The remarkably talented, if previously neglected, African American painter Bob Thompson (1937-1966) finally has his day in the sun. This excellent book, published to accompany an important exhibit at New York's Whitney Museum, tells the story of an artist who overdosed on heroin at age 29, but not before leaving many dozens of excellent canvases, mostly inspired by the mythological scenes of classical painters like Poussin. Subjects such as Mars and Venus and The Massacre of the Innocents show Thompson's fascination with the artistic past, and the very personal variations of this essentially self-taught painter have a winning energy and skill. His portraits of friends such as Leroi Jones and Allen Ginsberg are less outstandingly original, recalling the work of New York painters like Alice Neel. Art historians Thelma Golden and Judith Wilson are well informed about Thompson's artistic and literary contacts, his trips to Europe for inspiration, and his appetite for European culture--which make his life all the more tragic in its brevity. Still, his exuberantly graceful and colorful canvases remain, and these are well reproduced in the present book. Elegance of gesture was of primary importance to Thompson, and his works kept on improving until the very end. He was an important American painter, and fully worthy of the attention he is at long last getting. This book will intrigue anyone interested in modern figurative art. The only disappointing element is the brief and somewhat confused notes on individual paintings. Otherwise, this is a very useful title, whether or not one has visited the Whitney retrospective. --Benjamin Ivry
From Library Journal
African American painter Bob Thompson (1937-66) achieved renown during a brief career in the late 1950s and early 1960s. While the black artists of the Harlem Renaissance and the WPA projects of the 1920s and 1930s and those of the black consciousness movement of the late 1960s and 1970s are now well known, the role of Thompson's generation has been largely overlooked. An active participant in the jazz, literary, and poetry culture of the Beats, Thompson combined rich color, abstract figures, the appropriation of European art historical imagery, and expressions of his racial experiences. This catalog of a retrospective show explores his eight years of productivity through biographical essays, color reproductions, and iconographic analyses. A valuable contribution to the documentation of African American art history that belongs in any library with an interest in art or ethnic studies.?Eugene C. Burt, Art Inst. of Seattle Lib.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Book Description
spectacular catalog of young 60s jazz era painter
About the Author
Thelma Golden is curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art and was the organizer of the exhibition Bob Thompson. Judith Wilson is Assistant Professor of History of Art at Yale University and was also an advisor to the Thompson exhibition.
Bob Thompson FROM THE PUBLISHER
Like many other artists and musicians of the 1950s, Bob Thompson (1937-1966) found his voice in the novel hybrid forms that emerged from postwar American culture: Abstract Expressionism and abstract figuration, and jazz and rhythm and blues. This catalogue, the first comprehensive book on Thompson's work, accompanies a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and provides an opportunity to celebrate the brief but intense career of an artist who managed to create over a thousand works in the short span of seven years. In this fully illustrated volume, Thelma Golden, curator of the Whitney exhibition, and art historian Judith Wilson, the preeminent Thompson scholar who has been studying the artist's work for nearly two decades, examine the issues that surrounded Thompson's art in his own day and still resonate in ours. Golden discusses the formal aspects of the works, their influence on later black artists, and the vicissitudes of Thompson's career, while Wilson places Thompson within an art historical, cultural, and biographical context. Together, they offer a serious evaluation of his work, one that finally establishes Thompson's place among his contemporaries and in the larger history of American twentieth-century art.
Art & Photography
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