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

Abstract

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.