“So Let’s All Be Citizens” is a small but illuminating retrospective of painter Bob Thompson’s meteoric career which ended prematurely on May 30, 1966, about a month before the artist’s twenty-ninth birthday. Skilfully curated by Ebony L. Haynes of 52 Walker, the exhibition features fourteen oil paintings, spanning the years 1960 to 1965, all of which have been loaned from private collections and museums. The works are strongly influenced by European masters: Fragonard, Gauguin, Poussin, Titian, as can be seen in a number of paintings, including The swing1965, or Triumph of Bacchus, 1964. Such inspirations exude an ideal of artistic perfection as well as a hyperbolic vision of Arcadia, a world where injustice and cruelty do not exist. This imaginary territory must have looked like a relief fantasy to a young black man growing up in Jim Crow-era Kentucky. How to paint harmony or keep innocence, after having known so much hatred and brutality?
In these images, luminous beings ripple across pastoral backdrops, each radiating their own personal color while participating in joyful group activities or more destructive endeavours. Thompson’s use of light adds a soft poetic touch to these bucolic paintings, which look like joyful celebrations of life’s fleeting moments. But hell is also very present in several of Thompson’s paintings, as seen in Execution, 1961, where a black man is hanged, blindfolded and mutilated – a scene reminiscent of the lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, which occurred when the artist was a teenager. Due to their facelessness, the artist’s anonymous characters may at first seem innocent, but their actions often reveal that they are anything but. Thompson synthesized historical European painting in a remarkable way. But his lush compositions never shy away from ugliness and pain: they offer a modern take on a shattered Arcadia.
