Goya’s private, internalized fears are externalized, transforming into intimate, vaguely satirical spectacle. In the Spanish artist’s famous 1799 etching, owls and bats swarm around the dreamer’s recumbent body, nocturnal nightmares staring straight ahead with fierce attention directed at the viewer looking in on the scene. Thompson uses Goya, a hinge between Old Master and Modern art, to ruminate on an up-to-the-minute artistic debate.īelow the wrestling men and birds, a small, rudimentary figure is hunched at a table, head down, like Goya’s dreaming man. The human and avian forms yield a vivid sense of socially and culturally approved Modernist abstraction struggling against an unquenchable, if unfashionable, urge toward figurative painting. Thompson’s chosen palette is dominated by flat planes of primary colors. Whether the birds or the figures are on the attack or escaping is hard to say.Ī second skirmish is also underway. They are being grappled by two muscular, slightly crouching figures, one crimson and the other bright yellow. In the painting, enormous, swooping silhouettes of owlish birds, one green and the other blue, each with wings spread wide, are creatures that display both menace and freedom. What he did with that knowledge is surprising. The composition was inspired by Francisco de Goya’s renowned, politically trenchant aquatint, “The sleep of reason produces monsters.” As a Black man raised in the American South, Thompson knew all about the irrational nature of feeling and the monstrousness it could generate. (He died in 1966, a month shy of his 29th birthday.) Often, as the newly opened survey of 50 paintings at the UCLA Hammer Museum indicates, he worked large, and sometimes at almost mural scale.īut “The Circus,” painted in 1963 when Thompson was living on the bohemian island of Ibiza in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Spain, is formally hypnotizing and conceptually disconcerting despite its easel-size. 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.

Faceless menace value