How did Frank Bowling Become one of the Abstract Art Greats?

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-05

[00:00:03][music] [music] [music] >> A very warm welcome to Art Gallery Explorer from here in beautifully sunny and incredibly busy Cambridge. I'm heading to a show at the Fitzwilliam Museum, which is promising to bring together a selection of works by abstract great Frank Bowling. Bowling is now 92 years old as I record this in April 2026.

[00:00:48]He was born in Guyana in 1934 and he emigrated to Britain in 1953.

[00:00:54]He became interested in becoming an artist and in 1959, he gained a scholarship to the Royal College of Art.

[00:01:01]His early art is kind of figurative and it's very much about an artist trying to find their voice.

[00:01:10]It was a move to New York in the mid-1960s which transformed his art and pushed him onto the path to a highly lyrical abstract style. He began painting these map paintings which had deep historical meaning. The last time I saw Frank Bowling was at the um Tate Britain show in 2019 just before I started this vlog actually. This show at the Fitzwilliam Museum, which hopefully you can see behind me, is going to be much much smaller than that. But it's still hopefully going to allow me to answer the question, how did Frank Bowling become one of our greatest abstract artists? And I'm hoping it is going to explore the trajectory of his career. This show is free as I say until the 17th of January 2027. Come and join me as we head inside. The title of this exhibition, Seeking the Sublime, is very apt because Frank Bowling's work has been described by the artist as pursuing the possibility of paint.

[00:02:08]And over his career, as he's moved through different styles, pushing the boundaries as he goes, there's been I would think a movement towards the sublime in his art.

[00:02:22]As we enter the exhibition, we see two works from the early period before Bowling left London for New York.

[00:02:31]The work on the left, which you're about to see in more detail, is entitled Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a painting produced while he was a student at the Royal College of Art where he was given the Bible passage Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Conquest, War, Famine, and Death.

[00:02:47]The painting, as you can see in the sparse strokes, hints at the abstraction that is to come, but we still see screaming heads, a prone body, fire.

[00:02:57]This was a visceral response to the murder of Congolese politician Patrice Lumumba by the Belgian-backed opposition earlier in the year it was painted, 1961.

[00:03:11]Beggar Number Five shows a ragged figure outside Bowling's variety store, the shop run by Bowling's mother in Guyana.

[00:03:19]She often took in beggars and Bowling was required to wash their feet as a child before he could eat, something that traumatized him.

[00:03:28]Both of these works clearly are indebted to artists who were influential at the time, most noticeably Francis Bacon, but I saw little hints of Leon Kossoff as well.

[00:03:38]While interesting, maybe these aren't great works because Bowling is trying to produce art that society expects him to produce as to as opposed to the art he wants to produce and later does.

[00:03:52]The exhibition explains that in the 1960s, Bowling saw a swan harbored in oil near the River Thames and this became a bit of a motif for him and this section of the show is kind of a bit like um Bowling's journey in microcosm.

[00:04:09]We see works like this one and this one um beginning to strain at maybe geometric abstraction.

[00:04:19]The at the the exhibition explains that he had studied and was influenced by Mondrian.

[00:04:25]Then we contrast it with this much more abstract work from his mature period which revisits the the um motif of the swan very differently.

[00:04:37]We might see the two early swan works as a bit of a impasse and a reason why he had to break out of the restrictions of London to New York and head to New York.

[00:04:47]In the second half of the exhibition, we see Bowling breaking through.

[00:04:52]We see two of his poured paintings.

[00:04:55]In 1973, Bowling began pouring paint to produce layered effects of contrasting colors.

[00:05:01]And in his studio, he built a tilting platform to pour paint from quite high, from up to 2 m.

[00:05:08]And there's an element of both control and chance to these works.

[00:05:12]The work becomes much more about the aesthetic experience. Leonora Sea is one of my favorites in this very small exhibition. It's named after Bowling's friend Leonora Goldberg, but it's also the name of a village on the coast in Guyana where the river Essequibo meets the Atlantic.

[00:05:32]So this that you're looking at now is a landscape painting with white, green, and ochre and pink cascading down like the river meeting the sea.

[00:05:42]Another highlight, you can see it on the left if you look, is entitled Pond Life.

[00:05:47]It represents in its title the painting Ophelia by Pre-Raphaelite Millais, probably his most famous painting where he depicts Ophelia floating in a river.

[00:05:58]In this painting, yellow bands and browns and oranges pour down to the greenish water and found objects lie below the surface where Ophelia's body is in the Millais painting.

[00:06:14]This gives the painting a rough, rugged feeling Bowling's often used found materials in his work.

[00:06:21]Tracey's Bouquet refers to a bouquet of flowers sent to Bowling by Tracey Emin when he received his OBE and he embedded fragments of the flowers into his painting.

[00:06:33]And this work's also interesting because it shows his use of embedding textiles and fabric into the painting.

[00:06:41]It's fair to say that the map works that Bowling started to produce in New York when he arrived in the late '60s were the works that broke him through into a style he could call his.

[00:06:53]We don't see any of these epic map works here, but we do see a smaller, much more recent version outlining South America from 2025.

[00:07:03]To find the final work by Bowling, you have to leave the Octagon Room and head into the main gallery space where you'll see this work which is evoking the fact that Guyana is a land of water and the exhibition text says it's evoking the rivers, rapids, and waterfalls of Guyana. Well, I hope you enjoyed exploring that pocket-size Frank Bowling show with me from the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. There was something really nice about being able to sit or stand in the middle of this Octagon Room and see an artist's career unfold in a very small space in front of your eyes. I really enjoyed that from one of the earliest works he produced at the Royal College of Art through to a work that's never been displayed before shown in 2025.

[00:07:46]It was fascinating to see how his art evolved and changed over that time.

[00:07:52]And I really enjoyed especially the transition between the works produced in London before moving to New York and then obviously the works in New York and it obviously leads us to ask what triggered that transition and quite clearly the exhibition points out that the it maybe Bowling felt a little bit overlooked in conservative post-war Britain, whereas in America he found freedom to be the artist he wanted to be um inspired by abstract art and pop art.

[00:08:18]And maybe also he was moving from the artist people expected him to be, painting explicit pictures of human concern as he calls them in the in in that first few works, to being much more about um the texture and the paint and and the expression, the visual impact of his work.

[00:08:40]I was a tiny bit disappointed there wasn't an original map painting from that that first period in New York when he began to produce them because they're a really important part of his transition from figurative to abstract art. You have to picture them as being mainly abstract, often hazy colors um and then and then the stenciled outline of a map. I know that most of them would absolutely not fit in this room because they're often ginormous horizontal um style works of art, but maybe a smaller uh vertical one because that was the space of the walls like Traveling with Robert Hughes may have added a little bit more of a satisfying transition from the figurative to the abstract, but but you know, the compensation is seeing a much more recent map work from 2025 of of of of South America with countries like Venezuela labeled and obviously that has particularly pertinent link to Bowling. So that was that was that was fine and don't forget as well to go out of the the Octagon Room and to the other Frank Bowling work, which I really enjoyed.

[00:09:44]Um is it worth traveling up from London just to see this very small show? Only if you're a Frank Bowling super fan. But if you're in Cambridge, maybe visiting Handpicked, the the the the show of flower paintings at the Kettle's Yard or maybe going to the um the National Women's Art Collection and seeing the show on the Nicholson building, then this would provide a very satisfying part of an art day out in Cambridge. So, do you think about it?

[00:10:10]And it's on all the way till the 17th of of of January 2027. So, if you're in Cambridge for any reason, I really urge you to go to the Fitzwilliam Museum.

[00:10:19]It's a really nice museum actually with a great art collection on that top floor and I love the way it's sort of laid out in lots of ways with the art all in one place. So, you can circle around the riches that this museum has.

[00:10:33]My favorite paintings were were the Leonora Carrington, which I I loved because it's a brilliant landscape and also Pond Life as well after Millet. I thought these two were the ones that got my heart beating a little bit faster. So, yeah, they were my favorites, but this is a free exhibition. So, make sure you spend something in the cafe or in the wonderful shop in the sort of newish modern extension to the Fitzwilliam Museum. And it was great to celebrate the life and career of Frank Bowling.

[00:11:05]And it Do you know what it left me? It left me wanting more. I know it's not so long ago that that 2019 show was at Tate Britain.

[00:11:12]But I did love it then. Really loved it.

[00:11:15]It was a big hit as well on the London art scene. And so, I'm definitely going to be seeking out if there's any private viewings of his works over the next year or so. And finally, if you're a fan of Frank Bowling's work, do post in the comments what you thought about this show and how well it represented him. And do stay tuned because I've got another Cambridge show coming up very soon entitled Hand-Picked: Painting Flowers from 1900 to Now from the wonderful Kettle's Yard.

[00:11:42]So, do stay tuned for that.

[00:11:44]And thank you ever so much for watching.