Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is proud to present its fourth solo exhibition for Bob Thompson, which is presented alongside the gallery’s first solo exhibition featuring the work of Louis E. Eilshemius.
About Bob Thompson
Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Robert Louis (Bob) Thompson (1937-1966) studied at Boston University (1955) and the University of Louisville (1956-1958). He spent the summer of 1957 in Provincetown, where he was introduced to the expressive figurative work of Jan Muller, Hans Hofmann and Red Grooms. During the early 1960s Thompson traveled abroad extensively and spent time in Paris, Ibiza, and Rome. In 1963, artist friend Lester Johnson introduced him to Martha Jackson of the Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, where he had solo exhibitions in 1963 and 1965. Known for employing a language of expressive landscapes and figures painted in hot, violent tones, Thompson experienced painting as a liberating catharsis that allowed him to pour his soul onto canvas, weaving figures and landscapes into a tapestry of color. Thompson actively appropriated the work of European masters including Goya, Poussin, and Piero della Francesca, adapting their compositions and subject matter to his own visionary style and often turning idyllic, classical scenes into contemporary allegorical nightmares. Thompson’s brilliant reworking or European art history stands very much alone in twentieth-century art and reflects the vitality, spirit, and tragedy of his life. In 1966, at age twenty-eight, Thompson died suddenly in Rome. In a brief life that included only eight years of painting, Thompson left a complex body of work that has proved to be of great significance and influence to successive generations of artists. His work is included in many museum collections, and in 1998, the Whitney Museum of American Art organized a major traveling retrospective exhibition, featuring over one hundred of Thompson’s paintings. Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is the exclusive representative of the Estate of Bob Thompson, and since 1996 the gallery has presented three exhibitions, publishing catalogues for each.
Naked at the Edge: Louis Eilshemius includes fifteen major paintings, dating from c.1905 to c.1920. Known as an artist’s artist who painted romantic landscapes with nymphs and nudes, Eilshemius has been collected by art world masters, including Louis Nevelson, Jeff Koons and Ugo Rondinone. In a recent statement, commenting on the KMD publication and Michael Rosenfeld Gallery exhibition, Rondinone states, “The art world loves an overlooked genius, especially one of whom it can be said that he was ‘ahead of his time’, and in Louis M. Eilshemius, the Swiss artist and scholar Stefan Banz has picked a peach of a subject. He does an excellent job of putting right old unfairness’s by reinstating him to the pantheon of great late 19th-century landscapists. For whereas Turner and Constable gave their contemporaries a vision of England that tactfully harmonized the new and the old, Louis M. Eilshemius did something quite different for America. His landscapes are not only innocent of the signs and tokens of the industrial age, but they bear only a fleeting resemblance to what you might have seen if you had stood by his elbow at the moment of their making.”
About Louis M. Eilshemius
Louis M. Eilshemius (American, 1864-1941) was a fascinating outsider of the New York art scene at the beginning of the twentieth century, and an artist whose entire oeuvre had remained practically unknown to the general public. Not until artist Marcel Duchamp discovered him—at the age of fifty-three—in the famous first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists at the Grand Central Palace in New York in 1917 did he attract the attention of the international art world. Following his discovery, Duchamp and patron of the arts Katherine S. Dreier organized Eilshemius’s first solo exhibitions at the now legendary Société Anonyme in New York (1920, 1924). Eilshemius’s name was suddenly on everyone’s lips: some of the most prominent art critics of the time wrote about him and some of America’s most influential collectors began to take an interest in his work. Eilshemius, himself, exhausted and frustrated by his years of failure and having grown increasingly eccentric - and perhaps also somewhat confused by the sudden change in the reception of his art - ceased painting in 1921. His works, on the other hand, received ever-greater recognition and was exhibited in the most reputable galleries of New York. Between 1932 and his death in 1941, there were more than thirty exhibitions of Eilshemius’s work.
Please note that press releases for past exhibitions are provided for reference purposes only, and certain information may have changed since the date of release.
