Born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1937, Bob Thompson emerged as an important voice in the era of Abstract Expressionism. Drawing inspiration from Renaissance and Baroque masters such as Nicolas Poussin and Francisco Goya, he developed a distinctive figurative language that challenged both artistic and racial conventions. His paintings transform historical subjects into dreamlike scenes characterized by flattened forms and rhythmic compositions reminiscent of jazz—an art form he deeply admired.

Painted in 1963, the present oil exemplifies Thompson’s bold reimagining of one of Western art and Christianity’s most enduring subjects: the Descent from the Cross. Throughout his brief yet impactful career, Thompson repeatedly reimagined canonical works into boldly modern compositions. Here, he draws inspiration from the celebrated triptych by Peter Paul Rubens in the Cathedral of Our Lady, Antwerp, yet the result is unmistakably his own. The cross becomes a tree; Christ appears as a winged figure; and attendants rendered in saturated passages of red, yellow, and deep blue resolve into flattened, vibrant silhouettes. Through his signature use of unmodulated color and simplified form, Thompson subverts the solemnity of the Baroque prototype, translating it into a psychologically charged composition. As was often his method, the present work likely served as a study for a larger painting of the same theme, Descent from the Cross, now in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.