Bob Thompson’s Measure of My Song, by Sam Cornish
Measure of My Song at Maximillian William marks the first European exhibition of Bob Thompson’s (1937–66) paintings since his early death at the age of just twenty-eight. Works from private collections are supplemented by the loan of a 1964 painting from the New Jersey State Museum, in which Thompson reimagined Titian’s Perseus and Andromeda (1554–56). The original is housed in the Wallace Collection, a short walk from Maximillian William’s space on Mortimer Street. Thompson could well have seen it on a trip to London in 1961. A more contemporary connection can be found only slightly further away, in Kerry James Marshall’s current exhibition at the Royal Academy, which includes a tribute to Thompson. Both Marshall and Thompson are African American painters deeply involved in the European painting tradition, even if the intent and the effects of this involvement could hardly be more different.
Bob Thompson Abundance of the Four Elements, 1964 Oil on canvas 121.9 x 152.4 cm 48 x 60 in. Courtesy of Private Collection and Maximillian William © Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY. Photo: Ben Westoby / Fine Art Documentation
Thompson paints images of troubled paradise, by turns, or often all at once, inviting and disturbing, gawky and intense, clearly structured but with a light touch. Colour is direct and strange, personal, partially naturalistic, partially arbitrary, closer to the harshness of German Expressionism than its French equivalent. This German or Eastern European connection was noted by Frank Bowling, writing shortly after Thompson’s death. For Bowling, Thompson showed the “genesis of Black art,” as an artist who used “the European masters in much the same way, as during the ferment and rumblings after Cézanne and Monet, artists used everything from Japanese prints to African sculpture.”
Seemingly painted at speed, the pictures show a knack for succinctly conveying physicality. Thompson’s figures appear simultaneously enmeshed in and on the cusp of breaking free from the natural landscapes they inhabit. Thompson recognises this dual status as a fundamental fact of imaginatively inhabiting a body: inseparably within our physical selves we nevertheless desire escape, with tragic or absurd consequences, as in Perseus’s tumble. Two lounging female figures in Abundance of the Four Elements seem to almost melt into their surroundings, while nearby two men are suspended against the dawn sky. Holding balloon-like birds by the legs, it is unclear whether they are about to land or float away for good. Perseus holds a similar bird, which the small 1963 painting Turkey Catch suggests is a turkey. These odd creatures—something of a personal emblem for Thompson - reminded me of the animals of the “outsider” Black American artist Bill Traylor, although I don’t know how likely it is that Thompson would have known Traylor’s art.
Bob Thompson Perseus and Andromeda, 1964 Oil on canvas 151.4 x 182.2 cm 59 5/8 x 71 3/4 in. Courtesy of New Jersey State Museum Collection; Museum Purchase, FA1984.47 and Maximillian William © Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY. Photo: Ben Westoby / Fine Art Documentation
In Perseus and Andromeda, and also in Abundance of the Four Elements (1964), the other large-scale composition shown here, the slightly flattened colour of figures and landscape is illuminated and aerated by the pink and blue wet-brushed luminescence of the sky. A small, tightly organised horizontal painting on wood, The Casting of the Spell (1960), shows Thompson’s ability to structure his paintings’ patchworks of colour in light and dark. One difference from James Marshall, fundamental to our contrasting experience of their paintings, is that Marshall’s “grand-machines” present precisely delineated and rigorously designed space, whereas Thompson is a conjuror of convincing and sensuous colour-space. Space created by colour was central to the 1960s abstract paintings by Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, or Jack Bush, heavily promoted at the time Thompson was working. Yet for all their “abstract” qualities, Thompson’s paintings are clearly figurative, concerned equally with the visual and symbolic world and its prior representation in art, and not treating either as a “path to abstraction.”
As with so many paintings throughout the Western tradition, both modern and pre-modern, there is an equivalence between the nude figures and the natural settings they are enmeshed in. Thompson had a broad and direct knowledge of European art, having spent most of his far-too-short career there. An exemplary 1999 review of Thompson by the painter Merlin James, reproduced in a gallery handout, elucidates some of these precedents: “Bellini’s and Titian’s Arcadian scenes, Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, Puvis de Chavannes’ idylls, Tahitian reveries by Gauguin, Munch’s ‘frieze of life’ and Matisse’s or Derain’s fauvist fêtes champêtres.” Perhaps, following Frank Bowling’s thoughts, Ernst Kirchner or Emil Nolde should be added to this list.
Kerry James Marshall’s fundamental project is a reimagining of the grand Salon style of European painting as a vehicle to picture Black American history and contemporary experience. Modernism appears in his paintings more as cultural reference than fundamental structure. Thompson’s aims seem less explicitly intentional, less public, more private, and more committed to viewing - or better, reconstituting - European historical painting through a modernist imagination. To what extent this imagination is Black or located in African American experience I have no tools to judge. James points out that Thompson’s “saturated sonorous hues in which he camouflages his people make it hard to ascribe any natural, local skin tone - no one is neutral or ‘normal’, everyone is equally, and differently, ‘of colour.’” I’m sure there is much more to say about this.
Most of the figures shown here have blank, eyeless faces. Men and women interact with each other, and with the viewer, through stance and posture; that is, with their bodies. The monster poised to devour Perseus is one exception, and even its roundel seems partially blind, unfocused compared to its wide-open, expectant mouth, lined with teeth of pure-white triangles enclosed by borders of bare canvas. This pervasive sightlessness is one aspect of the paintings’ hallucinogenic quality, although it also echoes the mute, somnolent interiority with which the characters in paintings by Piero della Francesca or Nicolas Poussin - both artists important to Thompson - act out the roles assigned to them.
Sex and the relations between the sexes are a central part of Thompson’s vision, combining the mystic and the comic, even slapstick - the cursory scrawl of Perseus’s penis mimics a piece of schoolboy graffiti. Two shadowy figures on the right of a roughly made wooden triptych (c. 1960) are clearly copulating, even if their arrayed backs are covered in shadow. It seems that the same is true of the ambiguously multi-limbed, merged group of at least three figures in the central panel, even if the precise details are impossible to untangle.
In Perseus and Andromeda and Abundance of the Four Elements (1964), the divisions between the sexes are more clearly structured, although still inviting multiple interpretations. Andromeda does not seem especially concerned by Perseus’s plight, appearing less a chained, helpless maiden and more a combination of, amongst other possibilities, Egyptian hieroglyph, liberated German Expressionist nudist, and gyrating hippy. Her claw-like hand suggests an open-jawed snake, echoing the adjacent monster, in a gesture that could, to the extent it is even directed at Perseus, be read as dismissive or commanding.
Organised by Diana Tuite, the curator of a U.S. touring show in 2020–21, this is a stimulating and ambitious exhibition for a commercial gallery to put on, and I hope we will see a more wide-ranging display in a U.K. public institution.
https://www.maximillianwilliam.com/exhibitions-home 9 October–13 December 2025
