Bob Thompson’s upending of the Old Masters

Plus: the rise of private foundations in France ͏‌

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Ben Street on the inspired ad-libbing of Bob Thompson

Bob Thompson, who was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1937 and died in Rome only 28 years later, made paintings that raise questions about what the traditions of art are for. 'I went to Europe, the museums were driving me crazy.' That's Thompson, speaking in the mid 1960s. 'I was seeing so much art […] my God, I look at Poussin and he's got it all there.' Thompson and his wife Carol Plenda lived in Europe twice: first from 1961–63, then again from 1965 until his death the following year. The encounters with Old Master paintings that drove him so crazy informed the works for which Thompson has become well known: allegorical scenes with multiple figures in silhouette, each rendered in flatly executed, jarring, dazzling colour.

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Juliet Jacques on the avant-garde art of Marthe Donas

The 'Enchanting Modernism' exhibition at KMSKA in Antwerp features the cubist sculptor Aleksandr Archipenko in its full title, and a host of renowned 20th-century artists from Natalia Goncharova to Fernand Léger in its retrospective of the Paris-based cubist group La Section d'Or. Its principal aim, however, is to reintroduce Marthe Donas – one of Belgium's first notable women painters of the century and a well-regarded member of the group at the time – to the European modernist canon. A huge amount of effort has gone into this, with sculptures thought too fragile to travel being transported to Antwerp, and Donas paintings thought lost being tracked down and exhibited for the first time in over a century. The result is a spectacular success.

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Michael Delgado talks to Art Basel Paris's director about this year's fair

Art Basel Paris has been reinventing itself. The fair began in 2022 with a hastily organised event as Paris+ par Art Basel and held its first two editions in the Grand Palais Éphémère, a temporary space used while the Grand Palais itself was being prepared to host the Olympics. Last year's fair was the first to take place in the Grand Palais and this year's will do so too, even though renovations are not fully complete. More change is on the way: the fair's director since 2022, Clément Delépine, recently announced that he is leaving the role after this year's edition. 'It's been a ride,' he tells me when we speak in late August, but 'this is as close as it gets for a normal edition for us.'

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Robert Rubsam explores Stan Douglas's histories of cinema

Spanning photography, digital collage, experimental video and a new five-channel installation riffing on D.W. Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation (1915), these works attest to the artist's decades-long interest in divergence: between the past and the present, the seen and the unseen, the world as it is described in official reports and public narratives, and as we experience it – and the possibility, however far-fetched, that one might be transformed, one day, into the other.

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The painter Anne Rothenstein explains the importance of privacy

'When I was with a smaller gallery, I don't think I had any visitors in my studio for about 12 years. I've had to get used to it more recently, but I really have to get into a world of my own in order to paint, so other people coming in can be very disturbing. I don't think even my children used to come into my studio; not that I wouldn't have let them, but it became known as a rather private space.'

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In the current issue…

As the Fondation Cartier reopens in Paris, Catherine Bennett reports on the rise of private art foundations in France

For 40 years, the Fondation Cartier has been moving closer to the heart of Paris. Its first home was in the south-western suburb of Jouy-en-Josas, in a 19th-century chateau set in a 14-hectare park. In 1994 it moved to a glass and steel monolith designed by the architect Jean Nouvel on Boulevard Raspail in the 14th arrondissement. This year, the foundation has outgrown its home yet again and has moved into the centre of the snail's shell of a map of the city's arrondissements, where the Louvre is its closest neighbour. Its new site is a vast Haussmannian building that used to be a shopping centre, flanked by the five-star Hôtel du Louvre and France's Supreme Court. Gold lettering above the elegant limestone arcades spells out the name of the institution, with the word 'Cartier' in the brand's curling serif. When it opens at the end of this month, the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain will undoubtedly be a central part of the city's cultural landscape.

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