Bob Thompson: Meteor in a Black Hat

(Milwaukee, WI) The Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, is pleased to announce its first exhibition of 2006, Bob Thompson: Meteor in a Black Hat.  The exhibition, which features 26 paintings by African-American Expressionist painter Bob Thompson (1937-1966), will open on January 26.  The exhibition was organized by the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York.
 
Robert Louis Thompson is a pivotal figure in modern American art history and African American culture.  The artist is known for his expressive landscapes and figures painted in brilliant colors.  Poet Allen Ginsburg called Thompson “the most original visionary painter of his day.”  His paintings were made in part as a reaction to abstract art which was at the center of the New York art world at the time.  Thompson’s work represents a dynamic hybrid of emotion and movement and that often references masterpieces of the past by artists such as Piero della Francesca, Tintoretto and Poussin.  The duality of good and evil is often the focal point of his paintings.  Thompson’s lifelong interest in music, particularly jazz, is also reflected in his work.  
 
During Bob Thompson’s short career (from 1958 to his death in 1966) he produced over 1000 paintings. He worked primarily oil on canvas, board or paper, but also painted with acrylic and gouache.  The paintings in this exhibition date from 1959 to 1965, and are among the artist’s best works.  Highlights of the Haggerty exhibition include Self-Portrait, (1964-65) and Thompson’s religious paintings The Entombment (1964) and Martyrdom of Erasmus, (1965).  
 
Robert Louis Thompson was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1937.  He studied pre- medicine at Boston University for one year and then returned to study art briefly at the University of Louisville with German expressionist painter Ulfert Wilke.  Thompson left the South in 1958 and moved to in Provincetown, Massachusetts where he was introduced to the figurative expressive works of Jan Muller.  
 
In the fall of 1958, Thompson moved to New York City where he became a visible figure in the city’s music scene.  He frequented jazz clubs, befriending jazz notable Ornette Coleman, and artists Red Grooms and Jay Milder.  The post-bop jazz being played in the New York clubs at the time became an important influence on Thompson’s work.  He was inspired by the way this music was being created in the clubs.  Musicians would take phrases and melodies from old jazz standards and improvise on top of them, sometimes weaving the melodies of three or four tunes to create completely new compositions.  Thompson would paint like these jazz musicians.  He would take ideas and images from the classical masters of Europe, weave them together and improvise on top of them to make his own compositions.   
 
Thompson later moved to Europe where he could more closely study and draw inspiration from the works of the classical European masters.  During this period his popularity in the States and abroad grew.  He became known for his bold and impassioned improvisations, his connections with 1960s jazz and his fearlessness in portraying the female nude.  
 
In 1963 Thompson moved back to the states briefly and was given a solo exhibition at the Martha Jackson Gallery, in NYC.  Soon after this he returned to Europe where he lived and worked until his untimely death (in Rome) in 1966.  
 
The Haggerty Museum of Art is located at North 13th St. and West Clybourn Avenue on the campus of Marquette University. Museum hours are Monday - Wednesday, Friday - Saturday, 10 am-4:30 p.m.; Thursday, 10 am-8 p.m.; and Sunday, noon-5 p.m.. Free parking is available in the Mary B. Finnigan Parking Lot (enter on 11th St. through Marquette Lot J). For more information please contact Brian Moore at 1-(414)-288-7290.