At three-feet-square, “The Circus” isn’t the largest painting in the deeply absorbing survey of Bob Thompson’s brief but intensely productive career. Often, as the newly opened survey of 50 paintings at the UCLA Hammer Museum indicates, he worked large, and sometimes at almost mural scale.
Thompson does something different: His combatants are acting out on an open stage, as if in the ring. They’re poised between the imagining artist out front and a boisterous crowd of onlookers, rudimentarily sketched out as a wall of people looming in the background. A show is on.Goya speaks to us one-on-one. But, appropriate to a mass-media age, Thompson speaks to us as part of the faceless crowd — or, in the worst case, the mob.
That “house” is also mine, Thompson declared, regardless of who — white supremacist or Black nationalist — might say otherwise. The exhibition unfolds what that meant.Individual paintings show him taking possession, reworking and reinterpreting a host of Renaissance and Baroque precedents, just as he did with Goya and “The Circus,” to make something distinctive and new.
Thompson was born in Louisville, Ky., deep into the Great Depression and a few short months after the Ohio River famously flooded the city, cresting at an astonishing 40 feet and putting more than two-thirds of it under water. The worst natural disaster in Louisville history no doubt played a role in the family’s decision to move to nearby Elizabethtown. His father, a dry cleaner, died in a car crash when Bob was 13, leaving his teacher-mother to raise three kids.
Crucifixions and the martyrdom of saints are pretty standard stuff in European art history. Thompson united the Christian image of the cross, a place of unspeakable suffering on the road to deliverance, with the gruesome specter of the lynching tree.
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