Review: In a must-see L.A. show, painter Bob Thompson uses art history to consider social injustice
LA TimesAt three-feet-square, “The Circus” isn’t the largest painting in the deeply absorbing survey of Bob Thompson’s brief but intensely productive career. Thompson, keenly attentive to his situation as a Black painter in a white-dominated society, including an art world largely closed to him, yet very much attuned to the social and cultural turmoil of the expanding civil rights movement in the early 1960s, presents a complex revision of Goya’s take on grinding immorality in his “Los Caprichos” suite of prints. “The Circus” didn’t make it into the impressive 1998 Thompson retrospective at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art — that’s not too surprising, since nearly a thousand works are known from his compact eight-year career — which brought the artist back to national attention three decades after his untimely death. Bob Thompson, “Homage to Nina Simone,” 1965, oil on canvas Poussin plays an outsize role in a number of major works that respond to the French Baroque classicist’s elaborate paintings, which are based on ancient religious and mythological stories. Appropriating the composition of Poussin’s “Bacchanal with Guitar Player,” for example, Thompson inserted singer Nina Simone, passionate icon of Black liberation, into the precisely ordered yet boisterous scene.
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