Bob Thompson: This House Is Mine
July 20, 2021–January 9, 2022
Upper and Lower Jetté Galleries
Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Chicago
February 10–May 15, 2022
High Museum of Art, Atlanta
June 17–September 11, 2022
Hammer Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles
October 9, 2022–January 8, 2023
This exhibition offers a rich reconsideration of a visionary African American painter. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Bob Thompson (1937–1966) earned critical acclaim in the late 1950s for his paintings of figurative complexity and chromatic intensity. Bob Thompson: This House Is Mine borrows its name from a diminutive but exquisite painting created by the artist in 1960. With this title, Thompson declared his ambition to synthesize a new visual language out of elements of historic European painting.
The first museum exhibition devoted to the artist in more than twenty years, This House Is Mine traces Thompson’s brief but prolific transatlantic career, examining his formal inventiveness and his engagement with universal themes of collectivity, bearing witness, struggle, and justice. 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.
Garden of Music, 1960. Oil on canvas. 79 1/2 × 143 in. (201.9 × 363.2 cm). Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut. The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund. © Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York. Photo: Allen Phillips / Wadsworth Atheneum
Bringing together paintings and works on paper from more than fifty public and private collections across the United States, This House Is Mine centers Bob Thompson’s work within expansive art historical narratives and ongoing dialogues about the politics of representation, charting his enduring influence. The exhibition is accompanied by a lavishly illustrated catalogue featuring scholars, artists, and poets, published in association with Yale University Press. Contributors include Kraig Blue, Adrienne L. Childs, Bridget R. Cooks, Robert Cozzolino, Crystal N. Feimster, Jacqueline Francis, Rashid Johnson, LeRoi Jones, Adjoa Jones de Almeida, Alex Katz, Mónica Mariño, George Nelson Preston, Lowery Stokes Sims, A. B. Spellman, and Henry Taylor.
About the Artist
Robert Louis (Bob) Thompson briefly studied medicine at Boston University before enrolling in the studio program at the University of Louisville, which had desegregated in 1951. As an art student, Thompson explored the languages of totemic abstraction then in vogue and developed an extraordinary proficiency in academic drawing. He spent the summer of 1958 in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he continued his training at the Seong Moy School of Painting and Graphic Arts and forged valuable friendships. Thompson also encountered the work of the recently deceased German émigré artist Jan Müller (1922–1958), whose figurative style pointed him toward new expressive possibilities.
Thompson soon settled in New York City, where he joined fellow artists Allan Kaprow and Red Grooms in some of their first so-called “Happenings,” multimedia performance events. A devotee of jazz, Thompson frequented downtown clubs such as Slugs’ Saloon and the Five Spot Café, where legendary performers including Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and Charlie Haden played. These musicians materialize in many of Thompson’s paintings and drawings including Ornette (Birmingham Museum of Art, 1960–61) and Garden of Music (Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 1960). This pivotal period was marked by Thompson’s first solo New York City exhibition, and within the next few years his work entered some of the preeminent modern art collections in the United States.
Bob Thompson in his studio on Rivington Street, NY, c. 1964.
© Charles Rotmil
In 1961, Thompson and his wife, Carol, made their first trip to Europe together, spending time in London and Paris and eventually settling in Ibiza. Thompson was able to fully immerse himself in the traditions that formed the core of his practice. While in Spain, he deepened his study of Francisco de Goya (1746–1828), and canvases such as Untitled (Colby College Museum of Art, 1962) demonstrate his heady dialogue with Los Caprichos, the Spanish artist’s mordantly satirical print series. On a second trip to Europe, the couple settled in Rome, where Thompson died tragically on May 30, 1966, of complications following gall bladder surgery.
Memorial exhibitions at the New School for Social Research (1969) and the Speed Art Museum (1971) celebrated his life and career. In 1998, Thelma Golden and Judith Wilson mounted a foundational scholarly retrospective of his work at the Whitney Museum of American Art. More recently, paintings by Thompson have featured in group exhibitions such as Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties; The Color Line: African-American Artists and Segregation; and Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power. The Estate of Bob Thompson is represented by Michael Rosenfeld Gallery.
Related Media
Art&: Titian, Thompson, and Mythmaking
Art&: Art and Social Change
This House Is Mine: The Soundtrack
Selected Works
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Catalogue
Bob Thompson: This House Is Mine
Diana Tuite with A. B. Spellman, Adjoa Jones de Almeida, Adrienne L. Childs, Alex Katz, Bridget R. Cooks, Crystal N. Feimster, George Nelson Preston, Henry Taylor, Jacqueline Francis, Kraig Blue, Leroi Jones, Lowery Stokes Sims, Monica Marino, Rashid Johnson, and Robert Cozzolino
Yale University Press | Hardcover | 216 pages | $45 US
Bob Thompson (1937–1966) came to critical acclaim in the late 1950s for paintings of unparalleled figurative complexity and chromatic intensity. Thompson drew upon the Western art-historical canon to formulate a highly personal, expressive language. Tracing the African American artist’s prolific, yet tragically brief, transatlantic career, this volume examines Thompson’s outlier status and pays close attention to his sustained engagements with themes of community, visibility, and justice.
In the News
Bob Thompson’s Provocative Challenge to Euro-American Art History
Billy Anania, Hyperallergic – December 20, 2021
Art review: Colby packs ‘House’ in reconsideration of Bob Thompson
Jorje S. Arango, Portland Press Herald – November 14, 2021
‘He Raises the Bar for Me’: 4 Artists on the Influence of Bob Thompson
October 20, 2021
The Staggering Breadth of a Brief Career
Three Takes on Bob Thompson
Terence Trouillot, Frieze – October, 2021
Bob Thompson died young, but his colorful jazz- and Old Master-inspired paintings speak to the ages
Sebastian Smee, Washington Post – September 21, 2021
The House that Bob Thompson Built
Murray Whyte, Boston Globe – August 25, 2021
Like Goya, a ‘renegade’: exploring Bob Thompson’s high-octane challenges to Western art
Nancy Kenney, The Art Newspaper – July 12, 2021
Student Research
Venues
Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago
Chicago
February 10–May 15, 2022
High Museum of Art
Atlanta
June 17–September 11, 2022
Hammer Museum at UCLA
Los Angeles
October 9, 2022–January 8, 2023
Installation Views
Bob Thompson: This House Is Mine is curated by Diana Tuite, Katz Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Colby College Museum of Art, and generously supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, halley k harrisburg and Michael Rosenfeld, the Alex Katz Foundation, Richard and Mary L. Gray Foundation, the Robert Lehman Foundation, and the Terra Foundation for American Art. Additional support is provided by the 25th Anniversary Fund, Everett and Florence Turner Fund, and Mirken Family Publications Fund.
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