Bob Thompson: This House Is Mine

Location

Space

Dates

Title card for Bob Thompson: This House is Mine.

Multiple figures depicted in various colors playing music surrounded by landscape and trees.

Human and animal figures, often silhouetted and relatively featureless, populate mysterious vignettes set in wooded landscapes or haunt theatrically compressed spaces. Thompson reconfigured well-known compositions by European artists such as Piero della Francesca and Francisco de Goya through brilliant acts of formal distortion and elision, recasting these scenes in sumptuous colors. On occasion, familiar individuals appear: the jazz greats Nina Simone and Ornette Coleman, and the writers LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) and Allen Ginsberg.

Bringing together paintings and works on paper from more than fifty public and private collections across the United States, This House Is Mine centers Bob Thompson’s work within expansive art historical narratives and ongoing dialogues about the politics of representation, charting his enduring influence. The exhibition is accompanied by a lavishly illustrated catalogue featuring scholars, artists, and poets, published in association with Yale University Press. Contributors include Kraig Blue, Adrienne L. Childs, Bridget R. Cooks, Robert Cozzolino, Crystal N. Feimster, Jacqueline Francis, Rashid Johnson, LeRoi Jones, Adjoa Jones de Almeida, Alex Katz, Mónica Mariño, George Nelson Preston, Lowery Stokes Sims, A. B. Spellman, and Henry Taylor.

About the Artist

Portrait of Bob Thompson sitting in a chair.

These musicians materialize in many of Thompson’s paintings and drawings, including Ornette (Birmingham Museum of Art, 1960–61) and Garden of Music (Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 1960). This pivotal period was marked by Thompson’s first solo New York City exhibition, and within the next few years his work entered some of the preeminent modern art collections in the United States.

In 1961, Thompson and his wife, Carol, made their first trip to Europe together, spending time in London and Paris and eventually settling in Ibiza. Thompson was able to fully immerse himself in the traditions that formed the core of his practice. While in Spain, he deepened his study of Francisco de Goya (1746–1828), and canvases such as Untitled (Colby College Museum of Art, 1962) demonstrate his heady dialogue with Los Caprichos, the Spanish artist’s mordantly satirical print series. On a second trip to Europe, the couple settled in Rome, where Thompson died tragically on May 30, 1966, of complications following gallbladder surgery.

Memorial exhibitions at the New School for Social Research (1969) and the Speed Art Museum (1971) celebrated his life and career. In 1998, Thelma Golden and Judith Wilson mounted a foundational scholarly retrospective of his work at the Whitney Museum of American Art. More recently, paintings by Thompson have featured in group exhibitions such as Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties; The Color Line: African-American Artists and Segregation; and Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power. The Estate of Bob Thompson is represented by Michael Rosenfeld Gallery.

Travel Details

Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois
February 10–May 15, 2022

High Museum of Art
Atlanta, Georgia
June 17–September 11, 2022

Hammer Museum at UCLA
Los Angeles, California
October 9, 2022–January 8, 2023

Related Media

Selected Works

Bob Thompson

Multiple figures in various colors behind purple trees. Two figures on the right in blue are depicted with halos.

Bob Thompson

Multiple figures in various colors, three of whom are wearing different hats. A pink figure in the front is being put into a purple bag.

Bob Thompson

Two female figures, one holding a red object in her hand, surrounded by one seated figure in red and another blue-colored figure holding a horse.

Bob Thompson

Tan-colored figures and figures in red and green depicted infant of large mountains and a body of water.

Bob Thompson

Painting of multiple figures all in black against a white background.

Bob Thompson

On the left, two figures sitting on top of a black bird. Next to them, three peach-colored figures with wings standing infant of three seated red figures.

Bob Thompson

Portrait of a man, woman and child. The man is wearing a suit and has a beard, the woman is wearing a yellow shirt and large glasses, and the child is wearing a red blanket or scarf.

Bob Thompson

One red and one yellow figure surrounded by one green and one blue birds in front of a patterned background.

Bob Thompson

A woman with red hair in the foreground infant of an upside down red figure holding a yellow object and entering a mouth with large teeth.

Bob Thompson

Multiple figures in various colors and an animal standing and swimming in a river of water surrounded by rows of green trees.

Bob Thompson

A portrait of a figures in a blue dress with a white color holding a purple flower.

Bob Thompson

Multiple figures playing music and walking around in front of a colorful background of trees, mountains, and clouds.

Bob Thompson

Portrait of a shirtless man sitting in a chair infant of two drums and shelves filled with books.

Bob Thompson

Two faces in red holding a painting facing a figure in yellow surrounded by three other figures who appear to be ghosts.

Bob Thompson

Figures in a line surrounded by large colorful circles with a the top of a dark hat in the foreground.

Bob Thompson

Multiple figures in various colors kneeling infant of a figure sitting on top of a red animal.

Catalogue