Porous Figures, Living Histories: Bob Thompson and Friends Return to Provincetown

A town is a vessel and its spirit is the energy that moves through it. When we reach back into a town’s history, we can hold onto the charge of another time and keep ourselves alive to its ethos. Walking into Hammock Gallery off Commercial Street in Provincetown, the natural warmth of the space is an immediate reprieve from the whitewashed walls of the galleries along the main drag of town. The wooden interior of the repurposed fishing shack has been maintained, offering an authentic backdrop for the walnut, black, and silver frames holding Bob Thompson and friends’ midcentury work. 

Hammock Gallery is owned by Todd Perry, a lifelong Cape Cod resident who has collected Provincetown art over the last four decades. He shares this love with his nephew, Nick Schlerf, who helps Todd run the gallery. The two are good stewards of the town’s creative history—excited about showcasing the work of those who have moved through Ptown with vivacious fervor and promoting the artists continuing in this spirit today.

Their latest show, “I Am Myself: Bob Thompson and Friends’ Early Works,” includes selections from  Bob Thompson’s 1958 summer—the summer he arrived in Ptown from Louisville, Kentucky—not yet working in his full Fauvist-psychedelic palette. With this exhibition, curated by Steven Harvey, Martha Henry, Kevin Rita, we also get a glimpse from when Thompson returned to Provincetown in the mid sixties, amid a thriving career in Europe. 

There is a nod to a brighter, bolder palette in the gouache painting Dawn (1964). The melding of figurative forms in this painting is a regular component of the work Thompson was creating at the time, although Dawn feels more personal—a snapshot in the dunes as the sun rises—than referential. The bodies are linked, the porosity of these figures extends to each other rather than to their environment. Where do I end and you begin?

While Dawn is bright, awake, and voyeuristic, earlier selections like Sun Face (1968) are bulky, somber, and dimly lit. The year 1958 saw Thompson working in deep greens, purples, and browns—highlighting with citron in Untitled Nude (c. 1958)—a cool earthen palette that extends to Wilting Flower (1959), albeit with more warmth and softer edges. In Portrait of Gandy Brodie (1965) and Nina Simone, Provincetown (1965), we see a Thompson rooted in the physical realm—rooted in Provincetown, among the people in it. Here he’s working more as a documentarian of a personal history than as an energetic vessel channeling mythic archetypes, as we do in Thompson’s most famous works. 

Here, I’m drawn to the Figurative Expressionist works in the exhibition that situate the figure (the person, the self) on a more ambient plane. They are themselves, but they are also part of everything around them. Seated Figures (1953), Jan Müller’s sole inclusion in the show, features two figures—one consoling another—but the two forms fuse with their environment, almost entirely. These figures are the most ambient of the show, even as the illusion of containment is present in the painting’s mosaic style. Emilio Cruz’s pastel and oil figures range from permeable to defined. The figures in Untitled (Kneeling Nude) (1966) are buoyant, as if filled with air, but bound by their outline the same way a balloon is bound by its latex shell. Dancers (c. 1960–65) sees his figures moving through and being held by the colors around them—a line of differentiation between person and environment that falls away dramatically in Untitled (June Ekman) (c. 1965).

The show also includes work by Mary Frank and Mimi Gross who, along with Cruz and Jay Milder, became Thompson’s close friends his first summer in town. Both of Frank’s works embody a similar movement, the same reach, as Cruz’s figures. We sense the importance of this personal history in this show—artists nodding to each other across time. The top-hatted shadow figure, present in many of Lester Johnson’s works, shows up as a motif in Cruz’s Untitled (1962) and in later Bob Thompson works as well. Müller died six months before Thompson arrived for his first summer in Provincetown, but his local legacy clearly had an impact on the young artist; Thompson painted an imagined scene from Müller’s funeral during that 1958 summer and befriended Müller’s widow, who was influential to the development of his work. The two artists shared friends, peers, and were exhibited in the same local gallery space.  

Sun Gallery popped up on Commercial Street in 1955—the project of Yvonne Andersen and Dominic Falcone. In his manifesto for the space, Falcone declared, “The Sun belongs to everyone who has something to say and a way of saying it.” Thompson arrived in town during the gallery’s heyday. The space was a response to the artistic entities in town that were biased against young, contemporary artists; it was open and democratic, and showcased the likes of Müller and Thompson, as well as Bill Barrell and Red Grooms. In fact, Thompson was first exhibited in the space because Grooms had been granted a one-artist show and he wanted to exhibit with his friends instead. This ethos of friendship, of inspiration moving among a community of people, is tangible in these works. It’s an ethos Hammock Gallery wants to honor with this show, situating it back in the environment that held these friends, this art as it was being created.

From this selection, Cruz’s work is the most high-spirited. I’m most drawn to his work, perhaps because the ecstatic visionary quality of Thompson’s later work is most palpable in this selection of Cruz’s oil and pastels—the vigor of the colorways and the ascendant reach of the forms. Not much has been written about the spirituality of Thompson’s later work; any reference is often flattened to a lifted historical motif. I can’t help but wonder if Thompson had a penchant for lifting motifs, or if he felt a call to that which is operating outside of time—that which is always present, irrespective of the current zeitgeist.  

Those who knew Thompson often spoke to his intensity, the tenor in which his spirit moved. What critics sense in these later works but fail to nail down is the freedom inherent in Thompson’s surrender to the energy palpable in the environment beyond us, beyond conceptions of the self. Looking at the works in this show, it’s clear Cruz was operating on a similar plane as Thompson in the later half of the sixties. Critics often draw parallels between Thompson’s work and jazz music—I think because of the energetic space the quality of improvisation relays—but I fear this framing miscasts improvisation as the aim itself rather than a natural byproduct of Thompson’s creative process. Thompson’s desire to paint was born of an energetic imperative that moved through him, through his art: “I paint many paintings that tell me slowly that I have something inside of me that is just bursting, twisting, sticking, spilling over to get out.” Thompson knew that the art, the message, exists both inside of us and outside. It’s what the best of art reminds us. We are ourselves, but we are also everything around us.

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“I Am Myself: Bob Thompson and Friends’ Early Works” is on view through September 12 at Hammock Gallery, 361 Commercial Street, Provincetown, MA.