In 1961, when Frank Bowling was making the earliest work in this small but illuminating show, painters were expected to be either one thing or another, over a range of categories. They had to be either political, using art to better society, or formalist, insisting art be judged on its own terms. They had to belong either to the European or the American tradition. And they had to be a Black artist, meaning they had a duty to speak on behalf of the communities they were presumed to represent, or an artist (full stop), meaning that they were allowed to speak on behalf of everyone about whatever subject they chose (on condition they were white and ideally male). This young British-Guyanese artist, it soon becomes clear, did not like these options.
The early works suggest that he did at least try to fit in: 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse, made when Bowling was at the Royal College of Art in London, might have been designed to meet the professors’ expectations. A screaming black face amid this shambles of tortured bodies is linked by the wall text to the 1961 murder of Patrice Lumumba, the former prime minister of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, positioning Bowling as both a postwar existentialist grappling with the horror of the camps and a Black artist speaking to the postcolonial experience. Beggar No 5 (1962–63) is so heavily indebted to Francis Bacon that it would be dismissed as juvenile pastiche if it weren’t for the subject matter. It points to a career as a professionally Caribbean artist making paintings about “cane-cutting and suffering”, as Bowling once put it.
