Visionary Physics – Art & Antiques Magazine

Mildred Thompson: A visionary abstract painter who used String Theory to illuminate the human condition

By William Corwin

Mildred Thompson’s paintings “were the children of her age,” to paraphrase the famous opening line of Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1910): the nuclear age, the space age, as well as the civil rights era.  Born in 1936, Thompson grew up at a time when mechanization and scientific innovation achieved a level seemingly capable of anything.  Thompson’s mature paintings are large-scale fantastical diagrams of creative and destructive forces, seductive in their rich color and impossible concepts of space, subtly referencing imagery while engaging with the schools of Neo-Plasticism, Fauvism, and Die Brücke, among others. For the artist, science was a double-edged sword; in her mind, it both defined and narrated the extents of space and time, but simultaneously had the capacity to eradicate all life.  Her paintings described these conceptual structures and laws that she studied, a thought space largely off limits to women, lesbians, and even more so to African Americans.  Indeed, she trod a path in painting and sculpture that mirrored the trajectories of figures like mathematicians Katherine G. Johnson and Dorothy Vaughn, as well as engineer Mary W. Jackson, African American women who were pivotal figures in pushing technology from the theoretical into the real, in their vital roles at NASA.  Mildred Thompson resided in that artistic space between recording what was going on around her and approximating something beyond comprehension—the zone of the Visionary.

Thompson would title her mature series with the names of concepts that clearly aligned with fundamental concepts in physics, such as Magnetic Fields or Radiation Explorations; or cutting-edge theories, such as String Theory or Hysteresis; or poetical and historical, but archaic scientific sensibilities, possibly even astrological, such as Music of the Spheres.  In works such as Music of the Spheres: Mercury and Music of the Spheres: Mars, Thompson’s dialogue with Kandinsky is clear.  He was an artist with whom she felt a deep kinship.  In his seminal text mentioned above, he discusses one path of abstraction originating in a hybrid of abstract and figurative forms.  While Thompson shares certain aesthetic choices with the great Russian painter, such as color and application of paint, Thompson goes one step further than Kandinsky, employing theoretical diagrams and charts as a “figurative” basis for her canvasses.  In Mercury, the viewer seems to be positioned on one sphere, observing the chasm between a red planet and a distant blue one.  In between, chains of rough circles, dashes, and solid dots swim in a fluorescent green miasma.  Somewhere between astrological symbols and streams of particles, the painter hints at an unseen harmony that acts as a connective cosmic tissue.

Thompson was born in Jacksonville, Florida, and attended Howard University, where she studied with the artist and art historian James Amos Porter (1905–1970). Porter was a figurative painter and a foundational figure in the movement to codify and empower African American art, authoring Modern Negro Art in 1943.  While he was trained in Europe in traditional methods, looking at canonical Western works, Porter emphasized a rejection of overly picturesque approaches to imagery and stressed a focus on previously under-recognized African American painters.  Thompson’s own individualistic approach to her subject matter and her determination to eventually pursue her interests in abstraction would have found a nurturing environment at Howard with Porter.

String Theory 6, 1999, acrylic on vinyl, 72 x 50 in.
© The Mildred Thompson Estate, Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co.

In 1956 she received a scholarship to study at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, followed by a year at the Brooklyn Museum Art School.  In 1958, using savings from a summer gig teaching ceramics at Florida A&M University, Thompson sailed to Germany and arrived in Hamburg with a desire to study at the academy; however, she was without a place to live and an acceptance letter. Fortunately, she soon found both and studied at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg from 1958 to 1961 with the artists Walter Arno, Emil Schumacher, Willem Grimm, and Paul Wunderlich.

After studying in Hamburg, Thompson returned to the United States and settled in New York, where found the art market hostile to black women—despite the fact that she made important sales to the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) of the etchings Love for Sale and Girl with Dolls and Toys (both 1959). The two works display heavy influence from German Expressionism in both subject and rendering, along with, as art historian John J. Curley has pointed out, a reference to Hamburg’s famous red light district, the Reeperbahn, in her depiction of a prostitute.  She returned to Germany in 1963 and lived in semi-exile outside the town of Düren until 1975.  There she had access to several studios and increasingly pursued a path towards pure abstraction.  Thompson’s aesthetic trajectory followed the not unfamiliar path of many other artists from the late 1950s through the mid-1960s.  She transitions from a figuration in search of an authentic source—appropriating references to Beckmann and Grosz—to experiments in Abstract Expressionism.

During her sojourn in Düren, Thompson hit upon an almost puzzle-like accretive process that would inform the rest of her life’s artistic accomplishments. She created sculptures and bas-reliefs out of segments of found wood, such as Wood Picture (c. 1971–72) and Stele (c. 1963).  The arrangements are not precisely or neatly geometric, but they hint at a regular construction mimicking architecture, heightened by the addition of oil paint, which adds a musical sense of pattern.  Stele leans slightly, and its component lengths of wood sometimes form tight seams, but just as often leave gaps that offer a tantalizing view into a dark inner space.  Like Louise Nevelson, who also utilized found scraps of wood, Thompson tentatively accepts a kind of universal but inconsistent structure, reflecting the increasingly fractious world of philosophy and theoretical physics that was becoming more prominent in the nuclear age.  These works presage Thompson’s fascination with magnetic fields and string theory.

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