Elliott Thompson
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May 25, 1912
Elliott Thompson | |
|---|---|
| Born | Axel Elliott Thompson May 25, 1912 |
| Died | February 28, 2016 (aged 103) |
| Known for | Artist |
Elliott Thompson (25 May 1912 – 28 February 2016) was an American artist known for his non-objective abstract paintings. Active from the late 1960s through the 1970s, Thompson created hard-edged geometric abstractions using oil and acrylic on prepared or raw canvas. His early paintings were black and white, while later ones were colored, mainly with monochromatic backgrounds. Critics described his style as mathematical—marked by precise, systematic compositions—evoking musical emotions.
He received his training in Paris at Académie André Lhote and in Washington, DC, at the Corcoran School of Art. He began his art career in midlife, following retirement from work as a civil servant in the US government. During the 1970s, his work received extensive reviews from local critics when exhibited in solo and group shows at Washington galleries. In the 1980s, as his eyesight began to decline and as his style of abstract art began to lose favor, Thompson chose to stop painting, focusing instead on teaching and personal projects.
Thompson was raised in Washington, DC, and was educated in public schools through junior high. His parents then sent him to Briarly Hall Military Academy in Poolesville, Maryland, but he left in 1929 without a diploma and joined the US Navy. He attended a class in mechanical drawing in junior high but received no art education at Briarly. Serving in the rank of seaman, he spent the next four years on ships and ashore. During this time, although he had no art training or previous inclination to paint, he made his first artistic foray when he volunteered to make a painting of an officer's swimming pool.[1][2]
On being discharged from the Navy, he found work in Washington, DC, as a press officer for the newly formed National Recovery Administration. Over the course of the next 34 years, he worked as an accountant or financial officer in both civilian agencies and units of the US Army.[1][3] Early in 1954, while assigned to a postwar reconstruction project in Paris, he felt a strong urge to paint, bought some supplies, and set up an easel on the city's streets. He later said, "I knew a little about drawing, so I put up a canvas. The first thing I tried to paint was Notre-Dame Cathedral. I just painted whatever came out of the paintbrush."[1] That experiment led him to seek formal instruction for the first time. Later that year, he enrolled in an academy run by the cubist artist André Lhote. Working evenings and weekends, he produced small still lifes. He understood little French but enough to understand that Lhote dismissed his early efforts as those of a Sunday painter. He persevered, however, and eventually his innate skill and hard work won the artist's respect. Regarding this time, he later said that by then he was "doing better work, and a lot more work, than some of the full-time students."[1] He continued evening and weekend painting after leaving Lhote's atelier but was not then ready to begin a career as a professional artist.
After returning to Washington, DC, in 1958, Thompson stopped painting as work and family obligations began to take up most of his time and an intermittent struggle with alcohol dependence resumed. Nine years later he retired from federal service, returned to Washington from an overseas job with the Army, and decided to enroll in the Corcoran School of Art.[3] Asked to select a teacher, he chose a recently arrived Welshman named Roy Slade.[1][note 1]
Career in art
At the end of his art career, Thompson said he had been thinking of becoming an art professional since the time he spent working at Lhote's atelier. The retirement income he began to receive in 1967 gave him the security he felt he needed to make the shift from bureaucrat to professional artist.[1]
Lhote had let his students paint as they pleased and limited his instruction to weekly critiques of their work. Slade focused on basic design, stressing color theory, line, and form. At first, Thompson continued to produce mainly still lifes but on switching from oil to acrylic pigments, he began making entirely abstract paintings.
At age 55, he was one of Slade's most mature students. Since he was also one of the most diligent and reliable, Slade began to rely on him to direct the class during his frequent lecture travels and eventually accepted him as an assistant teacher. Thompson later directed Corcoran's Saturday classes and became a full-time faculty member. In 1979, he was appointed director of the school's summer program in Maine.[1]
In 1968, Thompson rented for use as a studio a two-room apartment near Washington, DC's West End. The next year, he moved to larger quarters at the top of a townhouse between the Woodley Park and Adams Morgan neighborhoods.[1]
Thompson contributed a small abstract painting to an exhibition called "Alliance for Art" that was staged in 1968 to benefit UNESCO and the library of Brandeis University. Other exhibitors included Henry Moore, Roy Lichtenstein, Helen Frankenthaler, and Robert Motherwell.[1] The following year, Thompson participated in three group shows: the Maryland Regional Exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art,[5] an exhibition of 17 Washington painters held at the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota,[6] and, as his first appearance in a commercial gallery, an exhibition of four Washington artists at the Jefferson Place Gallery.[7][8]
The early 1970s were a highly productive period for Thompson. During this time, he participated in the Art in Embassies Program of the US Department of State. He showed paintings in a rotating exhibition held at the White House. One of his paintings was included in the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Services program.[1] The Jefferson Place Gallery mounted solo exhibitions of his work in 1970,[9] 1971,[10] and 1973.[11] In 1971, Thompson participated in three shows with other Washington artists. The first was a traveling exhibition that opened in Columbia, South Carolina[1][12] and the second was a show at the gallery of the International Monetary Fund.[1][13] The third was a major exhibition at The Phillips Collection.[1][14] He also participated in an art auction to benefit the Washington, D.C., chapter of the Women's National Abortion Action Coalition in 1972 .[15] In 1974, the Corcoran Gallery gave him a solo exhibition of 48 paintings.[1][16]
After the closure of the Jefferson Place Gallery in 1974, Thompson's production began to decline.[8][1] While focusing much of his attention on teaching and on the work he put into turning a townhouse he had bought into a studio, he was still able to produce two series of paintings, one in black, white, and gray on square canvases and the other in colors on trapezoidal canvases.[1]
In 1980, the United States Information Agency sent Thompson and a young sculptor, Robert Stackhouse, as US representatives in a summer workshop in Bulgaria.[1] Later that year, he signed with the short-lived Barbara Fiedler Gallery in Washington and showed nine rectangular and six trapezoid paintings in a solo exhibition there.[1] In reviewing the show, critics Paul Richards of the Washington Post and Ben Forgey of the Washington Star said that while Thompson persisted in a style that was no longer popular, the paintings were well made. Richards praised their "rush and zing" and Forgey their musicality.[1][17]
In 1981, Thompson signed with Gallery K in Washington.[1] In 1984, his work appeared in two shows at that gallery. The first, held in July, was a group exhibition.[18] The second, held in December, was a two-person exhibition.[1] In 1989, the gallery produced a show called "30 Years Later", which brought together Thompson and 18 other Washington artists. Some of the artists were still active. Others, including Thompson, had shown infrequently in recent years.[19] In 1990, the gallery at Marymount University in Northern Virginia showed six of Thompson's paintings.[1][20]
In 1987, glaucoma caused Thompson's eyesight to begin to fail, and, his style having lost favor with collectors, he ceased to paint.[1] He was then 75 and would live another 29 years.[3]
Artistic style
Thompson's earliest paintings contained geometric shapes in black and white. Reviewing them in 1969, the critic Paul Richard called them "mathematical and sequential, formal, disciplined, austere." He said they elicited a "rich and almost musical" mood that was achieved "by following exactly a mathematical score."[7] He planned them beforehand using a formal system that he found difficult to explain.[10] After he began to paint in color, his work remained, as another critic said, "highly systematic, internally consistent, and resilient".[1] Thompson's compositions contained shapes based on squares, lines, and zig-zag patterns.[10] Seen together, the shaped canvases of the late paintings struck Paul Richards as resembling "brightly colored roadways seen in perspective." He said the paintings gave a "sense of rush, of accelerating speed" that was "heightened by the flicker, the electric op-art zing, that his colors generate." He said the square canvases in black, white, beige, and gray contained squares, lines, and cube shapes that sometimes looked like tilted planes and other times "call to mind arrangements of stacked cubes seen in isometric perspective."[17] In 1980, a critic wrote of the late paintings, "Thompson does not play; the paintings he is showing are the opposite of messy. Instead, they have the tension and the gleam of a stainless steel wire pulled absolutely taut."[17] Thompson often gave his paintings coded titles, either plain numbers or alphanumeric designations.[1]
