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CONFLICT, TRAGEDY, AND INTERRACIALITY: BOB THOMPSON PAINTS VERGIL'S CAMILLA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2023

Allannah Karas
Allannah Karas*
Affiliation:
University of Miami allannahkaras@miami.edu

Extract

In The Death of Camilla (1964), Black American painter Bob Thompson fascinates, disturbs, and provokes enduring questions about race in the United States. In this painting (Figure 1), multicolored nudes clash in battle around two figures frozen in a moment of anguish: a light-skinned female warrioress dying in the arms of a dark-hued male opponent. The power of this painting lies not only in its raw emotion, symbolism, and color, but also in Thompson's daring signification upon the story of Camilla from Vergil's Aeneid and on a seventeenth-century drawing by Nicolas Poussin. While a relatively ‘underknown’ artist, during his life Robert Louis Thompson (1937–1966) received extensive recognition for his compelling reconfigurations of the European old masters and their Classical (Greco-Roman) subjects. Thompson, according to his early biographer, Judith Wilson, may also be ‘the first American artist to put the nation's interracial sex life/sex fantasies on public view.’ In many of his works of reception, Thompson combines these two artistic preoccupations into compelling pieces that foreground tragic contradictions around interraciality in the United States. In his The Death of Camilla painting, I argue, Thompson expands upon the symbolic trajectory of Vergil's story and ‘colors’ Poussin in such a way as to re-present Camilla as collateral damage of the sort of nation building that necessitates interracial conflict.

Type
Research Article
Information
Ramus , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , December 2022 , pp. 268 - 288
Copyright
Copyright © Ramus 2023

In The Death of Camilla (1964), Black AmericanFootnote 1 painter Bob Thompson fascinates, disturbs, and provokes enduring questions about race in the United States. In this painting (Figure 1), multicolored nudes clash in battle around two figures frozen in a moment of anguish: a light-skinned female warrioress dying in the arms of a dark-hued male opponent.Footnote 2 The power of this painting lies not only in its raw emotion, symbolism, and color, but also in Thompson's daring signification upon the story of Camilla from Vergil's Aeneid and on a seventeenth-century drawing by Nicolas Poussin. While a relatively ‘underknown’ artist,Footnote 3 during his life Robert Louis Thompson (1937–1966) received extensive recognition for his compelling reconfigurations of the European old masters and their Classical (Greco-Roman) subjects. Thompson, according to his early biographer, Judith Wilson, may also be ‘the first American artist to put the nation's interracial sex life/sex fantasies on public view.’Footnote 4 In many of his works of reception, Thompson combines these two artistic preoccupations into compelling pieces that foreground tragic contradictions around interraciality in the United States. In his The Death of Camilla painting, I argue, Thompson expands upon the symbolic trajectory of Vergil's story and ‘colors’ Poussin in such a way as to re-present Camilla as collateral damage of the sort of nation building that necessitates interracial conflict.

Figure 1. Bob Thompson (1937–1966), The Death of Camilla, 1964. Oil on canvas. Detroit Institute of Arts, Founders Society Purchase, Rollyn O. Krichbaum Memorial Fund, F1983.73. © Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY.

In the first section of the paper, I examine Thompson's painting, The Death of Camilla, against the backdrop of his life, work, and social context. Little has been written about this work in general,Footnote 5 and this may be the first article on Thompson's Classical reception in this painting. I particularly highlight Thompson's classicism as reflective of the ‘antimodernist’ sentiments prevalent among Black American artists and intellectuals of his time. I also underscore the connections between Thompson's cultural critique and his characteristically conflicted exhibitions of interraciality. At the core of this paper are two close analyses of image and text. I examine the ways that Thompson's The Death of Camilla painting signifies uponFootnote 6 both Vergil's Aeneid (7.803–17; 11.410–915) and a battle scene drawing (c. 1622–23) by the French artist Nicolas Poussin. My analysis of Thompson's reception work reflects methodological approaches outlined by scholars who have begun to explore Black Classicisms in the visual arts. I particularly follow Barnard's Empires of Ruin Footnote 7 and situate Thompson's work as metacritique of exclusionist contradictions inherent within both United States imperialism and the Classical tradition.

Whether Thompson read Vergil cannot be definitively proved; it is likely that he encountered the story through the art historical tradition of Western Europe, which he studied extensively. Nonetheless, Thompson's visual representation aligns in many ways with the Aeneid's tragic account in which a local Italian warrioress rides out to fight for her country against a colonizing force and yet dies in the attempt. Thompson's work, I argue, harnesses the tragic and anti-imperialist qualities of Vergil's story while foregrounding, through his poignant reconfiguration of the two central figures, the devastating effects of the conflict on all involved: people of all colors. With Poussin as well, Thompson preserves the basic structure of the original and yet disrupts the battle scene's content, story, and meaning with abstract male and female figures, tumultuous color, and irreverent, ambiguous bird-symbols. In these ways, I suggest, Thompson uses both Poussin and Vergil as backdrops upon which to revel in interraciality and unmask destructive cultural taboos against cultural ‘mixing’ whether between Black men and white women (or other interracial pairs) or between the African American artist and an exclusivist Classical tradition.

1. Thompson's Life and Work: Antimodernist Signifying and Interraciality

Bob Thompson's The Death of Camilla has received little to no scholarly attention within art history, Africana studies, or Classics. Yet this painting is part of a rich panoply of textual and visual receptionsFootnote 8 of the Classics performed by other Black American creative intellectuals, particularly from the mid-twentieth century through to today. While much work has begun on Classical receptions by Black Americans in literary production,Footnote 9 scholars have only recently undertaken work on artistic receptions and their important contribution.Footnote 10 This paper, then, falls within new research on Black Classicisms in the visual arts and thus follows methodological approaches incorporated in work by O'Meally on Romare Bearden, Barnard on Kara Walker, and Morse on Edmonia Lewis and Carrie Mae Weems.Footnote 11 Each of these Black artists, and Thompson as well, engaged with (or, rather, signified upon) the Classical tradition on their own terms and for their own unique purposes. In particular, as shall be seen, Thompson's classicism in The Death of Camilla resonates with what Barnard has identified as a ‘critical strain’ in African American reception that problematizes ‘the intricate relations between classical tradition and [racialized] structures of power in the United States.’Footnote 12

Thompson painted The Death of Camilla in 1964 while living in New York city between trips to Europe. In this painting (Figure 1), Thompson foregrounds the tragic pain of a dark and seemingly monstrous male figure supporting the limp body of a lighter-colored female in the midst of battle that rages with no end in sight.

Around the central tragedy, however, Thompson paints a clash of color: nude male and female figures of different shades fight, die, elope, or (in the foreground) engage in an almost innocuous game of chase while bearing aloft ambiguous birds. As with many of his paintings, it is difficult to determine whether The Death of Camilla depicts tragedy, comedy, or a provocative mix between the two. A first key to interpreting this painting, I suggest, can be found in the life and perspectives of the painter himself: Thompson's (interracial) social circles, his artistic approach, and the racially polarized times in which he worked.

In this section, then, I outline aspects of Thompson's life and work in order to provide context for the critique presented in The Death of Camilla. I particularly highlight the interracial and artistic culture of which he formed a part, and the social context from which he emerged. Thompson, like many other creatives and intellectuals of the late 1950s and early 1960s, experienced acute ‘antimodernist’ discontent with the naïve optimism of the American dream, of national progress undermined by the color line. At the same time, I argue, Thompson ultimately channels his antimodernist sentiments through relentless returns to Classical myth in the art of the ‘old European masters’ combined with a near-obsession with interraciality, particularly between heterosexual interracial couples.

Thompson's Life and Artistic Context

Bob Thompson's friends remember him as larger than life, extraordinarily self-aware, and unabashedly assertive as a Black man.Footnote 13 Additionally, he habitually chose to defy social boundaries, crisscross the color line, and embrace an interracial cultural milieu throughout his life and work. He had no problem inserting himself into social circles of all races, socio-economic classes, and educational backgrounds, just as he had no problem inserting himself within the Classical tradition and one of its repositories: Western European art.

Thompson first studied the Classical tradition in art at the University of Louisville Hite Art Institute.Footnote 14 He also studied abstract expressionism, and further developed his work in an artistic community of figurative expressionists (such as Jan Müller) in Provincetown MA.Footnote 15 When he moved to New York City in the late 1950s, he exhibited in several galleries and moved among interracial circles of artists, jazz musicians, and members of the Beat community in New York's East Village.Footnote 16 He counted Ornette Coleman, Red Grooms, Amiri Baraka (at that time, LeRoi Jones), Charlie Haden, and A.B. Spellman among his friends. Thompson also married a white woman, Carol Plenda, in 1960.Footnote 17 From 1961 to 1963, Thompson and his wife went abroad on a Whitney Fellowship that he received. This gave him opportunity to develop his work through access to the museums, galleries, and artistic communities in London, Paris, and Ibiza (Spain). After a brief return to New York, in 1965 they went abroad again, but, tragically, in 1966, Thompson died in Rome from complications with a gall bladder surgery. Despite his truncated career, this young artist left behind almost a thousand brilliantly hued paintings that boldly mix cultures, social issues, Renaissance art, and his own private fancy into new creations. Given this background, then, The Death of Camilla emerges as a mixture of Thompson's creative signifying and antimodernist expression focalized through his perspectives on the glories and tragedies of interraciality in America.

Antimodernist Signifying and Interraciality

Thompson's wife Carol recounts: ‘Bob discovered the world in churches, museums, jazz clubs and paintings, particularly paintings of the Old Masters like Francisco de Goya, Nicolas Poussin, and Piero della Francesca.’Footnote 18 And, as Thompson scholars have continually asserted, his mode of signifyin(g) upon the Classics was never a merely integrationist endeavor.Footnote 19 Rather, James writes, Thompson played ‘a rather subtle and complex game, shuffling signs of Blackness and racial otherness together with those of canonical western art which he so often transcribes and adapts’.Footnote 20 Similarly to his peers Bearden and Colescott, Thompson also infused his reconfigurations with creative techniques from jazz: he never just copied, he ‘bent, twisted, extended, and remade’.Footnote 21 At the same time, by choosing to engage with the Classical tradition, Thompson rejected the rigid binary of a Eurocentric or Afrocentric model, but instead blended both in order to express his own inner world.Footnote 22

Yet, although his approach received warm reception in his time, Thompson was not without his anxieties about being a Black artist reworking the Classics in a white American art world during the late 1950s and early 1960s. The years between 1963 and 1965, during which Thompson created The Death of Camilla, marked significant milestones, tragic and otherwise, for the Civil Rights movement: the March on Washington, King's ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, the Birmingham bombing, ‘Freedom Summer’, the rise of Black nationalism, the murder of Malcolm X.Footnote 23 Amid these times of grave injustices, social unrest, and racial polarization, Thompson also found himself under pressure for his interracial marriage.Footnote 24 But Golden suggests that it was precisely during these years, however, that Thompson developed both his ‘narrative sensibility’ and his depictions of the ‘psychosexual drama’ of interracial relationships.Footnote 25 It is within this very context, moreover, that Thompson's The Death of Camilla emerges as a work of distinctly ‘antimodernist’ signification.

In his book Mercy Mercy Me: African-American Culture and the American Sixties, Hall describes ‘antimodernism’ as a postwar ‘dis-ease or disappointment with American culture and the resources, both material and spiritual’ experienced by many Black artists and intellectuals after World War II and into the early 1960s.Footnote 26 As a result of this disillusionment, many African Americans chose to confront the cultural contradictions of the color line by engaging with broader cultural traditions (often through visits or extended stays in Europe),Footnote 27 and by foregrounding the ‘frailty of life’, the inescapable reality of death, and ‘the despairing clarity of race hatred’ in their creative work.Footnote 28 Thompson's life and work also manifest these qualities and approach. In his paintings during these times, Thompson often reveals a preoccupation with vulnerability and death.Footnote 29 This emerges with particular clarity in The Death of Camilla. All the while, Thompson continued to use and reconfigure Old World art as a way of exposing the racial toxicity of the New (and its corresponding physical, psychological, and interpersonal destructiveness).Footnote 30

Thompson's ‘antimodernist’ sentiment is also expressed through his consistent rejection of rigid racialized binaries and his disruptive yet also exultant depictions of interraciality. Based on Stephens’ On Racial Frontiers, I understand ‘interraciality’ as the cultural dynamic of persistent relations (sexual or otherwise) between people of different ethnic groups.Footnote 31 According to Stephens, ‘our very conceptions of “race”…grew out of…the repression of interraciality, in order to construct racial privilege’.Footnote 32 While Thompson may not have articulated this himself, he lived and understood himself as an artist within a broad, generative and ‘mixed’ social and cultural context, a context which comes out consistently in his work. Also, as part of a trend of the late 1950s and early 1960s, as explained by Feimster, Thompson and other African Americans ‘were articulating a new Black sense of self that linked interracial sex with racial equality and Black freedom’.Footnote 33 Thompson himself is distinctly known for the interracial couples he paints cavorting across his canvases or in painfully conflicted erotic postures, such as in The Death of Camilla.Footnote 34 In this way, Thompson, like Stephens, offers a critique of race through an acknowledgement and re-evaluation of the persistent practice of interraciality in the United States and long-standing interracial networks in which Americans have, historically, been enmeshed.Footnote 35 As such and against the backdrop of his life and work, Thompson's The Death of Camilla emerges as a tragic and yet unexpectedly exultant critique of interracial relations—all focalized through his complex, antimodernist signification upon the Aeneid of Vergil and a seventeenth-century drawing by Poussin.

2. infelix Camilla and the Infelicities of Nation Building: Thompson and Vergil

The narrative force of Thompson's The Death of Camilla comes from his riffs on the lesser-known yet tragic story of Vergil's Camilla. This myth forms part of Vergil's Aeneid, an epic which Barnard has termed ‘the foremost epic of nation building in the Western tradition’,Footnote 36 and whose legacy has left an indelible mark on the construction of national identity in the United States.Footnote 37 It is uncertain whether or not Thompson actually read Vergil, although he was an avid reader of world literature as well as European art history throughout his life.Footnote 38 Uniquely, however, at Aeneid 7.803–17 and 11.410–915, Vergil presents Camilla as an inside critique of the imperialist project that he narrates. A renowned native female warrioress, Camilla dies defending her country against the invading Trojans and their local allies. As I argue in this section, Bob Thompson capitalizes on the tragic and subversive dynamics at the heart of Camilla's story and reworks certain aspects of her tradition into a critique of the myth of racial progress in postwar America.

Nature and Innocence Ravaged

In the first place, Thompson retains of much of Vergil's imagery for this heroine but focalizes his painting around the tragic moments of her death. Vergil's Aeneid builds up to Camilla's death with detailed descriptions that outline her significance as a child of nature, a slightly monstrous and yet accepted warrioress, and a female embodiment of pre-colonized Italy. Queen of the female-only Volscian tribe, Camilla is introduced by Vergil in Aeneid 7 as a child of nature, huntress, and an awe-inspiring warrior. She first appears at the end of a catalogue of the Italian host who are arrayed to fight against the forces of Aeneas.Footnote 39

hos super aduenit Volsca de gente Camilla
agmen agens equitum et florentis aere cateruas,
bellatrix
(7.803–5)
Above these comes Camilla, of the Volscian race,
leading a cavalry battleline and troops flowering with bronze
—a warrior maidenFootnote 40

Although an Amazon figure (and therefore, traditionally considered monstrous), Vergil celebrates Camilla as full of potential, skill, and nobility (805–11).Footnote 41 Her own people follow after her with awe (812–14). At Aeneid 11.508, her Rutulian ally Turnus praises her as decus Italiae uirgo (‘the maiden pride of Italy’). In these ways, Vergil depicts Camilla as a true Italian and a symbol of the original glory and unity of the indigenous Italian tribes.Footnote 42

Vergil also connects Camilla, as a pastoral huntress, with all that is lovely and pure in nature, a tragic symbol, as it were, of pre-colonized Italy.Footnote 43 At Aeneid 11.535–94, the goddess Diana describes how Camilla was raised with her exiled father, pastorum et solis…montibus (‘among the shepherds and on lonely mountains’, 569), and nourished equae mammis et lacte ferino (‘with wild animal milk and at the breast of a mare’, 571). As a child, she wore the skin of a tiger (576f.) and hunted birds and other animals in the woods with her spear (573–80). At the time of battle, then, accompanied by fellow ‘daughters of Italy’ (Italides, 657), Camilla takes up again the role of huntress. She is even described at one point as a falcon who overtakes her prey and destroys a dove in midflight (721–4). Yet, when new, foreign hunters invade, Camilla becomes their prey.Footnote 44 By thus situating Camilla within the context of nature, Vergil sets the scene for both personal and communal tragedy. She also becomes a symbol of indigenous Italy itself, unable to resist the destructive thrust of Trojan nation building.

In his visual depiction of the story, Thompson also situates Camilla firmly within nature and to similar effect. While basing the structure of his scene on a drawing by Poussin (see Figure 2 in section 3), Thompson omits the ruined buildings in his painting. Instead, he frames his composition on the left and from behind with large trees and a hedge. Additionally, his abstract figures are nude, stripped of the trappings of civilization. One holds a shield, but others, weaponless, run barefoot, ride horses, or hold aloft captive birds, as if involved in some sort of hunt. Thompson, as a painter, often privileged a naturalistic setting over those situated among built structures.Footnote 45 By setting this scene within nature, however, Thompson, like Vergil, increases the poignancy of Camilla's figure as a symbol of natural innocence about to die within a locus amoenus. Her death, therefore, becomes a brutal violation of the integrity of her body, of nature, and of peaceful relations between neighboring peoples.

Figure 2. Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), The Death of Camilla (?), c. 1622–23. Slight graphite underdrawing, pen and brown ink, grey wash, 18.5 x 32.4 cm (sheet of paper), RCIN 911936.

Perversions and Provocations of Civil Conflict

Thompson and Vergil also underscore the sexual dynamics of Camilla's tragic death. Vergil depicts her killing as a sexual perversity:

hasta sub exsertam donec perlata papillam
haesit uirgineumque alte bibit acta cruorem
(Aen. 11.803f.)
until the spear, brought home beneath her bared breast,
held fast and, driven deep, drank her virginal blood

Camilla grew up nursing from the breast of a horse (11.571); she came into battle with her own breast exposed (648f.); and she dies after being pierced there with a spear (803), a sort of perversion of both sexual penetration and of nursing motherhood.Footnote 46 And, at Aeneid 11.818f. and 827–31, Vergil's drawn-out descriptions eroticize the last moments of her death even more.Footnote 47 When an innocent huntress, child of nature, dies in civil conflict, her end takes on a twisted sexual dimension designed to arouse, horrify, and provoke reflection.

Thompson likewise compels his viewers to reflect on the psychosexual dynamics surrounding Camilla's death: dynamics experienced not only by Camilla, but by all involved. In the first place, he draws his male and female nudes with no distinguishing features except the hair on their heads (longer for the females, shorter for the males)Footnote 48 and the pubic hair of Camilla. In an additional and erotic shift, Thompson depicts Camilla's killer not as fleeing, but grasping Camilla's body in a posture similar to the traditional depiction of Achilles and Penthesilea.Footnote 49 Thompson's central red male figure gazes with a sort of helpless desire and despair upon the female warrior whom he (presumably) killed.Footnote 50 The crushed hopes and erotic fantasies of this warrior are, as it were, mirrored by the couple (also painted red and yellow) who flee, alive and free, in the background.Footnote 51 Yet, unlike Arruns’ phallic spear thrust, the sexual passion of this figure (further symbolized through the horse imagery present with both couples)Footnote 52 remains frustrated, and his posture reveals an aching vulnerability.

From within Thompson's symbolic world, the sexual and monstrous aspects of this dark male figure take on additional significance and add to the story a specifically racial critique. In his artwork, Thompson frequently used monsters to represent (and at the same time, criticize) American stereotypes about Black men in relationships with white women. Thus throughout his many depictions of interracial couples Thompson frequently depicted the darker males as monsters in order to expose and, ultimately, dismantle, in the words of Feimster, the ‘twin fiction of the “Black rapist” and the asexual white woman in need of protection’.Footnote 53 In an interview, Thompson himself explained: ‘I did these monster compositions…it had a sort of sexual orientation… The monster was always very much a monster and yet I wanted to make him gentle’.Footnote 54 In The Death of Camilla, Thompson transfers any of Camilla's Amazonian monstrosity to her male opponents; at the same time, two of these monsters must pause from the fight in order to grieve. In Vergil, Camilla's sexualized death is infelix (‘unlucky’, 11.562), undesired, and tragic for her and for her companions,Footnote 55 but, in Thompson, Camilla's death takes place without full consent of either party and to the effect of their mutual devastation—male and female, Black and white.Footnote 56 Ultimately it was another hand that forced them towards destruction.

Thompson's painting as a whole, moreover, leaves one with an impression of unending chaos and futility. Camilla has died, her killer mourns, and the battle continues without promise of relief. Similarly, in Vergil, Camilla's death does not end the conflict; if anything, it only exacerbates it. After Camilla draws her last breath, her female companions mourn (11.805f.), but the chaos increases for all:

tum uero immensus surgens ferit aurea clamor
sidera: deiecta crudescit pugna Camilla;
incurrunt densi simul omnis copia Teucrum
Tyrrhenique duces Euandrique Arcades alae.
(Aen. 11. 832–5)
Then indeed a huge roar arose, touching the golden
stars; with Camilla killed, the fight grows worse;
they rush in, all crowded together, the Teucrian forces,
the Tyrrennian chiefs, and Evander's Arcadian horsemen.

crudescit, the central word of line 833, indicates an intensification of raw violence. As the fight continues, the Trojans and their Italian allies push back the defending Italian troops even to the doorsteps of their homes (881) such that even the mothers join in the fray (891–5).Footnote 57 The battle rises to such a peak of frenzy as to produce the ‘most miserable slaughter’ imaginable (miserrima caedes, 885): unwitting destruction of one's own.Footnote 58 This battle had always been fierce, bloody, and destructive, but here it becomes desperate, perverted, and almost apocalyptic as the ferocity of civil war destroys Italy from within.Footnote 59 When Thompson thus co-opts Vergil's story of Camilla into his own work, he also forces his viewers to confront the mutual, continuous, and perverse devastation created by the American imperial project, a project so often predicated on racial polarization and violence.

Through Aeneas’ conquests and colonization, a new Roman world emerges, yet at the cost of civil war, tragedy, and the death of Camilla. A child of nature, Vergil's Camilla is cruelly and perversely cut down by those who are laying the foundation—a forced and destructive e pluribus unum—for Roman civilization. Thompson pitches the sentiments of this Roman foundation myth against the myth of racial progress and the creation of national identity in postwar America. Postwar nation building in the United States likewise involved a certain imperial optimism predicated on race-making and enforcement of the color line (aka, civil war between the neighbors). While reworking Vergil's anti-imperialist story, Thompson gives full expression to his antimodernist sentiments. And, through key shifts to the Aeneid, he highlights the inner tension and outer hostility (aka, ‘a psychology of disintegration’)Footnote 60 experienced by interracial couples caught up in the racial politics and polarization of his time. In these ways, Thompson also expands the symbolic trajectory of Vergil's myth. He re-presents Camilla as the collateral damage not only of colonization, but of the sort of nation building that necessitates the mobilization of a country's people (in his case, white and Black Americans) against themselves.

3. Disruption and Metacritique: Thompson Reworks Poussin

Thompson's reworking of Vergil, however, is only half the story. Thompson also signifies upon a battle scene drawing by Nicolas Poussin. This additional layer of reception positions The Death of Camilla as not only an antimodernist statement about race, but also a playful critique of a European master artist and the Classical tradition itself. In this section of the paper, I demonstrate how, in The Death of Camilla, Thompson significantly disrupts the content and meaning of Poussin's original to resituate it within his version of the Camilla myth. Even more, with riotous color and tragicomic birds, Thompson draws Poussin's battle into his own artistic arena, revels in interraciality, and irreverently mocks the very tradition that he re-presents.

Battle Scene: Admiration and Alteration

As with so many masters of Western European art, Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) pulled Thompson into dialogue, into a competitive game of signifying. Thompson once expressed in an interview:

I look at Poussin and he's got it all there. Why are all of these people running around trying to be original when they should just go ahead and be themselves and that's the originality of it all, just being yourself. Now you can't do anything. You can't draw a new form. The form has already been drawn. You see? …that total human figure almost encompasses every form there is. You know? …it hit me that why don't I work with these things that are already there…because that is what I respond to most of all…Footnote 61

As a result of this appreciation, Thompson reworked many of Poussin's drawings and paintings throughout his career and especially during the last two years of his life.Footnote 62 But, as Tuite observes: ‘Rather than looking at the output of his forebears, Thompson seems to position himself within it.’Footnote 63 This is precisely how Thompson seems to approach and reconfigure Poussin's The Death of Camilla drawing, the pictorial antecedent for his new creation.Footnote 64 Poussin's drawing (Figure 2) is one of a series of four military scenes depicting early Roman myth and history and created for an early patron, Marino, sometime between 1620 and 1623.Footnote 65 This particular piece depicts a battle between men in more formal battle attire, with helmet, cuirass, shields, swords (presumably, Romans or Trojans), and men without armor or shields but clad in tunics and trousers (presumably, indigenous Italian peoples).Footnote 66

Amid the chaos, two central figures are caught in a moment of pathos and grief, but, from their attire, they seem to be comrades in arms. The two background figures are also armed and helmeted Romans, fleeing the scene on horseback, perhaps in desertion, or perhaps to report the outcome of the skirmish, which seems to be a defeat. By contrast with Thompson and Vergil, moreover, the dying figure does not seem to be female; nor are there any clearly female warriors in the rest of the image.Footnote 67 Despite these discrepancies, however, the image was originally entitled The Death of Camilla by Poussin's posthumous cataloguer, Marinella, who cited several passages from Vergil to justify his attribution.Footnote 68 This title also remained with Poussin's drawing for centuries, so it is likely that Thompson encountered it described as such while visiting museums in London in 1961 or in an art book.Footnote 69

In reworking Poussin's battle scene, Thompson preserves the basic structure and intensity of the original, but ensconces the conflict within his own version of the Camilla story with an interracial twist.Footnote 70 In Poussin, a central, bearded, male warrior holds his fallen male companion and looks to the sky in a gesture and facial expression of grief, pain, unbelief, and even blame.Footnote 71 There may be some erotic suggestions between the central soldier and his youthful dead comrade, but nothing compared with the psychosexual angst of Thompson's monster-man clutching the naked body of his presumed opponent, Camilla. For the most part, also, Thompson replaces Poussin's soldiers with monster figures and the tribal peoples with female warriors.Footnote 72 Significantly, he does not seem to distinguish between the ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’ (or, armed and less armed) in his painting: all are faceless nudes, without any distinguishing apparel. All seem native to the land, caught up in a civil war between Rutulians, Latins, Volscians, male and female, Black and white Americans. As with Vergil so also with Poussin, then, Thompson channels the grief, anger, and conflict of the original towards a critique of the interracial strife of the twentieth-century color line and its devastating psychosocial effects.

Colors and Symbols of Thompson's Critique

Not all is tragedy in Thompson's painting, however. Thompson also hurtles viewers from the grey wash of Poussin into a tumultuous and delightful array of colors emblematic of Thompson's perspective on interraciality in America.Footnote 73 Most of Thompson's males are a reddish brown, whereas the females are either yellow, pink, or some other color. Based on other works done in 1964, it is very likely that at least the central figures (and the two in the background) represent interracial couples.Footnote 74 On the other hand, while the contrast between dark males and lighter-colored females in the painting may be a function of Classical influence, even this pattern does not completely hold up. The prone female in the left foreground and the other in the right foreground, for example, are charcoal and green colored respectively.Footnote 75 Indeed, deliberately ambiguous coloration seems to be a part of Thompson's artistic program. Sims writes that Thompson ‘exploded habitual obsessions about skin color by violating the naturalistic associations of color with pigmentation and suggestively de-privileging the component of color as it is associated with race’.Footnote 76 In these ways, Thompson does not merely use color in The Death of Camilla to foreground the complexities of Black–white sexual relations, but also to highlight the tensions and glories of interracial culture more generally speaking.

Thompson's coloration may also function as a critique of the purist tendencies within the Classical tradition and the Western canon. As Tuite suggests, Thompson habitually ‘reimagines, recasts, and revalues historical European painting’s representational codes, throwing into relief its conventions and thoroughly denaturing them’.Footnote 77 One of the main ways that Thompson does this, I suggest, is by recoloring his pictorial precedents. Sims, for example, suggests that Thompson's colors convey his ‘expressionist irreverence’ for the ‘staid orderly precepts of Renaissance and baroque narratives’.Footnote 78 Poussin's nearly monochrome drawing deeply embodies the Classical tradition, given that he himself used as models the supposedly ‘white’ bas-reliefs found on Roman triumphal columns and other monuments to Classical imperialism.Footnote 79 Through retelling Vergil's story and imbuing Poussin with color, then, Thompson subverts both the New World color line and the rigid imperialism of the Classical tradition and Old World art.

Thompson further mocks the often-impervious dominance of the Classical tradition by disrupting the solemnity of Poussin's scene with his own private symbolism. He removes Poussin's weapons and battle standards and replaces them with strangely comic red and blue chickens. Thompson's chicken-birds in general are probably some of the most discussed and disagreed-upon symbols within his repertoire. Do they represent frustration, freedom, a playful flight of fancy, or a mixture of all three? Perhaps they symbolize the psychological frustration experienced by interracial couples locked in a combat imposed by an imperial narrative that demands the repression of interraciality for the sake of progress.Footnote 80 Golden describes Thompson's birds in The Death of Camilla as ‘crazed, caught creatures…held aloft in the solemn procession, denied the freedom to fly’.Footnote 81 Yet, in an interview with Siegel, Thompson precisely linked his bird imagery with freedom.Footnote 82 Perhaps, then, instead, these fanciful flying creatures reframe Poussin's battle and Vergil's myth as potentially hopeful, as opportunities for Black agency through artistic expression. With these symbols, Thompson denudes the interracial combatants of their weaponry. In this way, he effectively eviscerates the violence upon which this civil conflict, the death of Camilla, and the entire imperial project depends. At the same time, by inserting comical chickens within a work of an ‘old Master’, Thompson seems to deride and undermine the often-impenetrable, elitist façade of the Classical tradition and one of its main repositories, Western European art.

In sum, while maintaining the basic compositional structure of Poussin's battle scene, Thompson changes its color, texture, and meaning for his own purposes. Thompson expresses a much clearer link between his work and Vergil's story of Camilla. Further, by changing the relationship between the two central figures, by splashing the drawing with color, and by replacing Poussin's weapons with harmless and humorous birds, he disrupts and redirects this tragic battle towards a playful critique of the American color line, the futile conflict it engenders, and the exclusivist Classical tradition with which it is often entwined.

4. Conclusion

From an accident of poor cataloguing, Poussin's seventeenth-century pen and ink drawing received the title The Death of Camilla, and, about three hundred years later, Black American artist Bob Thompson encounters and reconfigures this image under the same title. Thompson, however, while maintaining the basic structure and composition of Poussin's battle scene, aligns his work more closely with the story of Camilla from Vergil's Aeneid, a story of tragedy and loss amid a violent and unnecessary conflict between indigenous peoples provoked by the colonizing thrust of the founders of Rome. Thompson, as has been seen, runs with this anti-imperialist story to critique the empty myth of racial progress propagated in postwar America. Like Vergil, Thompson presents Camilla as a figure of innocence, nature, and original unity who becomes an appallingly victim of imperialist nation building, past and present. Thompson maintains these qualities of her depiction, but, with a provocative twist, focalizes her story through the image of a grieving, dark monster figure supporting the limp body of a light-skinned woman in the midst of battle that rages with no end in sight. Through this depiction, Thompson highlights the psychosocial devastation of this conflict as experienced by victims and aggressors alike, in this case, interracial couples. While he depicts a tragedy, at the same time he questions its necessity. Thompson thus channels Vergil's Camilla story into an antimodernist critique of the interracial conflict provoked by the American color line in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Furthermore, through insertion of ambiguous coloration and abstract figurative symbols within a battle scene of Nicolas Poussin, Thompson both directs the viewers gaze towards the agonies and ecstasy of interracial culture and exposes the devastation that results from hegemonic, exclusivist, and polarizing ideologies that suppress it—whether in the Classical tradition or in the project of nation building within the United States.

At the same time, Thompson's The Death of Camilla expresses a liberatory way of being for Black American artists. Through this painting, Thompson unabashedly positions himself within a Classical tradition articulated by Vergil and continued (to a certain extent) by Poussin. He embraces this story and the vexed cultural, textual, and artistic canon in which it is ensconced. In so doing, however, Thompson the antimodernist brings the Old World to bear on the cultural contradictions of the New. He offers, through his art, new critical symbols with which to make sense of and perhaps even transcend the tragedy of the present, the Classical tradition, and where they intersect. With riffing and ridicule, Bob Thompson points a way forward: through creating art, playfully reconfiguring even the most elitist cultural traditions, and exulting in his freedom and ability to ‘mix’.

Footnotes

I would like to thank Harriet Fertik, Mathias Hanses, Diana Tuite, Abigale Bernard, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions and enthusiasm for this project, as well as the editors at Ramus for their careful reading and support.

1. Within the context of this paper, I use the terms ‘Black American’ and ‘African American’ interchangeably when referring to Americans who trace their ancestors to Africans forcibly brought to the United States via the transatlantic slave trade.

2. It is worth noting that a slightly larger, nearly identical version of the painting exists, although this article limits examination to the one purchased by the Detroit Institute of Art in 1983. Thompson did many near doubles of his own work, and often gave them to friends. The other The Death of Camilla (1964) is at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC, 66.4925, Gift of Joseph Hirshhorn, 1966. As the paintings are nearly identical, the argument of this article could apply to both.

3. The word is taken from Wilson (Reference Wilson2007). A 2021–22 exhibition through Colby College, Bob Thompson: This House is Mine, and its corresponding catalogue edited by Diana Tuite (Reference Tuite2021), has recently brought greater attention to his work.

4. Wilson (Reference Wilson1988), 61; see also Feimster (Reference Feimster2021), 115.

5. Golden (Reference Golden1998), 22, makes only a brief reference to this painting. Wilson (Reference Wilson1995), Crouch (Reference Crouch2006), Stumbo (Reference Stumbo2013), and Tuite (Reference Tuite2021) make no reference to this painting at all.

6. Richard (Reference Richard1999), 58, writes: ‘To signify means to make meaning; in the African-American vernacular it means to make meaning in a particular way, to lay claim to the present through a conscious appropriation of the past constructed through revision, repetition, critique, and homage.’ The terms ‘signification’ and ‘signifyin(g) upon’ have been theorized at length by Gates (Reference Gates1988), 89–124, who expands upon Smitherman's (Reference Smitherman1986), 118, definition of ‘signifyin(g)’ as a complex ‘mode of discourse’ often utilized by Black people in the creative process. Through the process of signification, Black writers, and, by extension, artists, hone their craft, improve on the past, and simultaneously activate their creative agency by reworking aspects of a cultural heritage which is their own, but with which they cannot fully identify.

7. Barnard (Reference Barnard2017).

8. In the field of Classics, ‘reception’, or, more specifically, ‘Classical reception’, refers to the way in which a person or group of people in later periods (from late antiquity to modernity) have received, used, and/or repurposed aspects of the ancient Mediterranean world.

9. See, for example, Rankine (Reference Rankine2006) on Ellison, McConnell (Reference McConnell2013) on receptions of Homer's Odyssey, and Fertik and Hanses (Reference Fertik and Hanses2019) on Du Bois, and general overviews by Greenwood (Reference Greenwood2009) and Rankine (Reference Rankine2019).

10. Moyer, Lecznar, and Morse (Reference Morse2020), 21, argue: ‘Visual classicisms have the capacity to confront (or reinforce) hegemonic cultural and geographic spaces head-on in a manner that is perceptive and accessible to a wide audience’.

11. O'Meally (Reference O'Meally2007), Barnard (Reference Barnard2017), 169–86, and Morse (Reference Morse2020), 133–62.

12. Barnard (Reference Barnard2017), 8.

13. In Wilson and Hamalian (Reference Wilson and Hamalian1985), 114, his friend Emilio Cruz states that Thompson was ‘perhaps the only black man I ever met who was totally intolerant of the notion of inferiority’. See also, Wilson and Hamalian (Reference Wilson and Hamalian1985), 119, quoting Mimi Gross, Coker (Reference Coker1985), 20, and Wilson (Reference Wilson1995), 260.

14. Thompson kept two notebooks from college, both from classes on the art history of Greece and Rome, and Medieval and Renaissance Europe.

15. On his studies and Provincetown days, see Wilson (Reference Wilson1998), 31–43.

16. Coker (Reference Coker1978), 12, writes: ‘He was outrageous, not that his life-style was any different from other artists of the day, he was outrageous because he was a Black man who did not wait to be invited into the cultural circle of the world, he just went in.’ On the artistic environment of the East Village during that time, see Wilson (Reference Wilson2007), 58. On interracial couples in the East Village during the early 1960s, see Saul (Reference Saul2003), 77.

17. On their relationship and Carol's frequent modeling for his work, see notes from Anne Tabachnick in Wilson and Hamalian (Reference Wilson and Hamalian1985), 139. On their marriage and its possible connections with Thompson's paintings of interracial couples, see Crouch (Reference Crouch2006), 12.

18. Thompson (Reference Thompson and Gallery1999), 3. See also King (Reference King, Lock and Murray2009), 142f.

19. Siegel (Reference Siegel1967), 12, observes that the reworking of one's artistic predecessors was commonplace practice among many artists before Thompson. Coker (Reference Coker1978), 17, emphasizes Thompson's purposeful and utilitarian approach in ‘copying’ other artists. See also Tuite (Reference Tuite2021), 30–50, and Childs (Reference Childs2021), 58–68. For direct refutations of Thompson's supposed integrationist passivity, see Wilson (Reference Wilson1995), 16–23, and Jacques (Reference Jacques1999), 26f.

20. James (Reference James1999), 60.

21. Crouch (Reference Crouch2006), 14; see also Siegel (Reference Siegel1967), 12–14, Coker (Reference Coker1985), 19f., Golden (Reference Golden1998), 23f., King (Reference King, Lock and Murray2009), 137–9, and Stumbo (Reference Stumbo2013), 39, 97. For artistic parallelism between Thompson and Bearden, see Powell (Reference Powell, Appiah and Gates1999), 131f.; between Thompson and Colescott, see Childs (Reference Childs2021), 64f., and, particularly, Sims (Reference Sims2021), 136–42.

22. In these ways, Thompson's work provides an enticing response to the call from Moyer, Lecznar, and Morse (Reference Moyer, Lecznar and Morse2020), 11, to ‘consider classicism not simply as an object through which the Manichean polarities of European or African, white or black, colonizer or colonized are negotiated and understood, but instead to think about its deployment by individual figures with a view to expressing constructively their own futures and hopes rather than always as a source of antagonism with immovable and divided inheritances’.

23. The 1960s also marked important years for the independence of many different countries in Africa as well, a fact which Thompson duly noted with his painting North African Dream (1963).

24. Many intellectuals during this time decided to leave their white wives (e.g., LeRoi Jones and others). Thompson once vented his frustration about racial polarization at the time to his friend Jay Milder, saying: ‘Jay, I'm supposed to hate white people now’, quoted in Wilson and Hamalian (Reference Wilson and Hamalian1985), 131.

25. Golden (Reference Golden1998), 20.

26. Hall (Reference Hall2001), 16. See also King (Reference King, Lock and Murray2009), 144.

27. Hall (Reference Hall2001), 12.

28. Hall (Reference Hall2001), 27, 25.

29. During these years, Thompson painted many other depictions of limp bodies such as Christ (1961), Descent from the Cross (1963), and The Entombment (1964), each of which depicts a central, dead figure in yellow. On these paintings and their significance, see Golden (Reference Golden, Wilson and Momim1998), 20, and Stumbo (Reference Stumbo2013), 24–30.

30. One example is L'execution (1961), which, while it depicts the lynching of a Black man, is modelled after a Fra Angelico painting.

31. See Stephens (Reference Stephens1999), 3f. While interraciality is not limited to any particular ethnicity, in this paper, I localize the issue in the United States as between ‘Black’ peoples who trace their ancestry to Africa (and the transatlantic slave trade) and peoples—of predominantly European descent—who identify as ‘white’.

32. Stephens (Reference Stephens1999), 1f.

33. Feimster (Reference Feimster2021), 115.

34. See Wilson (Reference Wilson1991), 99f., on Thompson's images of ‘miscegenation’.

35. See Stephens (Reference Stephens1999), 5.

36. Barnard (Reference Barnard2017), 21.

37. On this, see Barnard (Reference Barnard2017), 16. For more on the topic, see Richard (Reference Richard1995) and Shields (Reference Shields2001).

38. See Wilson (Reference Wilson1998), 35.

39. According to Basson (Reference Basson1975), 131, in the tradition of epic catalogues, the last place is often considered a place of honor and emphasis. Vergil's insertion of Camilla at the end of this catalogue signals her importance to the war between the local peoples and Aeneas, and specifically, to the larger implications of this war.

40. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated; the Latin is that of Fairclough and Goold (Reference Fairclough and Goold2000).

41. See also Basson (Reference Basson1986), 65.

42. Wimperis (Reference Wimperis2020), 165–7 and 172–4, suggests that she is part of Vergil's creation of a fictive ‘national solidarity’ throughout the poem. See also Ramsby (Reference Ramsby2010), 16.

43. Theodorakopoulos (Reference Theodorakopoulos2019), 231, suggests that Camilla evokes the ‘pastoral innocence of Italy’.

44. Camilla also dies at a moment when, as Hardie (Reference Hardie2019), 336, describes, she ‘confuses the boundaries between hunting and war, the pastoral wilderness and the warfare of an urban civilization’. See specifically Aen. 11.778–82. Her opponents are also described as birds of prey, particularly Tarchon (11.751–8) who leads the attack and Arruns (11.759–61, 766f.) who delivers the death blow.

45. On Thompson's propensity towards natural landscapes and the ambiguities of these settings given experiences and expressions such as ‘put outside’ in African American culture, see Johnson (Reference Johnson2021), 127f.

46. According to De Boer (Reference De Boer2019), 147–9, these lines suggest that Camilla's ‘transgression of sexual norms’ and her ‘failed maternity’ are only rectified, as it were, by her death. For more on this imagery, see Heuzé (Reference Heuzé1985), 172–7, and Reed (Reference Reed2007), 19f.

47. For a description of the eroticism in this scene, see Lovatt (Reference Lovatt2013), 304f.

48. This is common throughout Thompson's artwork. Although at times the gender of his abstract figures may be ambiguous, he almost exclusively depicts heterosexual couples demarcated as male or female based on these conventions: head hair and genitalia.

49. While Vergil does link Camilla with Penthesilea at Aen. 11.661–3 (also, compare 1.490–3), Camilla does not express any heterosexual love interest or erotic connection with her killer in the Aeneid. On other types of connections between Camilla and Penthesilea, see Fratantuono (Reference Fratantuono2009), 165.

50. Wilson (Reference Wilson1991), 99, writes that ‘a key trait of Thompson's oeuvre is its frequent use of imagery that, in its frank display of a violent, conflict-laden, or indecorous eroticism, is deeply disturbing’. Also Coker (Reference Coker1985), 20f.

51. Thompson may be suggesting a connection between these couples and the isolated tree in the right background whose reddish trunk penetrates an inert yellow mound. On Thompson's tendency to align human figures with trees, see his own words, cited in Siegel (Reference Siegel1967), 11, and also Wilson (Reference Wilson1988), 58.

52. On equine imagery and its connection with sexual passion in Thompson's paintings, see Wilson (Reference Wilson1995), 195–201, and (Reference Wilson1998), 58f.

53. Feimster (Reference Feimster2021), 116. For more on the vulnerability of Thompson's supposed aggressors and the ‘highly charged psycho-social dynamics of interracial sex in the late 1950s’, see Wilson (Reference Wilson1995), 201.

54. From a 1965 interview, quoted in Siegel (Reference Siegel1966), 73. While the ‘it’ most likely refers to the monster, usually the entire composition has clear sexual connotations as well.

55. Fratantuono (Reference Fratantuono2007), 347, points out that Camilla is particularly unlucky because she became a hunter and a warrior unintentionally, because she knew nothing more than what her father taught her growing up; and she grew up, exiled from her father's original people, in the woods. At Aen. 11.841–9, also, Opis laments the unfortunate shortness of Camilla's life and the comparative futility of avenging her.

56. Even in Vergil, Camilla's killer suffers as a result of her death, since the goddess Opis, an associate of Camilla's patron Diana, avenges her by striking Arruns down with her arrow (11.863f.); on the other hand, unlike Thompson's figure, Arruns does not experience any personal (much less eroticized) regret for his action. His emotional response is limited to ‘terror’ and ‘confusion’ (exterritus, 806; turbidus, 814).

57. For earlier descriptions of battle which focus less on the additional perversions of home and family that result from battle and more on mass bloodshed and carnage, see Aen. 11.633–5. Vergil would have been particularly sensitive to the destructive and futile nature of civil war because the battles which ended the Roman Republic were still in recent memory while he was writing the Aeneid.

58. For this interpretation of the phrase, see Basson (Reference Basson1986), 64.

59. On Camilla's battle with the Trojans as a civil war, see Pyy (Reference Pyy2010), 194f. See also Ramsby (Reference Ramsby2010), 17.

60. The phrase is from Hall (Reference Hall2001), within the context of his discussions on ‘antimodernism’.

61. Quoted in Siegel (Reference Siegel1967), 12. Thompson was also likely attracted to what Blunt (Reference Blunt1967), 45, describes as Poussin's ‘psychological’ approach to depicting mythological or historical scenes, a unique ability to capture the essence of a story within a clear ‘unity of time’, and a propensity for painting with a ‘sense of drama’. For more on Thompson's preference for Poussin, see James (Reference James1999), 61.

62. On the chronology of his interest in Poussin, see Tuite (Reference Tuite2021), 44. Arguably Thompson's most famous reworking of Poussin is his painting, Homage to Nina Simone (1965), in which he signifies upon Poussin's Bacchanal with the Guitar Player or The Great Bacchanal (1625–28). On this reception see Wilson (Reference Wilson1998), 68f., and King (Reference King, Lock and Murray2009), 140.

63. Tuite (Reference Tuite2021), 33; emphasis in the original. Using stronger language, Childs (Reference Childs2021), 65, argues that Thompson was part of a ‘systematic invasion of art history’ that happened even more ‘among African American artists in the 1980s and 1990s’. On Thompson's work as a reverse colonization see Stumbo (Reference Stumbo2013), 34–8.

64. This source for Thompson's painting has not been previously identified in print. Golden (Reference Golden1998), 22, one of Thompson's main biographers, states that the ‘pictorial source [of this painting] is unknown’. Judith Wilson first identified Poussin's drawing as the pictorial antecedent, but in an unpublished email to Mary Ann Wilkinson at the Detroit Institute of Art (dated December 6, 1999, 1:43am).

65. The approximate dates for these Battle Scenes are taken from Blunt (Reference Blunt1945), 32.

66. The identification of these various groups based on their attire is taken from Costello (Reference Costello1955), 303, 305.

67. Mérot (Reference Mérot, Rosenberg and Christiansen2008), 54, entitles it The Death of Camillus; whether intentional or not, the mistake is telling.

68. See Blunt (Reference Blunt1976), 16f., 27, for Marinella's original catalogue entry, and the potentially erroneous titles assigned to the three other battle scenes as well: Battle of the Romans and Sabines (RCIN 911943), Battle of the Tribes of Latium against the Romans (RCIN 911944), Battle of the Rutuli against the Sabines (RCIN 911942). Blunt (Reference Blunt1976), 17, records that Marinella even describes the figures fleeing in the background as Acca and another soldier riding off to tell the news to Turnus, but there is no clear evidence that either character is female. For possible reasons for Marinella's misnaming, see Friedlaender (Reference Friedlaender1929), 256, and Costello (Reference Costello1955), 300–3. For a complete argument against the association with Vergil's Camilla, see Costello (Reference Costello1955), 302–6.

69. The texts of Friedlaender (Reference Friedlaender1929), 257, Blunt (Reference Blunt1945), 34, Oberhuber (Reference Oberhuber1988), 49, and Mérot (Reference Mérot, Rosenberg and Christiansen2008), 54, for example, all refer to the drawing as The Death of Camilla. Blunt (Reference Blunt1967), 46f., names this painting (along with the three others), Battle Scene, but also marks this painting with the questionable alternative title.

70. Thompson's central figures reflect both ancient Greek vase paintings and later art such as The Death of Penthesilea painted by Tischbein (1751–1829). This posture is, at times, replicated in depictions of Camilla as well, such as in The Death of Camilla by Michele Desubleo (1603–1676), but it is much more common to depict Camilla (when she is depicted at all) amid the chaos and slaughter of battle or accompanied by her grieving female companions at the moments of her death. For the former, see Battle of Camilla and Aeneas (c. 1450) by Domenico di Michelino and Camilla at War (1708–10) by Giacomo del Po; for the latter, see The Death of Camilla by Antonio Tempesta (1555–1630). One Renaissance painting that combines both chaotic and erotic elements is the marriage chest painting, Death of Camilla and the Wedding of Aeneas and Lavinia (c. 1460) by Apollonio di Giovanni.

71. As cited in Blunt (Reference Blunt1967), 16f., Marinella describes this soldier as follows: ‘a strong warrior—supporting the warlike virgin under the arms so that she does not fall from her horse—lifts his sad head and glares up to heaven, blaming it for its cruelty’ (‘forte Guerriere, sostenendo la bellicosa Vergine sotto la braccia, acciò non cada, dal Cavallo solleva la fronte mesta, e con torbido ciglio guarda il cielo incolpandolo di crudele’). This consternation is also reflected on the face of the other solider who grasps the reins of the horse.

72. The main exception to this exchange is with the reddish male in the right foreground, who replaces one of Poussin's tribal peoples.

73. According to Blunt (Reference Blunt1945), 34, Poussin did not intend his drawing to become a ‘colored’ painting.

74. For comparison, see the male and female figures in the two Venus and Adonis paintings, Adoration of the Magi (After Poussin), and Bird Bacchanal, all painted in 1964.

75. Wilson (Reference Wilson1995), 216, categorizes Thompson's basic color schemes for his human figures as objective color (where the figures have brown or pink skin), ideological color (where figures have color according to ‘race’: e.g., white people and black people), and subjective color (where figures have varieties of blue, orange, green coloring). In this painting, Thompson seems to mix both ideological and subjective coloration, but it is difficult to determine anything substantial from this observation.

76. Sims (Reference Sims2021), 141. Greenwood (Reference Greenwood2009), 98, notes that Bearden took a similar approach.

77. Tuite (Reference Tuite2021), 33.

78. Sims (Reference Sims2021), 138.

79. On Poussin's use of classical sculpture and Roman monuments, see Blunt (Reference Blunt1967), 49f., Oberhuber (Reference Oberhuber1988), 48, and Childs (Reference Childs2021), 62.

80. Sims (Reference Sims2021), 141, describes them as ‘poignant symbols for the frustrations of the Black experience’. Crouch (Reference Crouch2006), 7, writes: ‘In his work, those avian creatures symbolized conditions of the soul, and soul, finally, is what the world of Bob Thompson is all about.’ For further analysis of the bird symbolism in general and throughout other paintings, see Coker (Reference Coker1978), 20, and Stumbo (Reference Stumbo2013), 21–7, 43–8. According to Jacques (Reference Jacques1999), 26, Thompson's birds may also show the influence of Charlie Parker on his art—a well-known jazz musician nicknamed ‘Bird’ or ‘Yardbird’, who also gave bird titles to several of his compositions. For another connection between Parker and a painting by Thompson, see Tuite (Reference Tuite2021), 48 n.13.

81. Golden (Reference Golden1998), 22.

82. From 1965 interview with Siegel, cited in Siegel (Reference Siegel1967), 14.

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Figure 0

Figure 1. Bob Thompson (1937–1966), The Death of Camilla, 1964. Oil on canvas. Detroit Institute of Arts, Founders Society Purchase, Rollyn O. Krichbaum Memorial Fund, F1983.73. © Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY.

Figure 1

Figure 2. Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665),The Death of Camilla (?), c. 1622–23. Slight graphite underdrawing, pen and brown ink, grey wash, 18.5 x 32.4 cm (sheet of paper), RCIN 911936.