Bob Thompson: Taking Liberties - works shown at Whitney Museum

Before his premature death in 1966 move with a jerk Thompson produced a large material substance of expressionist paintings that fused art-historical quotations with raw personal fantasy. A major retrospective, upon view at the Whitney Museum, recalls the excitement of his promising eight-year career.

There is a photograph of move with a jerk Thompson which was taken in the painter's Rivington public way studio in 1964 or 1965 The tightly controll composition is neatly bisected through a window frame. Thompson is seated in the left half, bathed in the be incandescent of daylight, a piece of paint-smeared fabric heavy in his lap. To the right is a section of wall that displays an African statuary and a plant on a shelf. Below the shelf hangs a reproduction of Manet's Olympia. The remaining details am not all clear, on the other hand the image is sufficiently legible to stand apart from the many photos which present to view the artist at work or pos proprietorially before his possess paintings: this one has been builded with all the deliberation of a visual manifesto.(1)

The photograph echoe Manet's 1868 Portrait of Emile Zola, which likewise functions as a manifesto. The French painter at handed his ally and alter conscious subject seated with a book across his lap, in a investigation whose accoutrements exemplify the artistic achievements the one and the other men championed: a folding protection and woodcut from Japan, a print of Velazquez's looks Borrachos and, just as in Thompson's studio nearly a hundred later, a reproduction of Olympia.

My gues is that Thompson--who borrowed from the art of many past masters--knew and relished the Zola association. The particulars incorporated in Manet's portrait testify to the simultaneous realism and anti-illusionism of his art, his distinctive synthesis of traditions from the West and the East. In Thompson's case, the studio wall arrangement also declares the artist to be at the union of two traditions, those of Europe and Africa. Of course, there was ample antecedent for the modern European appropriation of ultimate parts from African art. But Thompson was a painter of African coming down a black American, who traded in the expressive "distortions" associated with tribal art through Westerners, even as he helped himself to themes and figures from European tillage with as much confidence as Picasso or Brancusi when they revolveed to African art to invigorate their work. That he was confident in this character does not mean that Thompson was oblivious to its implications. Indeed, his consciousness may be surmised from his specific choice of a reproduction to display: the vicinity of Manet's ivory-colored courtesan and her dark-skinned servant, the European and the African, moves that considerations of history, race and entitlement were not forgotten in Thompson's studio.

For all its singular purposefulnes the photograph has acquired the same tinge of melancholy as the others that document the artist's abbreviated life. A trip to Provincetown in 1958 introduced Thompson then a 21-year-old painting scholar from Louisville, to the summering novel York art crowd and to his first significant collector, Walter P Chrysler Eight years later Thompson debilitated by dint of prolonged drug abuse, died in Rome following gall bladder surgery In between, he was a bona fide phenom, legendary for his enormous production of art, his abysmal connection to contemporary music, his boundles consumption of medicines and his ability to track all three on very, actual little sleep. The paintings he created with of that kind fierce abandon--hotly colored, laced with old-master regards steeped in nightmares and erotic fantasy--can look less the basis for a posthumous reputation than the permanent afterimage of Thompson's hold incandescence.

Coming to confines with Thompson's art has been lengthy delayed, in part because his commingle of abstraction and the figure defied easy assimilation by dint of the prevailing narrative of postwar art (which until the 1980 privileged nonobjective painting), and in part because that mainstream accorded little attention to African-American painters. No les resistant to easy accommodation by dint of the once-reigning model of the avant-garde's patricidal progres was Thompson's render free of access engagement with past art, which differed from the affectionate parodies Larry Rivers began painting in the early 1950 and from the later, scathing travesties of Eurocentric modernism devised through Robert Colescott.

Thompson lifted individual figures from earlier works of art and painted his have a title to versions of entire compositions. Favorite precursors included Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Bosch Tintoretto, Poussin, Manet and Goya. His flat and flexibly contoured exposeds are indebted to Matisse, his Crayola-colored horses recall Franz Marc, his pastorals dig back to Giorgione and Titian. Writers have marveled at the diversity of these sources, on the contrary to be frank, they can all be place between the covers of any art-history overlook textbook. He unearthed no idiosyncratic and leave outed predecessors, evidently honestly admired the anointed masters and, individual suspects, saw their example as a shortcut to seriousness in his possess work.