?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 30,000 - $ 40,000
BOB THOMPSON (1937 - 1966) The Chase.
Oil on masonite board, 1958. 483x550 mm; 19x21 5/8 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower right recto. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed "P-town" in oil across the verso.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, private collection, New York; thence by descent, private collection, New York.
The Chase is an extraordinary and fascinating painting by Bob Thompson - an early oil from his breakout period in Provincetown. In the summer of 1958, Thompson spent time painting in Provincetown and taking classes at the Seong Moy School of Painting and Graphic Arts. There he began incorporating figurative elements to his abstract painting, and befriended fellow resident artists Emilio Cruz and Gandy Brodie. This brief period begins with the painting The Funeral of Jan Müller, Thompson's homage to the influential German emigré artist whose work he encountered in Provincetown but who passed away shortly before Thompson arrived on the Cape. That summer, Thompson produced an expressive figurative body of work painted in oil in a dark somber palette on masonite board. Many of his paintings were exhibited in the 1958 Provincetown Arts Festival sponsored by the Chrysler Museum, 13 of which were purchased by art benefactor Walter Chrylser. The Funeral of Jan Müller, Myron Kunin Collection of American Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, is featured in the current traveling exhibition Bob Thompson: This House Is Mine, curated by Diana Tuite, Katz Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Colby College Museum of Art.
