Bob Thompson 1937–1966
Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Bob Thompson had a short but dynamic career as a figurative painter whose works collided Baroque and Renaissance aesthetics with Abstract Expressionism. Thompson’s mother was a schoolteacher and his father ran a dry-cleaning business before his death by car accident when Thompson was only thirteen. As a young man, Thompson was briefly enrolled as a pre-med student at Boston University from 1955 to 1956, after which he dropped out to study painting at the University of Louisville. Among his teachers were Ulfert Wilke, Mary Spencer Nay, and Charles Crodel.
Thompson moved to New York City in 1958, befriending jazz musicians including Charlie Haden and Ornette Coleman as well as writers and artists such as Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones, Red Grooms, and Allan Kaprow. He had his first solo exhibition in 1960 at the Delancey Street Museum and soon after would show on multiple occasions at Martha Jackson Gallery as well as Detroit’s Donald Morris Gallery. Broadly, Thompson’s work was concerned with the dichotomies of good and evil, as well as man and nature, and paintings were strongly influenced by jazz music and culture. As Lynda Roscoe Hartigan writes, “Like other artists of his generation in New York, Thompson developed a vital new figurative style in reaction to the dominance of abstract art, yet adapted its spontaneity, scale, and expressive use of color… Whether sensual, spiritual, or tortured, Thompson's paintings are metaphors of both the rational and irrational forces of nature.” Thompson’s most well-known work may be Homage to Nina Simone, which was among the last paintings he made before his death.
Thompson married Carol Plenda in 1960 and, using funds from his Whitney Foundation fellowship, the couple moved to Europe in 1961 and traveled extensively. In 1966, at the age of 28, Thompson died of a heroin overdose while in Rome. Following his premature death, the New School exhibited his works in 1968 followed by the Speed Art Museum in 1971. He was honored with a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1998. Today his works are held in the public collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Detroit Institute of the Arts, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and many others.
