by Mark Van Proyen
Seeing Penumbra, Frank Bowling’s masterwork from 1970, was like being reacquainted with a long-lost friend. It was one of the highlights of a Soul of a Nation, a traveling exhibition that touched down in 2020 at the de Young Museum. The institution subsequently acquired the painting for its permanent collection, so we’re fortunate to have it on view again at SFMOMA (through September 10) as part of another exhibition, Frank Bowling: The New York Years 1966-1975, focused on the decade when Bowling lived and worked in New York.
Penumbra, part of Bowling’s Map series (1967-71), demonstrates how the acrylic stain method initially pioneered by Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis could be used in saturated layers to create stunning chromatic effects of iridescent vibrating color. That technique emphasizes the saturation of unprimed cotton canvas with diluted acrylic paint, creating works resembling large watercolors. Thin veils of particulate spray paint also contribute to the visual richness of the work, as does its panoramic aspect ratio that reaches beyond the viewer’s field of vision. Lurking in the painting’s frothy veils of dark violet and viridian paint are the barely perceptible outlines of European and North American continents hovering like anxious ghosts, possibly dissolving or emerging from misty darkness. These geographic forms disperse across the painting’s 22-foot width. Indeed, a case could be made that Penumbra represents the pivotal center point of the current exhibition and Bowling’s entire five-decade career. It and other paintings like it also can be said to anticipate the late 1970s vogue for “New Image Painting,” the subject of a 1978 exhibition of the
same name at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The repeated use of geographic entities as flat silhouettes lurking within fluid fields of color supports this suggestion, even as they also reimagine Jasper John’s use of map images in works from the early 1960s. Here, the critical difference is that Bowling’s cartographic fantasies focus on geographic land masses unbranded by the artificial boundaries between political subdivisions featured in Johns’ map works.
Frank Bowling: The New York Years was co-organized by SFMOMA and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, originating at the later where it was conceived by curators Reto Thüring, Akili Tommasino and Debra Lennard. Until now, the artist’s work has had little exposure on the West Coast, even though Bowling received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth in 2020.
Bowling was born in 1934 in British Guiana (which became the independent country of Guyana in 1966), a crown colony from which he decamped for London in 1953. After a short stint in the Royal Air Force, he attended the Royal College of Art, where he met fellow students R.B. Kitaj and David Hockney. The earliest painting in the current exhibition is also the only one from Bowling’s early London years, a diptych titled Beggar No. 1 and 2 (1963). It is also one of only two works in the exhibition to be executed in oil. Each panel features a solitary figure like those in Francis Bacon’s work, attesting to the widespread influence
Bacon exerted on younger British artists at that time. The museum placed a contemporaneous piece by Bacon, Study for Portrait (with Two Owls), just outside the Bowling exhibition to drive this point home. It’s far from being among Bacon’s best works, but it makes a point and sets the stage.
When Bowling arrived in New York in 1966, he brought the British preference for figuration with him and a lingering British antipathy toward Abstract Expressionism. By that time, his work had morphed into a kind of Britpop that used cartoonish forms, extravagant space and psychedelic color in a way that echoed the work of Richard Hamilton and Edwardo Paolozzi. He also used silkscreen applications of paint in concert with other acrylic techniques. Stencils for these applications stemmed from photographs of his mother’s variety store in New Amsterdam, Guyana, the top floors of which were the family home. Evidence suggests that Bowling’s mother was a remarkable woman, turning her skills as a seamstress into a successful mercantile business while also significantly influencing young Frank. Several works in the exhibition evoke the store, the most notable being Untitled (Mother’s House) from 1966 and Mother’s House and Night Storm (1967), the later opening toward the expansive space that would be the salient feature of Bowling’s subsequent work.
In 1971, Bowling had a solo exhibition at the Whitney, quite a feat for an artist who had only lived in the United States for five years and had never been a naturalized US citizen. Penumbra was among the largest works in that exhibition, confirming the sharp rise of Bowling’s career profile at that time. He had also become well known as a curator and a critic; he wrote for Arts and Art News, focusing on African-American artists’ work, circumstances and esthetic proclivities. He also had prominent gallery representation with dealers Terry Dentinfass and Richard Bellamy. The work Bowling presented in the Whitney exhibition made perfect sense in relation to the reigning style of the times, called Post-Painterly Abstraction, after a presentation of the same name organized by Clement Greenberg for the LA County Museum in 1964. Bowling was not among the 31 artists included in that exhibition because he had yet to arrive in New York until well after it was organized. But its esthetic was pervasive for most of the following decade, undoubtedly influencing Bowling throughout his New York years. Regarding Post Painterly Abstraction (aka Color Field Painting), we should remember that color was of paramount importance, meaning that all traces of the traditional “abstract expressionist” brushstroke had to be suppressed, if not wholly banished, to maximize the sensory and emotional impact of unmodulated color. A commitment to “open form,” “expansiveness,” and a dismissal of “schematic representation” meant that the only lines allowed were those formed by the edges between two areas of different color. (As an aside, it’s worth nothing that in the late 1990s we saw younger artists working in something close to that style, later featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s ill-fated Forever Now exhibition in 2014.)
Other significant paintings from the Map series featured in the 1971 Whitney exhibition (but not among those on view here) included Marcia H Travels (1970), which is almost as large as Penumbra, subtly revealing the continents of South America and Africa soaked in wine-dark fields of shaded magenta to suggest a vast ocean of blood left in the wake of colonization. Another large painting absent from this show but reproduced in the catalog, Texas Louise (1971), shows a faintly articulated silhouette of Australia drenched in shimmering layers of orange-yellow paint reminiscent of the sublime atmospherics found in the work of J.M.W. Turner. A smaller painting, Barticaborn 1 (1967), is another standout. It shows two silhouettes of the African continent floating amid a dreamy stream of fluid color. It is the most elegant and lyrical of the paintings in the exhibition, revealing an unusual aspect of Bowling’s work.
Bowling discarded the use of stenciled map shapes after his Whitney exhibition. The next group of smaller works featured multiple deployments of horizontal stripes evoking successive horizon lines. In Rupununi (1971), we see signs of the paint being scrapped left to right by either a large squeegee or a piece of lumber, anticipating Gerhard Richter’s famous scraped paint abstractions by two full decades. It and others like it are not burdened by the feckless melancholy that some critics have ascribed to Richter’s work. Instead, they are unashamedly ebullient, suffused with intimacy, spirituality and an aspiration toward the infinite. Starting in about 1974, we see Bowling’s work tacking in another direction. It features controlled cascades of thicker acrylic positioned against subtly stained backgrounds. They evoke melted multi-colored candles, bringing to bear an enlivening element of surrealist autonomism. In those days, “process art” was the term used to describe works emphasizing aleatory painting techniques and unorthodox tools. (For a relevant comparison, think back to the work that Larry Poons and Jules Olitski did at the time with high-powered spray guns.)
Bowling returned to London in 1975 but continues to maintain a studio in New York. One could say he was bi-continental or tri-continental, given that he was born in Caribbean South America. Judging from some of his writings, he was keenly aware of the complexities of his hyphenated identity and that of other African American (and Afrobritish) artists long before such concerns appeared in the slippery context of post-colonial theory. Throughout the exhibition, the Guyanan flag’s red, yellow and green colors turn up, most strikingly in a 1968 painting called Who’s Afraid of Barney Newman. This work suggests a reclamation project, a stealing back of Newman’s universalist theories of the chromatic sublime, returning it to the realm of the culturally specific and the methodologically particular, using color not to celebrate the alleged universality of modernist abstraction, but to ironically spite it. Indeed, he was ambivalent and even wary of the categorical pigeonhole that was then opening for Afro-American art in the wake of the late 1960s protest movements. On the one hand, it provided limited opportunities for visibility that were lacking in prior years. On the other, it also created neutralized zones of a condescending and potentially dangerous ghettoization built on externally mandated categories that had little to do with artmaking. His response was “both/and” rather than “either/or.” In late Modernism, he saw a unique opportunity for a new hybrid mode of working for African American artists all too familiar with hybrid identities.
Herein lies much of the import of Bowling’s work: he was among the first to bring connotation back into the realm of abstract painting after Greenbergian theory banished it to uphold an extreme and exclusive denotation of color as color and paint as paint. Some have called this emphasis on direct denotation “the metaphysics of presence,” which upheld programs of symbolic erasure lurking behind the happy smile of narcissistic over-confidence and corporate jouissance. With consummate subtlety, Bowling’s work reversed this polarity, literally erasing the erasure to reveal the palimpsest residue of a living counter-history that had been previously repressed in the name of truth to materials.
Several paintings in the exhibition were completed after Bowling’s return to London. Some, like Elder Sun Benjamin (2018), continue with the bright primary colors and horizontal bands featured in the post-1971 works, adding subtle collage elements. The major shift in the later works can be seen in 4 Bensusi (2020), featuring collage elements buried in thick layers of tinted acrylic gel, like insects trapped in amber. These collage elements are ambiguous but seem to carry some non-specific history that evades immediate interpretation. In other words, they seem like the forlorn relics of a lost magic, here preserved like the contents of a time capsule. Is it an accident that these works foreshadow the second-generation Britpop paintings of Chris Ofili? Given their dates, it might be fair to say that the reverse might be true. Either way, there is a peculiar affinity that invites the tantalizing question.
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“Frank Bowling: The New York Years 1966-1975” @ SFMOMA through September 10, 2023.
About the author: Mark Van Proyen’s visual work and written commentaries emphasize the tragic consequences of blind faith in economies of narcissistic reward. Since 2003, he has been a corresponding editor for Art in America. His recent publications include Facing Innocence: The Art of Gottfried Helnwein (2011) and Cirian Logic and the Painting of Preconstruction (2010). To learn more about Mark Van Proyen, read Alex Mak’s interview on Broke-Ass Stuart’s website.