This House is Mine (1960)

I thought the expression "This house is mine" was more recent than 1960, the year Bob Thompson painted his same-named 12" x 7" oil on board landscape. I usually associate the expression with something conquered, like an opposing athlete, an art museum or a sex organ. 

The brief career of Bob Thompson (1937-1966) is the subject of a survey of over 50 paintings and works on paper at the Hammer Museum (October 11 - January 8, 2023). Maybe I'll go see it. Or maybe the VAG will sign on and show these works with some Tom Thomsons.

From the Hammer press release (below that, Thompson's Homage to Nina Simone, 1965):

"This House Is Mine examines Thompson’s formal inventiveness and his engagement with universal themes of collectivity, bearing witness, struggle, and justice. Over a mere eight years, he grappled with the exclusionary Western canon, developing a lexicon of enigmatic forms that he threaded through his work. Human and animal figures, often silhouetted and relatively featureless, populate mysterious vignettes set in wooded landscapes or haunt theatrically compressed spaces. Thompson reconfigures well-known compositions by European artists such as Piero della Francesca and Francisco Goya through brilliant acts of formal distortion and elision, recasting the scenes in sumptuous colors. On occasion, fellow contemporaries appear, for instance jazz greats Nina Simone and Ornette Coleman and the writers LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) and Allen Ginsberg.

The exhibition title borrows its name from a diminutive but exquisite painting created by the artist in 1960. With this title, Thompson declared his ambition to synthesize a new visual language out of elements of historic European painting. This House Is Mine centers Thompson’s work within expansive art historical narratives and ongoing dialogues about the politics of representation, charting his enduring influence."