While several blocks of architectural debris at the lower left imply the destruction as well of a city or a building, the spacious landscape, with its blue sky, flowing brook, and lush foliage appears silent and undisturbed.

Thompson’s Bethel, in the spirit of Old Masters Titian and Nicolas Poussin, whom Thompson admired, evokes such classic subjects as a massacre of the innocents or the aftermath of a fierce battle, but the cause of the carnage is not specified. “Bethel” does not refer to an individual but rather to a city described in the Book of Genesis as “the house of God.” Perhaps the deaths here refer to an analogous violation of promising lives. In 1965, the year the work was created, Malcolm X was assassinated and riots devastated the Watts section of Los Angeles. While Thompson had been painting massacre scenes since 1960, these immediate tragic events may bear upon the meaning of this composition and its depiction of young lives lost. In Bethel, as in much of his art, Thompson fused classical subjects and modern themes, thereby reinvigorating formulaic conventions with contemporary relevance. (DAN)

Kentucky-born Bob Thompson studied art at the University of Louisville and Boston University before moving to New York in 1959. Between 1961 and 1966, he moved twice to Europe, where he avidly toured museums and painted. He died an untimely death in Rome, following complications from surgery and prolonged drug addiction. A prolific artist, Thompson produced approximately one thousand paintings and drawings in a career that lasted only six years.

Although Abstract Expressionism was the vanguard style of the 1950s, Thompson and others preferred the naturalistic mode and religious-mythic themes of traditional art. Revealing a variety of influences––from the Old Masters to Henri Matisse and contemporary figurative artists such as Red Grooms and Lester Johnson––the large-scale Death of the Infants of Bethel is characteristic of Thompson in its hot and brilliant palette, flattened shapes, and summary rendering of form. Yet, for all its vividness and its Edenic setting, Bethel is a tragic scene. The limp bodies of at least nine youths litter a roadway and the bank of a stream. These corpses are painted monochromatically in bright colors––orange, yellow, red, or blue––as if to contradict their lifelessness. In suppressing individuating details (except to distinguish gender), the artist allowed the figures’ poses to communicate the savagery just perpetrated.