Art Review: The oeuvre of the black British painter Frank Bowling presents a contest between the abstract and the figurative
Dec. 19, 2022 5:34 pm ETFrank Bowling —the 88-year-old black British painter—is currently the subject of a semi-retrospective exhibition titled “Frank Bowling’s Americas,” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Mr. Bowling wrote in 1988, “My art is formalist and my experience that of a black artist.” Mr.
Still, he wasn’t quite there yet. “With his move to America,” the catalog says, he “aspired to nothing less than to inscribe himself into the lineage of artists he considered most relevant”—those artists being Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler and Clyfford Still. His paintings bore such titles as “Who’s Afraid of Barney Newman” —a riff on Newman’s famous “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue” paintings—and “Looking at Barney & Mark” .
In 1971, Mr. Bowling said, “Culturally, the black American temporarily is not a Western man, he is not an African man either. He is a new man, the nearest and most culturally rich hybridization of the wheels of eternity.” Much the same might be said of Mr. Bowling, who couldn’t quite get out from under a desire to be a 100% abstract painter while at the same time reflecting on, if not imbuing his paintings with some indication of his race and Guyanese extraction.
Mr. Bowling certainly knew—and knows—what he’s doing; the work is vigorous, passionate and very often ambitiously big. The downside is not so much that he’s influenced , but rather that he sometimes seems like a musician performing someone else’s compositions. The best work in the exhibition bookends Mr.
Nevertheless, the struggles of Mr. Bowling—a black artist operating in a historically white mode—endeavoring to make something new out of Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting are almost heroic. They make this exhibition well worth seeing.Museum of Fine Arts, BostonCopyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
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