Robert Farris Thompson, scholar of Black art, dies

Robert Farris Thompson, a professor who roamed across continents and disciplines — from the Ituri Forest of Congo to the voodoo temples of Haiti and from art history to ethnomusicology — in a life of scholarship that helped redefine the study of Black culture, died Nov. 29 at a nursing home in New Haven, Conn. He was 88.

His death was announced by Yale University, where Dr. Thompson had taught art history and African American studies for more than half a century. He had complications from Parkinson’s disease and COVID-19, according to his son, Clark Thompson.

Once described by Rolling Stone magazine as “white of skin, white of hair and white of origins, education and society,” Thompson grew up in El Paso, near the U.s.-mexico border, with parents who he said instilled in him early on an interest in cultures other than his own.

At a time when many scholars found little of cultural interest beyond the borders of Europe, Thompson devoted his entire academic career to the study of Black art, music, dance, religion and language from Africa to the Americas. Through his writings, the exhibits he organized at museums, including Washington’s National Gallery of Art, and his lectures that helped shape generations of academics, he forced scholarly attention on a vast cultural heritage that had long been overlooked, if not outright dismissed.

“Robert Farris Thompson will always have the distinction of pioneering the study of African art as an academic field within the discipline of the history of art,” Henry Louis Gates Jr., a scholar of African and African American literature and culture, and a former student of Thompson, said in a statement included in Yale’s announcement of Thompson’s death.

“Before Bob earned his PH.D. in Yale’s art history department, African art was generally regarded as being of anthropological interest, primarily,” Gates continued. “Bob’s work did more to institutionalize the study of Black art as art than any other scholar’s work before his.”

In both his travels and his scholarship, Thompson traced artistic, musical, linguistic and cultural influences from Africa to Latin America and the United States, establishing what Gates described as “undeniable continuities among African, African American, and Afro-latin American cultures.”

Thompson examined those connections in books including the seminal volume “Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-american Art and Philosophy” (1983) and “Aesthetic of the Cool: Afro-atlantic Art and Music” (2011). At the National Gallery, he helped mount the 1981 exhibit “Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds,” prompting Washington Post art critic Paul Richard to declare that “few scholars in America have done more than he to make the art of Africa comprehensible, alive.”

“How dare people patronize Africa?” Thompson told Rolling Stone in a 1984 interview. “There is a moral voice imbedded in the Afro-atlantic aesthetic that the West can’t grasp. They don’t see the monuments, just barefoot philosophy coming from village elders. But the monument is a grand reconciling art form that tries to morally reconstruct a person without humiliating him.”

Robert Farris Thompson Jr. was born in El Paso on Dec. 30, 1932. His father was a physician, and his mother was described by Yale as a local arts patron.

Thompson had a formative experience in high school, when his parents took him on a trip to Mexico City, where he first heard mambo music. The exuberant strains continued to fascinate him as he embarked on his undergraduate studies at Yale and began to envision an academic career devoted to world music and art.

“My father was a surgeon,” he told Rolling Stone, “and he and my mother were a little confused by what I was doing: ‘My son the mambologist?’ All the while I was trying to explain this passion to myself.”

“The more I studied, the more I saw how the world had covered up the source of all this. It wasn’t Latin music — it was Kongo-cubanbrazilian music.” Music, he also noted, led him to art history.

Thompson received a bachelor’s degree in 1955, a master’s degree in 1961 and a PHD in art history in 1965, all from Yale.

Thompson joined the Yale faculty in 1965. His early books included “Black Gods and Kings” (1971), about the art of the Yoruba people of Nigeria, where he traveled extensively.

He was fluent in the Yoruba and Kongo languages, as well as French, Spanish and Portuguese, according to Rolling Stone, in addition to his acquaintance with Creole and many tribal languages. His academic interests, like his linguistic ones, ranged widely, from anthropology and sociology to philosophy and religion.

Thompson’s marriage to the former Nancy Gaylord ended in divorce. Besides his son, of Garrison, N.Y., survivors include a daughter, Alicia Thompson Churchill of Lynn, Mass.; a sister; four grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.

According to Yale, Thompson did field research in “most African, South American, and Caribbean countries” over 60 years, surviving what the university described as “death-defying adventures worthy of the film character Indiana Jones,” among them encounters with venomous snakes and armed guerrillas.