August 26th: Today's Feature - Frank Bowling

August

Sir Richard Sheridan Patrick Michael Aloysius Franklin Bowling OBE RA, (26 February 1934) known as Frank Bowling, is a British artist who was born in British Guiana. He is particularly renowned for his large-scale, abstract "Map" paintings, which relate to abstract expressionism, colour field painting and lyrical abstraction. Bowling has been described as "one of Britain’s greatest living abstract painters", as "one of the most distinguished black artists to emerge from post-war British art schools" and as a "modern master". British cultural critic and theorist Stuart Hall situates Bowling’s career within a first generation, or “wave” of post-war, Black-British art, one characterised by postwar politics and British decolonisation. He is the first black artist to be elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts.

In 2019, Bowling was the subject of a hugely successful retrospective at Tate Britain and, in 2022, opened a major show of works that took place from 1966 to 1975 at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. He is represented in more than fifty international collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York}, Tate Britain (London) and the Royal Academy of Arts (London).

Bowling studied at the Regent Street Polytechnic, Chelsea School of Art[6] and, later, the City and Guilds of London Art School. In 1959, he was awarded a scholarship at the Royal College of Art, where he joined fellow students David Hockney, R. B. Kitaj, Derek Boshier and Patrick Caulfield.

Early Life and Education

Bowling was born on 26 February 1934 in Bartica, British Guiana, to Richard Bowling and his wife, Agatha.

In 1940, Bowling's father moved the family to New Amsterdam so as to take up his post as accountant and paymaster in the local police force. Bowling's mother was a highly skilled seamstress, dressmaker, and milliner; she created a successful business from scratch and built a grand three-storey clapperboard building with a boldly lettered fascia that proclaimed: "Bowling's Variety Store".

In May 1953, at the age of 19, Bowling emigrated to Britain, where he lived with an uncle in London and enrolled at Westminster College of Commerce to study English.

After National Service in the Royal Air Force, Bowling met the future artist and architect Keith Critchlow. Influenced by Critchlow, Bowling went on to study art, despite earlier ambitions to be a poet and a writer. He lodged at his parents' house in Redcliffe Gardens, Chelsea, where he was painted by Critchlow, and he studied at the Chelsea School of Art.

In 1959, Bowling won a scholarship to London's Royal College of Art, where fellow students included artists such as David Hockney, Derek Boshier, Allen Jones, R. B. Kitaj and Peter Phillips. At the beginning of his studies there, Bowling concentrated on painting –still-life compositions of bottles, animals, meat and figure drawings. His Sheep’s Head paintings, made in the autumn of 1960, were a series of muddy, murky intense works reminiscent of Giorgio Morandi and his muted colour palette. Another series of paintings produced in 1960, titled the Athletes, are characterised by vivid chromatic colour and dynamically asymmetrical compositions.

Bowling graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1962.

Career

Frank Bowling, Cover Girl, 1966

Bowling’s artistic career began with his first commercial exhibition, Image in Revolt, at the Grabowski Gallery in Chelsea, London, in October 1962.

In autumn 1963, Bowling had begun to teach painting at Camberwell School of Art in London. There, with the assistance of the textiles department, he amassed a stockpile of canvas pieces bearing the image of his mother’s emporium screen-printed in red or green. The first painting in which the image was deployed was Cover Girl (1966). The title refers to the young woman with the Mary Quant-style dress and the Vidal Sassoon helmet haircut, an image appropriated from the cover of an Observer colour supplement of March 1966.

The masterpiece of the first phase of Frank Bowling’s career is Mirror (1964-66), the culmination of years of development in London. In this painting, Bowling appears twice: at the top of a spiral staircase from the Royal College of Art’s painting school, and at the foot of the stairwell, a metaphor for transition and emergence. In between is the figure of Paddy Kitchen.

"Map paintings" (1967–1971)

From around 1967 to 1971, shortly after arriving in New York, Bowling made a group of works now known as the map paintings. For Bowling, the map motif served both as evocative subject matter and as device to organize the flat, modernist picture plane. Bowling elected to present three of these epically proportioned canvases – Marcia H Travels (1970), Texas Louise (1971), and Australia to Africa (1971) – together with two marginally smaller works, Polish Rebecca (1971) and Traveling with Robert Hughes (1969-70), in his first solo museum exhibition, held at the Whitney Museum of American Art from 4 November to 6 December 1971.

"Poured paintings" (1974–1978)

Frank Bowling, Grating Rhymes, 1978

In 1974, Bowling constructed a movable wood platform, pivoted like a seesaw, so that paint could be poured onto unstretched canvas pegged to the tilted surface. Known as the poured paintings, they were characterised by their upright, rectangular format, linearity of cascading poured paint and masked edges. The combination of chance and precise technique resulted in process-driven works that share affinities with a long lineage of abstract painting. The poured paintings were the subject of an exhibition at Tate Britain in 2012.

1980s

By the early 1980s, dense, encrusted and flowing paintings, often using a large amount of gel, were a significant aspect of Bowling’s painterly practice. A turning point arrived in the summer of 1984, when he arrived at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine for an artist-teacher residency. Quite quickly, he began to incorporate a broad range of objects into his paintings such as newsprint, plastic and foam. In 1986, Bowling exhibited a group of major new paintings at the Serpentine Gallery in London, curated by Ronald Alley, then Keeper of Modern Art at the Tate Gallery. Among the works on display was Wintergreens (1986), now in the Royal Academy’s collection. A year after the show at the Serpentine Gallery, a key work from the same year, Spreadout Ron Kitaj (1986), was acquired by Tate. Also in 1987, Bowling created Philoctete’s Bow, a work characterised by complex, textured surfaces, essentially additive and collage-like (involving stitching, patching and gluing fragments to the surface).

Towards the end of the 1980s, Bowling made his Great Thames series of paintings (1989), in homage to the great English landscape painters J. M. W. Turner and Thomas Gainsborough. This was also the period Bowling started making sculpture. Seven sculptures resulted. For the 1988 exhibition at the Royal West of England Academy (RWA) in Bristol, he made a further group of sculptures in galvanised steel.

2000s to the present

In 2009, Bowling produced a series of vertical and horizontal "zippers" paintings, including Epps, Litchfield and Chinese Chance (all 2009), suggesting tall skies or long horizons. In 2011, Bowling presented new works known as the Crossings at ROLLO Contemporary Art in London In these paintings, bands of colour are overloaded along the centre of the canvas creating a thickly textured build-up of contrasting colour. Crossing: Snakeheadpassage (2011) and Crossing: Liberty (2011) are two such examples.

In 2017, there was a retrospective of his work at Haus der Kunst in Munich.[20] A major retrospective exhibition of his work was on view at Tate Britain in 2019. Land of Many Waters, a major exhibition of unseen works by Bowling, alongside key paintings from the previous decade, was exhibited at the Arnolfini in Bristol in 2021. In 2022, the Stephen Lawrence Gallery at the University of Greenwich focused on his sculptures and the sculptural aspects of his paintings in an exhibition called Frank Bowling and sculpture.

The exhibition Frank Bowling's Americas was at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston from 22 October 2022 to 9 April 2023 and will be at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) from 13 May to 10 September 2023.

Bowling's paintings have been shown in numerous exhibitions in continental Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States and are included in major private and corporate collections worldwide. His work can also be seen in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as the Tate Gallery in London.

Art criticism, curatorial work and teaching

From 1969 to 1972, Bowling was a critic and contributing editor at Arts Magazine, where he rejected the idea that "artists who happen to be black" should be making overtly political or protest art, and defended those engaged in abstraction. His critical writings represent a significant contribution to intellectual debates on "black art". His writings have been included in several publications such as The Soul of a Nation Reader and Mappa Mundi.

In 1969, Bowling organised an important exhibition at Stony Brook University, New York, titled 5+1, that included abstract works by five Black American artists – Melvin Edwards, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Al Loving, Jack Whitten, and William T. Williams – together with his own paintings. Bowling held teaching positions at many institutions, including at Camberwell School of Art, where he taught painting in 1963, and lectureships at the University of Reading (until 1967); Columbia University, New York (until 1969); Rutgers (until 1970); and Massachusetts College of Art, Boston (1970–71).

Role within the history of postwar British art

From the late 1960s onwards, Bowling’s work appeared in many of the century’s most important exhibitions that centred upon the work of Black-British and Afro-Caribbean artists. Historian and artist Eddie Chambers notes how Bowling took part in an important, though now largely forgotten, 1978 London exhibition entitled Afro-Caribbean Art alongside a variety of other major artists from Africa and its diasporic populations. Participants included Lubaina Himid, Donald Locke, Eugene Palmer, Mohamed Ahmed Abdalla and Keith Ashton.

Bowling was also featured in the highly influential 1989 exhibition The Other Story, held in London’s South Bank Centre. The show sought to survey the history of postwar, Black-British art, serving as one of only two shows to ever tackle the subject matter. Curated by the London-based, Pakistani artist Rasheed Araeen, the landmark show sought to demonstrate the ways in which the history of contemporary non-Western art could be understood as both a variety of independent art-historical narratives as well as integral to a mainstream story of global art history. Araeen devised this curatorial approach as a protest against what he took to be a pervasive way of marginalising non-Western art histories in which artists working outside of the Western canon would be presented as existing within an insular, Western-adjacent canon. Participants included Rasheed Araeen, Salim Arif, Eddie Chambers, Aubrey Williams and Ronald Moody.

Family Life

Bowling married textile artist Rachel Scott in 2013.

While working at the Royal College of Art, he met the novelist, biographer and art critic Paddy Kitchen when she was a member of staff there. They married in 1960 (divorcing in 1966) and had one son, who is now deceased: Richard Sheridan Bowling (1962–2001), known as Dan Bowling.

Frank Bowling has two other sons: Ben Bowling (born 1962), Professor of Criminology & Criminal Justice at King's College London, whose mother is the artist Claire Spencer; and Sacha Bowling (born 1964), a film maker and photographer, whose mother is Irene Delderfield Bowling (whom Bowling married in 1969).