For Bob Thompson, painting was a liberating catharsis that allowed him to passionately pour his soul into often autobiographical and allegorical expressions, weaving figures and landscapes into a tapestry of color. As he wrote in a letter to his family, “If you can understand I want to paint – paint, paint! Paint! Paint! And then paint more & more. I’m what is jokingly called an esthetic junkie – I’m hooked on pigment, so please forgive me and most of all believe in me.”

Thompson is known for employing a language of expressive landscapes and figures painted in hot, violent tones. While his paintings appear irreverent, they are often rooted in tradition; Thompson actively appropriated from the masters including Goya, Poussin, and Piero della Francesca, adopting their compositions and classical subjects as the basis for his works. By combining his own visionary style of self-expression with tradition, Thompson succeeded in producing distinctive works that stand very much alone in twentieth-century art.

Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Thompson moved to Boston in 1950 and studied at Boston University (1955) and the University of Louisville (1956-1958). He spent the summer of 1957 in Provincetown, where he was introduced to the expressive figurative work of Jan Muller, Hans Hofmann and Red Grooms. During the early 1960s Thompson traveled abroad extensively and spent time in Paris, Ibiza, and Rome. In 1963, artist friend, Lester Johnson introduced him to Martha Jackson of the Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, where he had solo exhibitions in 1963 and 1965.

Works completed between 1958 and 1966 reflect the vitality, spirit, and tragedy of the artist’s life. As Thompson became more involved in the avant-garde and Beat culture of musicians, writers, and artists, the muted and subdued figurative compositions of the late 1950s gave way to dynamic and hotly colored images of the 1960s.

In 1966, Thompson died in Rome, tragically short of his twenty-ninth birthday. In a life of less than twenty-nine years, which included only eight years of painting, Thompson left a complex body of work which has proved of great significance and influence to successive generations of artists. His work is included in many museum collections, most notably, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in 1998, the Whitney Museum of American Art organized a major traveling retrospective exhibition, featuring over one hundred of Thompson’s paintings.