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Bob Thompson | |||||||||
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Title: Abundance and the Four Elements (1964) oil on canvas - 48"H x 60"W Biography: 1937 - 1967 | |||||||||
Bob Thompson was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1937 and studied at Boston University (1955-56) and the University of Louisville (1957-58) with German expressionist Ulfert Wilke. Thompson spent the summer of 1958 in Provincetown, where he was introduced to the figurative expressive work of Jan Muller, and Red Grooms. In the fall of 1958, Thompson moved to New York and embraced a Bohemian lifestyle, forming friendships with jazz musicians, writers, poets and fellow artists including, Charlie Haden, Leroi Jones and Jay Milder. A regular at the infamous jazz club "The Five Spot", Thompson participated in two of the earliest happenings staged in the United States. In 1960, he had his first solo exhibition in New York at the Delancy Street Museum and in 1963, artist Lester Johnson introduced him to the Martha Jackson Gallery where he had solo exhibitions in 1963 and 1965. Thompson traveled extensively and spent time in London, Paris, Izbia and Rome, where he died tragically just short of his twenty-ninth birthday. Known for a language of expressive landscape and figures painted in hot, violent tones, Thompson's paintings wed his own visionary style with compositional schemes derived from classical predecessors. Allan Ginsberg declared Thompson "the most original visionary painter of his day, a first natural American psychedelic colorist". In 1978, The Studio Museum in Harlem organized his first retrospective exhibition and in 1998, The Whitney Museum of American Art held a major Thompson retrospective. | |||||||||
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