguin and the improvisation of jazz as to its sources. Back in New York he showed with the Martha Jackson Gallery from 1963 with great success. In 1965 he returned to Europe and settled in Rome, where he died in May 1966, a month before his twenty-ninth birthday.

In eight years he made about a thousand paintings and drawings. The Whitney Museum of American Art gave him a retrospective in 1998, and his work is in the Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.