The Easel

4th June 2019

Frank Bowling, an overlooked star of British art’s golden generation

Bowling’s first retrospective has critics puzzled as to why he has been so long ignored. Is it race (he is from Guyana), his unfashionable abstractionism, or perhaps his avoidance of a signature style? Recognition from the London art establishment has been scant – New York has been more welcoming. Not that Bowling has been put off at all – “I still get a lot of juice out of abstraction.”

Brancusi and America

Brancusi felt a debt to America, its openness to the new. In return he has been “the fountainhead” of American sculpture. Listing his undoubtedly numerous innovations tends to obscure where his true greatness lay. An earlier critic is more specific – “his rapturous feeling for surfaces … [and endowing] his forms with something of the clarity and finality of law”.