Bob Thompson1998

Like many other artists and musicians of the 1950s, Bob Thompson (1937-1966) found his voice in the novel hybrid forms that emerged from postwar American culture: Abstract Expressionism and abstract figuration, and jazz and rhythm and blues. This catalogue, the first comprehensive book on Thompson's work, accompanies a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and provides an opportunity to celebrate the brief but intense career of an artist who managed to create over a thousand works in the short span of seven years. In this fully illustrated volume, Thelma Golden, curator of the Whitney exhibition, and art historian Judith Wilson, the preeminent Thompson scholar who has been studying the artist's work for nearly two decades, examine the issues that surrounded Thompson's art in his own day and still resonate in ours. Golden discusses the formal aspects of the works, their influence on later black artists, and the vicissitudes of Thompson's career, while Wilson places Thompson within an art historical, cultural, and biographical context. Together, they offer a serious evaluation of his work, one that finally establishes Thompson's place among his contemporaries and in the larger history of American twentieth-century art.