Following the success of our inaugural presentation at Frieze LA last year, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is pleased to return to Los Angeles with a solo exhibition of works by Bob Thompson (1937–1966) organized in complement to the recent traveling retrospective Bob Thompson: This House Is Mine, which concluded its nationwide tour at UCLA’s Hammer Museum in January. The gallery’s presentation at Frieze LA 2023 constitutes Michael Rosenfeld Gallery’s fifth show on Thompson and our first solo exhibition of the artist since acquiring the estate in 2019. The presentation at Frieze serves as a preview to an upcoming solo exhibition of the artist’s work that will be on view from April 1–May 26, 2023, in the gallery’s ground floor space in Chelsea. 

Sixteen major paintings and over thirty works on paper are on view at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery’s Booth A15, constituting a succinct, vibrant survey of Thompson’s visionary oeuvre. The works on view were executed between 1958, the year the artist moved to New York, and 1966, the year he passed away in Rome, providing a compelling synopsis of Thompson’s career. Both our Frieze presentation and the upcoming gallery show include works that have not been publicly exhibited in decades as well as several works that appeared in This House is Mine.

In a tragically brief life, Bob Thompson created a complex body of work structured by his own symbolic lexicon, fauvist palettes, and compositional devices drawn from the European Old Master tradition. As inspired by the improvisational riffs of jazz as he was by the formal tropes of Goya, Poussin, and Tintoretto, Thompson’s viscerally executed paintings conjure a psychedelic allegory of his own experience. Often set in a pastoral countryside or dense woodlands, Thompson’s scenes are populated by Madonnas and saints, monstrous birds, anthropomorphic donkeys, shadowy men in fedoras, and much, much more. During the years he lived in New York, the artist was deeply immersed in the avant-garde scene of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, participating in Fluxus happenings, befriending Beatniks such as Allen Ginsberg and LeRoi Jones, and frequenting the city’s legendary jazz clubs, including the 5 Spot and Slugs’ Saloon.

A chance encounter with the work of German Expressionist Jan Müller (1922–1958) in the summer of 1958 set Thompson on a path to his mature style; Müller’s raw, flatly rendered allegorical paintings were a revelation to Thompson, and he sought out the artist’s widow Dodi Müller, to learn more; she advised him to eschew extended study of contemporary art in favor of close consideration of the Old Masters. Thompson subsequently took advantage of every opportunity to sketch the works of Old and Modern masters in the U.S., visiting the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia and frequenting The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He also took several long sojourns in Europe with the aid of travel grants and, after his career took off, his own funds. Sketching daily at the Louvre and various historical sites in Spain and Italy provided the artist with a seemingly infinite supply of fodder for his increasingly complex and monumental compositions. 

The paintings and drawings on view at Frieze LA collectively represent the richness of Thompson’s oeuvre, portraying myriad subjects and converging a broad range of art historical references. Among the sixteen works on canvas are Harvest Rest (1964) and The Golden Ass (1963), which reimagine Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Harvesters (1565) and a scene from Francisco de Goya’s Los Caprichos (1797–99), respectively. Among the selection of works on paper will be Thompson’s spontaneous line drawings of various musicians he observed at the downtown jazz venues he haunted, including Cannonball Adderley, Art Blakey, Bob Cranshaw, John Ore, and Sonny Rollins.

“Thompson understood the power of the works he used and their place in the history of art,” writes curator Thelma Golden in the text accompanying Thompson’s 1998 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American art, which she and Judith Wilson curated. “Western art offered him something which he assumed was his right to use freely. He was also clear about his desire to make these works his own: inflect their vocabulary with his grammar; infuse the agreed-upon meanings with his intention. To claim them. To signify. …Thompson’s art lay not simply in the restatement, but in the revision and replacement of these familiar passages—a philosophy that brings him into a direct affinity with his jazz musician contemporaries as well as with an entire generation of African American artists who followed his strategy.”  

Curated by Diana Tuite for the Colby College Museum of Art (Waterville, ME), Bob Thompson: This House Is Mine garnered widespread acclaim throughout its four-city national tour. The exhibition was the first solo exhibition of Thompson’s work at a museum since the 1998 Whitney show. Following its opening at the Colby Museum in July 2021, This House is Mine traveled to the Smart Museum in Chicago, the High Museum in Atlanta and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. A beautifully designed, fully illustrated catalogue published in association with Yale University Press features an impressive group of contributors, including curators Lowery Stokes Sims and Robert Cozzolino; art historians Adrienne L. Childs, Bridget R. Cooks, Jacqueline Francis, and George Nelson Preston; and artists Henry Taylor, Alex Katz, and Rashid Johnson. 

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery’s relationship with the work of Bob Thompson dates to 1996, when the gallery took on representation of the estate and mounted Bob Thompson: Heroes, Martyrs & Spectres at our 57th Street location. Three more solo exhibitions followed: Fantastic Visions (1999), Meteor in a Black Hat (2005)—which traveled to the Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University in Milwaukee—and Naked at the Edge: Bob Thompson, which opened at the gallery’s current Chelsea location in 2015. The gallery published accompanying catalogues for the first three exhibitions, featuring texts by the artist’s widow Carol Thompson and jazz critic Stanley Crouch. Following twenty-three years of representation, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery acquired the Estate of Bob Thompson in 2019, a monumental procurement that included all remaining works in the family’s possession, numerous artist sketchbooks, and the artworks’ intellectual property rights.