Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects and Martha Henry, Inc. present Bob Thompson Drawings an exhibition of drawings by Bob Thompson (1937-1966) that date from the late 1950s to the mid 1960s and includes Thompson’s last known work, a large drawing in oil paint on canvas after Titian.

On view are more than 20 works on paper representing Thompson’s favorite themes executed in a variety of mediums including ink, charcoal, pastel, oil and watercolor. The show covers the artist’s full career beginning in 1958 in Provincetown, MA to his premature death in 1966 in Rome, Italy. All of the drawings are from private collections, and most of them have never been seen in public. We are pleased to present the first comprehensive exhibition in over 35 years devoted to Bob Thompson’s drawings in SHFAP’s new Lower East Side gallery located around the corner from Thompson’s former Clinton and Rivington Street studios.

In the summer of 1958, Bob Thompson arrived in 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 and was inspired by the work of the recently deceased Jan Müller. There the younger artist developed two of his earliest themes. One, a man wearing a broad brimmed hat is a symbol for the artist. As Paul Mocsanyi wrote in a 1969 New School catalog, “The silhouette of a black observer stands far away from the action…in the background, always watching, sometimes threatening. By his posture, his hat, his gesture, one can identify him as being the artist himself.” A second theme is nude women in a forest. Jeanne Siegel interviewed Thompson who said after seeing Cezanne’s Bathers at the Barnes Foundation; he became fascinated by women and trees: “I paint a woman that is real for me…and then I am going to put her right beside a tree and I relate her to the sensuality of the tree...” The exhibition includes drawings from 1958 that establish both of the motifs in the artist’s oeuvre.

Thompson had been encouraged to study Old Masters by painter Dody Müller, 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 artists for inspiration and instruction.

A number of the drawings in this exhibition are studies of Old Masters, including Thompson’s important Study for Expulsion and Nativity, an interpretation of two famous 15th century Biblical paintings by Renaissance masters - Masaccio’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden and Piero della Francesca’s Nativity. A year later in 1964, Thompson painted Expulsion and Nativity, a large oil on canvas, one of his greatest paintings.

The years of study in Europe paid off with tremendous growth for 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, which art historian Judith Wilson considers to be the final phase of his career, Thompson “thoroughly combines the appropriated and the imagined.” His controlled classicism is evident in the Last Painting of 1966, essentially a large drawing in oil on canvas. Other Thompson drawings on canvas are in the collections of 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 enjoyed making portraits of his friends: artists Red Grooms and Gandy Brodie; Beat poets LeRoi Jones and Allan Ginsburg; and many jazz musicians. Jazz was especially important to Thompson, whose life and art were similarly improvisational. Featured in the exhibition are two ink sketches - an intimate portrait of bassist, Charlie Hayden, and a spare elegant rendering of singer, Nina Simone performing, Simone’s stylistic diversity appealed to the artist as well as her political role as a black cultural icon for the Civil Rights movement in the mid sixties.

Other drawings include powerful studies of the female nude that transcend their origin as life drawings to become thoroughly modern and as contemporary as a Kerry James Marshall or Jean-Michel Baquiat. Hettie Jones, who was married to LeRoi Jones in the 1960s, has written a poignant remembrance of her friendship with Bob Thompson in the catalog that accompanies the show, “I always think about Bob Thompson’s work in terms of 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 stuff 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.”

Bob Thompson Drawings is co-produced by steven harvey fine art projects and Martha Henry,
Inc. An illustrated catalog with text by Hettie Jones is available.

Bob Thompson Drawings opens November 30, 2011, reception 6- 8 pm, continues:
November 30, 2011 – January 8, 2012

steven harvey fine art projects, 208 Forsyth Street, NY, NY 10002, 917-861-7312

info@shfap.com. Gallery hours: Wednesday - Sunday 12- 6pm. Call for holiday hours.
Contact: Steven at 917-861-7312 or Martha at 917-699-7894