NYAB Event - Bob Thompson "Drawings"

Bob Thompson "Drawings"

steven harvey fine art projects

This event has ended.

The exhibition covers the artist’s career beginning in 1958 in Provincetown, MA, through his premature death in 1966 in Rome, Italy. Most of the drawings have never been seen in public. This is the first exhibition in over 35 years of Thompson’s works on paper and the first ever focussed specifically on his drawings. We are pleased to present it in new Lower East Side gallery which is located around the corner from Thompson's former Clinton and Rivington Street studios.

In the summer of 1958, Bob Thompson (1937-1966) moved to the artist colony of Provincetown, where he was befriended by a number of contemporary figurative painters including Red Grooms, Lester Johnson and Gandy Brodie. He also discovered the work 0| the recently deceased Jan Mliller. Thompson was encouraged to study Old Masters by painter Dody Miiller, Jan‘s widow. and he heeded her advice after he moved to Europe in early 1961. Living for extended periods of time in France, Spain and Italy, Thompson immersed himself in art history. drawing upon Poussin, Goya and Italian Renaissance painters for inspiration and instruction.
The years of study in Europe paid oft with tremendous growth tor the young artist. He had a new command of placing multiple figures in space, creating more complex compositions, often directly based on historical models and developing the narrative aspect of his subjects. From 1964 onwards, Thompson, in art historian Judith Wilson's words “thoroughly combines the appropriated and the imagined." His controlled classicism is evident in his Last Painting from 1966, essentially a large color drawing in oil on canvas. Other Thompson drawings on canvas are in the collections oi the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY and the Hirschhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. This work was directly inspired by Titian's Venus and Adonis, of which several versions are known.

The artist also made portraits of his friends: artists Red Grooms and Gandy Brodie; Beat poets LeRoi Jones and Allen Ginsberg; and many jazz musicians. Jazz was especially important to Thompson. Featured in the exhibition are two ink sketches - an intimate portrait of bassist. Charlie Hayden. and a spare elegant rendering of singer, Nina Simone perlorming in Provincetown. Simone‘s stylistic diversity appealed to the artisl as well as her polilical role as a black cullural icon lor the Civil Rights movement in the mid sixties.

Other drawings include powerlul studies of the female nude that recall works from early twentieth century German Expressionism and yet are thoroughly modern, as contemporary in their own way as Jean-Michel Baquiat or a Kerry James Marshall. The writer Hettie Jones, who was married to LeRoi Jones in the 19605, has written a poignant remembrance of her friendship with Bob Thompson in the catalog that accompanies the show, “l always think about Bob Thompson’s work in terms ol how new it was. although in many ways it was of course, old. Nevertheless, at the time it came to our notice. we were suddenly, and frighteningly, diverted from abstraction’s intelligence to the stuft of nightmare - real monsters in bold colors - and forced to admit that we were looking at what was divinely, and classically. human. Which was indeed scary, because what Bob had seen and painted was us."

[Image: Bob Thompson "waiting Figure #4" (1958) watercolor on paper 12-5/8 x 9-3/8 in.]