SHFAP and Martha Henry present
"Pairings:
Gandy Brodie / Bob Thompson:
The Ecstasy of Influence,"
an exhibition about the painterly relationship of Gandy Brodie and Bob Thompson in the late 1950’s.
February 1 - 28, 2011
reception 6-8pm, February 1, 2011
shfap, 24 east 73rd Street, #2F, NYC, NY 10021, info@shfap.com
Gandy Brodie and Bob Thompson both spent the summer of 1958 in
Provincetown, Massachusetts, amidst a community of other artists that included
Mimi Gross, Red Grooms, Jay Milder, Wolf Kahn, Emilio Cruz, Lester Johnson,
Anne Tabachnick, Dody Müller and Christopher Lane.
Art historian Judith Wilson has characterized that Provincetown summer as
exemplifying an “ecstasy of influence”: the influences of contemporary
figurative painters on Thompson’s work. She wrote about this community in the
1998 Whitney Museum exhibition catalogue for Thompson’s retrospective.
Despite the fact that they never met, Jan Müller who died in January of 1958
was unquestionably a significant influence on the developing Bob Thompson.
However, the influences of other members of this community on Thompson have
been less explored. Wilson touches on this as she quotes a mutual friend of
Brodie and Thompson, the painter Emilio Cruz. Cruz has stated that Thompson
painted “his first figurative paintings” in response to the influence of Gandy
Brodie.
visit the exhibition
