Bob Thompson

Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Robert “Bob” Thompson (1937–1966) first entered Boston University to study education before leaving for the University of Louisville to pursue art in 1957. After his sophomore year, Thompson spent a summer painting in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Around 1959, Thompson moved to New York, where he mingled with jazz musicians and encountered Allan Kaprow’s Happenings as well as other developments in conceptual art; however, the artist would eschew these experimentations to engage more intimately with works by the established masters of European art history. After mounting his first solo exhibition in New York at Red Grooms’s Delancey Street Museum in 1960, Thompson received a grant to go to Europe; he would travel to and settle in Paris, Ibiza, and Rome for short periods of time, viewing works of art at museums and galleries firsthand while maintaining his studio practice. He returned to New York in 1963, joining Martha Jackson Gallery and presenting solo shows there in 1963 and 1965. He traveled to Rome in 1965, and after being hospitalized for appendicitis, he died in Italy at the age of twenty-eight in 1966.