More Land Than Landscape:Frank Bowling at Tate Britain.

"The possibilities of paint are never ending" - Frank Bowling, 2017.

Maps of South America, bright colours,  grids, spiral staircases, and dripping paint galore. There were certainly plenty of things I liked in the works of Frank Bowling on show at the moment in an impressive Tate Britain retrospective. I'd say overdue too but at least Bowling's getting one while he's still alive which is better than a lot of artists manage!

So many other artists come to mind looking at his work. During the time it took me to pass through all nine rooms I thought about Jackson Pollock, Bridget Riley, Francis Bacon, JMW Turner, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Frank Auerbach, and Mark Rothko to name just seven. But the overwhelming impression you get at the show, and the one that you leave with, is that Frank Bowling, despite being influenced by, and influencing many, other artists, is very much his own man.

I first became properly aware of Frank Bowling when I saw two of his works, Middle Passage and Texas Louise, at Tate Modern's Soul of a Nation:Art in the Age of Black Power in 2017 with my friends Mark and Natalie. It seemed less political than much of the stuff there but no less potent. Soul of a Nation was a great, to me mold-breaking, show and I wondered and hoped if, in London at least, we'd soon see other galleries follow its lead. After all it was insanely popular.

About the same time as the Tate show, the Hales Gallery in Shoreditch were hosting a free, one room, exhibition of Bowling's more recent work, Fishes, Wishes in Summertime Blue which I made a solo mission to and did a bit of paint fondling while I was there. But it's taken until now for a major retrospective of this artist's career to appear and it proved worth the wait for, it turns out, there is far more to Bowling than I had previously thought.

Born in Guyana (then British Guiana) in 1934, he moved to the UK aged fifteen, and, has since based himself, mostly, between London and New York. His art, too, has been on a journey. Most obviously from the figurative to the abstract but he's taken the scenic route at all times and that's what makes Bowling as an artist, and this show, such a pleasure. The best thing to do is follow in his footsteps and enjoy it at your own pace.

Birthday (1962)

Early paintings like Birthday (1962) and the following year's Beggar no.6 show, quite clearly, the influence of Francis Bacon. Bowling had arrived in London in 1953, following the Queen's coronation we're informed by a board on the wall as if that has much relevance to his art, and after a spell in the RAF and a stab at poetry he enrolled at the Royal College of Art where he studied alongside David Hockney, R.B.Kitaj. and Derek Boshier.

Boshier, particularly, became a good friend but Bacon appears to have been the one they all looked up to. As with Bacon, Bowling's early work is primarily figurative but blurred, and smudged to such a degree that elements border on abstraction. Bowling, as a black Guyanese man in early sixties London, was also responding to his own personal experience.

It was a double edged sword for him. He was interested in the black experience, undoubtedly - he once claimed he wanted to paint people like him as there were already enough paintings of white people, but he didn't want to be considered a 'black' artist and he didn't think it was his responsibility to be a political artist when nobody was asking for answers from Hockney, Kitaj, or Boshier.

In 1962, Royal College of Art students were asked to make a painting on the theme of birthdays. Bowling had witnessed the intense pain of a neighbour giving birth so, instead of birthday cakes and presents, he decided he'd go for that and the Baconesque brush strokes, gestural is the word that tends to get bandied about, contrive to capture some of the emotional ambivalence of creating a new life while undergoing profound physical discomfort.

Beggar no.6 was completed following a return visit to Guyana that Bowling undertook. His mother would give food to local panhandlers and Bowling's job was to wash their hands and feet before they could eat. He spoke of feeling simultaneously sympathetic and repulsed and it's this duality that is captured in this painting while at the same time, look at the background patterns, showing Bowling's burgeoning interest in pure abstraction and the possibilities of colour.

Beggar no. 6 (1963)

Swan I (1964)

Big Bird (1964)

You can see those same juxtapositions at work in Swan I and Big Bird from a year after Beggar no.6. Coloured stripes, inspired by Riley, a 'lozenge' shaped canvas inspired by Kenneth Noland, and a slightly 'psychedelic' (for want of a better word) sixties target are the background, in Swan I, for an oil covered bird Bowling had observed struggling on the Thames whilst Big Bird adds more colour to Mondrian's grids than Mondrian himself would probably have been happy with!

Later in the sixties, as if remembering it was the sixties, Bowling really hit his stride with the best figurative work of his career. He was bringing together modish art with his own Guyanese back story while, at the same time, keeping the ideas pioneered by Francis Bacon absolutely relevant to the end product. 

In 1966, Bowling moved to New York where he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship enabling him to establish himself and spend the next decade living and working there. A regular motif in his paintings at the time became the large house-cum-store his mother had built in New Amsterdam, Guyana. That's it in the upper half of 1966's Cover Girl and it's what adds another dimension to a painting that could otherwise be a rather rote depiction of the over-represented swinging sixties.

Not least because of its spectral appearance, almost as if Bowling is warning that the utopian dream of the sixties is soon to come crashing down. Hiroko Matsumoko may look swell in her Pierre Cardin dress and Vidal Sassoon haircut but this is frivolity, this is fashion, and, thus, this is transient. A year later when Bowling's Variety Store was made Bowling had cut out almost all extraneous detail and gone for a hard edged abstraction reminiscent of Richard Diebenkorn.

Cover Girl (1966)

Bowling's Variety Store (1967)

Mirror (1964-6)

For me, it's a rare miss in the show. It's not that it's bad. It's just that Diebenkorn did that kind of thing much better and, more importantly, Bowling was capable of much better himself. Mirror, for example, is one of his very best paintings. To use the parlance du jour, there's a lot to unpack. Based around a spiral staircase that was in the V&A it features grids, modern (at the time) interior decor, a bit of op art, and two self-portraits.

We can see Bowling swinging from the top of the staircase and then again at the bottom. In the middle, stuck between two Bowlings, is Paddy Kitchen, the artist's wife at the time and one of his tutors. Something that, if not a complete outrage, was certainly tutted about at the time. As was, perhaps, the mixture of so many disparate styles into one painting. Bowling's work was never to be so busy, so hectic, again in his career but if it's an outlier it's an absolutely delicious one.

His mother's house crops up again in My Guyana and Mother's House Overprinted x 3 (there's a clue in the title) before Bowling starts expanding his geographical horizons to include the outline of both Guyana and the entire continent of South America. My Guyana utilises a stencil he'd printed and then soaked with primary colours and, for the first time in the show, we learn how Bowling saw his art almost as an aide memoire, as something to fill in the blanks of his childhood memory, to try and make sense of half-remembered places and events, made even more hypnagogic by having moved countries not once, but twice.

Mother's House Overprinted x 3 pushes this way of thinking into eerier territory. Childhood can, of course, be terrifying and Bowling's Variety Store appears here, lit up as if by an electrical storm, at night, its shadows defying logic and creating the first example we see of one of Bowling's trademark maps. The lower half of the painting is given over to a map of Guyana next to a map of South America. It's very much a work of two halves but, fortunately, both of those works, er, work!

My Guyana (1966-7)

Mother's House Overprinted x 3 (1967)

Mel Edwards Decides (1968)

South America Squared (1967)

Soon, Bowling stopped painting the human figure and it's something that, to this day, he has not returned to. Later, the maps would give way to a gnarly, lumpen, yet beautiful and almost full abstraction but, for now, those of us who like to recognise something in a painting still had something to cling on to.

Bowling was already beginning to reject simply using a brush to create his works and was instead, undoubtedly inspired by Pollock, staining, spraying, and pouring paint on to the canvas - in one instance he slid it down a slide! The inclusion of South America so often in his work is said to be Bowling's way of rejecting a Western centric view of art and art-history which means that not only had Bowling found something that could signify a painting was his (think Dali's melting timepieces, Magritte's apples, or Picasso's bulls) but that he'd been able to infuse his signature with a gentle, but persuasive, political message in a way that few European born artists had been capable of.

At the same time the grids were still there. So while he was stealing a bit from Pop Art, a bit from Abstract Expressionism, he was also still indebted to the formalism of Mondrian. So disparate were these sources, and if you factor in that added South American dimension, that Bowling's art could hardly fail to be anything but singular. Middle Passage's title pays tribute to the journey millions of enslaved Africans were forced by Europeans to make across the Atlantic as part of the slave trade.

There's very little political about it to look at (there are barely legible portraits of Bowling's son as if to say this could have happened to you, this could have happened to your children, but that's about it) and many will be unaware of the title's significance but it's still Bowling's way of letting you know that he's here despite history, not because of it, and that he's proud of who he is.

He's not even afraid to cock a snook at the elder statesmen of Abstract Expressionism. Who's Afraid of Barney Newman half-inches one of the artist's trademark 'zips' and overlays it with one of Bowling's maps. It's 50% tribute, 50% challenge. It's as if Bowling is saying to Newman "I see your zips and I raise you my maps". I know not of any response from Barnett Newman.

Middle Passage (1970)

Who's Afraid of Barney Newman (1968)

Tony's Anvil (1975)

It wouldn't have served Bowling well to be too flippant though. He did owe these American artists a debt. British artists too, like Anthony Caro, were acknowledged. Under the aegis of esteemed, and controversial, critic Clement Greenberg, Bowling came to believe that the visual aspects of a painting were more important than any narrative considerations.

He built a tilting platform that allowed him to pour paint from two metres up on to the canvas which, again like Pollock, created a kind of controlled chaos. Tony's Anvil is a reference to the New Malden born abstract sculptor Anthony Caro whose use of found objects, what some might call rubbish, dazzled Bowling. Bowling was in awe of Caro's inventiveness, his variety, and the boundlessness of his juxtapositions. In his own way, Bowling was trying to do with paint what Caro did with wheels, lumps of metal, and, as the title suggests, anvils.

Narrative, what there was, became cloudier than ever and was mostly given over to the obscure and confusing, yet often fun, titles of Bowling's paintings. People and places close to Bowling were referenced but in highly ambiguous fashion. Kaieteurtoo, another 'poured painting', is named for Kaieteur Falls in Guyana, the world's largest single drop waterfall and an image that crops up regularly when promoting Guyanese tourism.

Kaieteurtoo (1975)

At Swim Two Manatee (1977-8)

At Swim Two Matanee appears to be a riff on, or a private joke about, Flann O'Brien's 1939 metafiction novel At Swim-Two-Birds but it's never clear why. A room about halfway round the Tate Britain show is called COSMIC SPACE and it seems to suggest that Bowling had now, in some way, transcended workaday concerns and was working from a loftier vantage point.

Indeed he does appearing to be looking at nature, at skies, and at rivers now more than maps. The physical rather than the geopolitical. But for me it's still grounded in the materials that make up the earth as opposed to feathery ethereal flights of fancy. Buckets, plastic toys, oyster shells, and the cap of a film canister are included, half submerged, in the works he made at this time. The painter Dennis de Caires said of them, in 1986, they are "more land than landscape" and "portray the marriage of man to the physical world".

They mostly look like they'd make pretty good 4AD record covers, in fact I'm pretty sure Vitacress was not only the cover of, but the title, of an early nineties Cocteau Twins album. There's lots of stuff about Bowling adding ammonia, pearlessence, and turpentine to his work at this point in the show. It's not stuff I particularly understand and, simultaneously misunderstanding and disagreeing with Marshall McLuhan, I'm not totally convinced the media is the message.

Vitacress (1981)

Ah Susan Woosh (1981)

Serpentine (1982)

It's the results that count for me and Vitacress, Serpentine, and the brilliantly named Ah Susan Woosh all met this amateur critic's eye with approval. Extending his list of raw materials further still, Bowling started to make use of beeswax, glitter, and fluorescent chalk to give his surface different, more brilliant, textures. Spreadout Ron Kitaj (another tribute to another friend) contains jewellery and packaging material and Wintergreens a toy owl. They have more corporeal physicality than even Auerbach, verging close to Anselm Kiefer levels.

Bowling could not resist a political statement, however, and in the 80s, any black artist, indeed any artist, would surely have felt obliged to make some statement about Apartheid era South Africa. Silver Birch (No Man, No Vote) was exhibited in the Serpentine Gallery in 1986, while Mandela remained in prison, and refers to Mandela's call for 'one man, one vote', a call which eventually led to the collapse of Apartheid - or at least paid a large part in doing so.

Spreadout Ron Kitaj (1984-6)

Wintergreens (1986)

Silver Birch (No Man, No Vote) (1985)

Flambouriarischoice (1983)

Vitrine cases that flesh out the exhibition, and books in the bookshop, suggest fusing the personal and the political has not always come easy to Bowling. It's possible I'm reading too much into it but it seems that Frank Bowling contradicted himself often on this. That's fine. Throughout our lives we will all contradict ourselves many times and with art and politics twas ever thus.

At times, Bowling seemed eager to make political points. On other occasions, he was wary of being pushed forward simply on account of his colour. I think the safest, and, more importantly, most correct way of reading this is that Bowling was politcal, we're all political - whether we like it or not, but he was political on his own terms. He wasn't there as a black face to fight white liberals battles for them but he was, like all of us, a man of multitudes and this came through in the breadth of art he made even more than it did in his occasional political statements.

Great Thames II (1989)

While Bowling clearly fits closer, though not quite in, with the Abstract Expressionists there is a strand in his work that stretches back much further, via Whistler, to JMW Turner. This came to the fore during the late eighties with Bowling's Great Thames series where, inspired not just by Turner but also Constable and Gainsborough, Bowling would spend much time observing the effects of light on the surface of the river.

These paintings weren't landscapes in any traditional sense. They were more impressions of landscapes, again more land than landscape, and, with the addition of a few assorted non-traditional art objects, they went towards creating a kind of portrait of the Thames in all her beauty, majesty, and mystery. Bowling felt the pressures of working in London, Turner's town, to be exhilarating and, hopefully, he'll be finding exhibiting so close to some of Turner's greatest works equally exciting.

Fishes, Wishes and Uncle Jack (1989)

Sacha Jason Guyana Dreams (1989)

He applied this, now more empirical, approach when he travelled back to Guyana too - and in Sacha Jason Guyana Dreams it paid handsome dividends. It's hard to say why exactly Sacha Jason Guyana Dreams is such a satisfying painting. Is it that great red curve like a giant velvet rope partitioning off a VIP area in the sky? Could it be that Bowling's decades of studying colours and their relationship to each other finally hit emotional paydirt here? Or, perhaps, it just touches something primal in us. In me at least.

I loved it. For me it was the last truly great piece in the show but the examples from the last few decades show that Bowling's still got it in him. I wouldn't bet against him. He's still learning, adapting, and eventually mastering new techniques which is impressive for anyone, let alone an octogenarian.

Girls in the City (1991)

Benjamin's Mess (Hot Hands) (2006)

But Bowling should no more be judged by his age than by his colour. It's part of him, sure, but it's certainly not all of him. Recent works have doubled down on his love of colour while at the same time often using a grid approach as if to suggest, the curators push us towards thinking, that Bowling has been thinking about how we arrange, organise, and compartmentalise our ever busier lives.

Bowling still works in his studio every day. These days there's no going down slides and standing up to paint is even too much. Our bodies may begin to fail us but our minds, at least Bowling's mind, stay(s) sharp and, for him, trying the resolve the dichotomy of making a painting that is both geometrically 'correct' and fluid enough to appear 'cosmic' remains the challenge. 

It's a circle that can surely never be squared and you would imagine Frank Bowling is fully aware of that. For him, or to me at least, it seems the joy is in the challenge, not in completing it. The journey is more important than the destination. On the journey your view, your frame of reference, is constantly updated. At the destination one's imagination is kept on a tighter rein.

Frank Bowling's life has been an emotional journey, it's involved quite a lot of literal journeys, and his art, and this exhibition, took me on a journey through some of the more interesting developments of twentieth century art. My journey home may have been no more exciting than a walk to Victoria station and then a train to Honor Oak Park but with the brilliant, colourful, life affirming, and positive art of Frank Bowling lighting up my imagination that journey was strangely beautiful. Gi Jack he jacket!

Remember Thine Eyes (2014)

Wafting (2018)