Measure of My Song

Measure of My Song
Bob Thompson

10 October–14 December 2025
Opening Reception: Thursday 9 October, 6–8pm

Maximillian William is honoured to present Measure of My Song, the first European exhibition devoted to the work of Bob Thompson (1937–66) since his early death. Although the American artist lived abroad for several years between 1961 and 1966, his extremely influential, incandescent paintings remain relatively unknown beyond the US. Writing soon after Thompson’s death, Sir Frank Bowling OBE described his work as ‘generating its own personal heat’.

Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Bob Thompson dived headlong into the cultural ferment of Happenings, Beat poetry and free jazz in downtown New York City in the late 1950s. As many modes of abstraction seemed to have run their course, he turned to figuration and distinguished himself with pastoral scenes marbled with tectonic colour. Thompson’s first trip to Europe began in London in 1961, and he described being moved to tears by the city’s museums. This exhibition brings Thompson back to London and considers how his years as an expatriate sharpened his style.

Measure of My Song presents a focused selection of paintings, many of which have not been displayed publicly in at least two decades. The exhibition draws its title from a 1959 translation of a line in the final stanza of Ovid’s epic poem Metamorphoses. Ovid’s tales of ‘bodies changed’ inspired the iconography in many images to which Thompson responds, but they also resonate with the ways he used poetic indirection and generated friction through transformation. To resuscitate representational painting, Thompson looked to canonical Western compositions from the Quattrocento on, tinkering with their allegorical circuitry. Included is a triptych whose form gestures to historically devotional art, but whose coarsened content – entangled silhouettes in a rhapsodic landscape – exemplifies the deftness with which he cross-wired vulgarity and sanctity. In another painting, on loan from the New Jersey State Museum, Thompson revisits Titian’s Perseus and Andromeda, one of the Italian artist’s Ovidian poesie and a cornerstone of London’s Wallace Collection.

The exhibition is organised by Diana Tuite, the curator of the retrospective exhibition Bob Thompson: This House Is Mine, which toured the United States between 2021 and 2022, and will be accompanied by a publication.

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Bob Thompson (1937–66) was an American painter whose brief but prolific career bridged European Old Masters and postwar avant-garde culture. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Thompson studied art after an early interest in medicine, developing a distinct figurative mode in an era dominated by abstraction.

Though based primarily in the United States, Thompson developed a transatlantic practice shaped by extended periods in Europe during the early 1960s. Supported by a Whitney Foundation fellowship, he travelled with his wife to London, Paris and Ibiza.

His premature death in Rome at age 28 curtailed a rising career already recognised by major American collections. In recent years, Thompson’s legacy has been celebrated in landmark exhibitions including Bob Thompson: This House Is Mine (2021–22), which toured the US, and in group shows such as The Color Line: African-American Artists and Segregation (2017), Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (2017) and Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties (2014).