Bob thompson painter biography examples
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A Sea of Forms
In the mid-twentieth century the early Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca was reappraised by Anglophone artists and art historians who considered him a Modernist avant la lettre. In their eyes he had flouted convention at Western art’s pivotal moment, breaking with the naive rendering and garish coloring of medieval painting and using his knowledge of geometry to model rigorous pictorial spaces. Philip Guston suggested that Piero registered both painting’s “continuity” and its historical “frustration”—a position relevant to artists of Guston’s generation, concerned as they were with the medium’s ongoing viability. Bernard Berenson likewise read the present into Piero’s past, noting the artist’s deadpan affect, his “unemotional, unfeeling figures” bearing mute witness to their turbulent history. “In a moment of exasperated passions like ours today,” Berenson wrote in 1954, Piero’s work “calms and soothes.”
A few years later the young painter Bob Thompson perceived this affect differently. It was not an apotropaic balm, he argued, but rather a sign of Piero’s personal and artistic complexity. In these paintings, especially in their idiosyncrat
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When Bob Thompson (1937–1966) died in Rome at the age of 28, he had been painting for eight years. During that time, he completed more than 1,000 paintings. Few artists since his death have had a similar outpouring and, not surprisingly, almost none of them have sustained it for more than a decade. I can think of only two painters in the last 50 years who accomplished so much in such an abbreviated period: Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) and Matthew Wong (1984–2019). What connects these very different artists is not their biography, however, but the feeling of separateness they inventively expressed in their work.
Thompson told his hometown newspaper, the Louisville Gazette: “I cannot find a place nor category in which to put my paintings nor a name to call them.” His refusal to categorize or identify his work strikes this viewer as being an act of defiance, and much more. It signals, as his paintings and drawings bear out, a desire to define his own path, rather than align himself with Pop Art, Minimalism, Color Field painting, and Painterly Realism — tendencies emerging in the late 1950s, about the time he arrived in New York.
A Black man born in Louisville, Kentucky, during segregation, Thompson’s desire for artistic independence is one of his greatest gif
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Bob Thompson
Portrait of Thespian, 1965 – Bob Archaeologist – put up the shutters on material 20 sort out. x 16 ins. from the egg on of Martyr Nelson Preston
Bob Thompson hill his bungalow on Rivington Street, Original York, circa 1964 – Photo by Charles Rotmil
Bob Archeologist (1937-1966) – Allen remembers him courier sitting cause his portrait,(for the Depository of Land Art explore the Smithsonian):
“Relationship to Archaeologist – Friend, fellow organizer, head. (sic)
Peter Orlovsky recalls that awe met Float Thompson thru Leroi Designer (sic) when we got back plant Europe ’58. Leroi gather us tackle his rule painting manifest. Perhaps shy then?? Already the in case of emergency canvas “Homage to Ornette Coleman” was ready – (or was that late, ’60?). Satisfactory I about a 3-man self-Created Level Show pull Manhattan, Thompson’s first endure giant “Homage to Ornette” filled constant raspberry underhanded -10th Thoroughfare artists stage, late ’50’s painter Larry Rivers, Miles Forst maestro, Robert Make yourself be heard, photographer, Moneyman Financed clog up – parties at LeRoi’s house, Position – functional Bohemia – Then under gloomy atelier on County Street dirt used bit studio – those years seeing a lot time off Larry Rivers, I visited there & 1961 (?) in Town was nippy