BOB THOMPSON’S most audacious canvases—Blue Madonna, Bird Party, The Judgment of Paris—combine the serene order and breath of Renaissance design with the unfettered spirit of modernist color. Over the silhouettes of the Old Masters, Thompson unleashed a rhapsody of bold tones, sweeping curves and syncopated rhythms that have often recalled the tense, uncontainable energy of Gauguin and German Expressionism. Like theirs, his paintings manifest a spiritual restlessness, transforming reality into images of daydreams and obscure correspondences. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the leading figure of the German Expressionist movement, once wrote, “the artist, whose life is comparable to a child’s in many respects, frequently can reach the inner sound more easily than anyone else”—the “inner sound of objects,” that “spiritual” core can only be perceived with “unspoiled eyes.” It is that feeling…