Bob Thompson.

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART 

The opening of the Bob Thompson retrospective at the Whitney looked a bit like a Harlem Renaissance black-tie gala, as various luminaries of the black culturati - the Baraka family, Ed Clark, Camille Billops, Ted Joans, Jane Cortez, Mel Edwards, and Stanley Crouch - graced the event with their presence. Thelma Golden, the curator of the show, brought her guests together in a celebration of the intoxicating colors and fluidity of Bob Thompson's paintings that was further enlivened by the rhythms of a live jazz combo.

It is said that post-bop jazz and Beatnik poetry are essential to any understanding of Thompson's work, for that is the milieu from which he sprang. His tragically short career - which took him from his native Kentucky to New York, Provincetown, Paris, Ibiza, and, finally, Rome - lasted only seven years, from his first one-man show in Louisville in 1959 to 1966, the year he died of a heroin overdose, at the age of twenty-nine. With only a few semesters of college and a year of formal art training under his belt, Thompson was largely an autodidact, and one might say his teachers were the old masters - Masaccio and Piero della Francesca, El Greco and Poussin - no less than the jazz greats Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, and John Coltrane. Describing Thompson's reworkings of old-master compositions in a colloquy at the Whitney shortly after the opening, Thelma Golden and Stanley Crouch frequently conjured musical metaphors, speaking in terms of improvisation, riffs, rhythms, and thematic developments.

Golden's signature exhibition style made the walk through the exhibition galleries effortless. She had the walls painted yellow, except for the one room, done in red, where smaller paintings and drawings from Thompson's sketchbooks were placed. (After opening night, for the run of the show, jazz recordings would be piped into this room, filtering out through the rest of the galleries, setting a distinct if not altogether unobjectionable mood.) The vividly colored walls (dismaying to some eyes) certainly offset Thompson's vibrant paintings, which came alive like actors on a stage.

The success of this show derives in part from its positioning of Thompson in the African-American tradition of excellence - as seen particularly in music - at the same time that the art world claims him as a figurative expressionist (in other words, a real painter, like his colleagues Jay Milder, Christopher Lane, and Red Grooms). All of this serves to cast Thompson as a crossover artist whose work is capable of bringing large audiences of African-Americans to the Whitney. But what does it really mean to say that his art "crosses over"? What precisely is the attraction of his art today?

Bob Thompson's world - as amply illustrated in the hundred-plus works included in the show - is transtextual (that is, the Aristotelian "either/or" is supplanted by the Deleuzian "and . . . and . . ."), a theater of fluidity where people of all colors - blue, green, yellow, orange, brown, and black - move freely and exchange roles. In Thompson's canvases as in Ovid, human sexual desires are often transposed onto animals (horses) or nature (trees). In Blue Madonna, 1961, for example, the human figures intermingle with trees and horses in a flat, fragmented fauvist space, and that depiction of the natural world, traversed by desire, contrasts sharply with the austere world of the Madonna and Child (painted at the right of the canvas), aloof and stylistically at odds with the rest of the painting.

Thompson's paintings are the arenas of infinite metamorphoses, and birds - those wings of desire - are central to his iconography. In many of his works, women masked as birds, walking or alighting, naked, approach the object of their sexual longings (see, e.g., Triumph of Bacchus, 1964; The Judgement, 1963; and Bird Ritual, 1963). In Judgment of Paris, 1964, a blue figure with a bird on her head (Minerva?), holds a horse by its neck, and they both face - in what may be a separate pictorial space - two naked women standing before a man (presumably Paris), who is painted red. Another blue bird hovers above their heads. One of the women holds out a red apple, which she may have just taken from Paris's outstretched hand - or may be offering to him. This canvas seems almost like two paintings in one, inasmuch as the artist has conflated two traditions of painting: he paints a Renaissance composition in the fauvist style. But the work's true force arises from complex, ambiguous layers of desire brought to life in the bold colors of Thompson's palette.

Bob Thompson, perhaps more than any other painter from the turbulent '50s and '60s, shows that, if racial integration was elusive in reality, it was not so in art. This may be the real reason for the appeal of his paintings today to people who are more optimistic. Thompson's work shows a freedom to reinterpret the old masters and fill old jars with new wine. His free use of color goes further than art, giving form to his desire for a world where people might change from one hue to another as they wish. The Whitney exhibition gives the viewer pause to consider whether, in the years since Thompson's death, we have come any closer to realizing his vision.

"Bob Thompson" is on view through Jan. 3, 1999.