Guyanese artist sells painting for more than Gy$55M

After selling one of his paintings for US$275,000 (more than GYD 55M) 79 year-old Guyanese artist Frank Bowling has finally seen his efforts prove lucrative.
In a dramatic breakthrough for Guyanese art last week, “Polish Rebecca”, a painting by Frank Bowling which had been rolled up and forgotten in a friend’s attic for 40 years, was sold at New York’s Armory Show for US$275,000 (£185,000), far in excess of his auction record of £12,000 (more than GYD 3.6M).
Success has been a long time coming for the artist, who left his native Guyana for London in 1953. After a few false starts, he enrolled as a student at the Royal College of Art alongside notable international artists such as David Hockney, RB Kitaj and Allen Jones, all of whom enjoyed success early on. Bowling struggled, unable to find an effective gallery to sell his work.
Being West Indian did not help. As Bryan Robertson, the director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery said in 1964: “England is not ready for a gifted artist of colour.”
When pressured to exhibit at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Senegal in 1966, Bowling “freaked”.
“I began to feel I was being isolated from my peers because I was black. It seemed that everyone was expecting me to paint some kind of protest art out of post-colonial discussion. I resented being pre-packaged, as though put in a trick bag, and I had to fight my way out.”
Bowling’s way out was to go to America. “I was largely ignored and not really understood in London, whereas the US enabled me to grow and change.”
Moving away from figurative art, he embarked on a series of “map paintings” – colourful abstract works rooted in ambiguous references to the South American and African continents, before freeing himself from figuration altogether with colour-saturated, entirely abstract painting.
Although he never set out to become an American artist, he was adopted as one, and a “black American” at that. Against the background of the Civil Rights movement and growing cultural pressures, the Whitney Museum of American Art embarked on a series of exhibitions for black American artists, one of which was for Bowling in 1971.
For this historically unprecedented event, he made a series of large “map paintings”, including the 11-foot-wide “Polish Rebecca”, where the ghostly, greenish-blue map of South America is drenched in oceans of sprayed, stained and soaked colour. Titled after his Polish-born friend Rita Reinhardt, the painting was reproduced on the cover of the Whitney catalogue, in which Bowling declared there was no such thing as “black art”.
After the exhibition, the painting was taken off its stretcher, rolled up and sent to a friend in England, where Bowling had returned to be with his extended family.
Barely surviving through occasional sales and teaching, Bowling received occasional acknowledgement. An exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in 1986 was the first recognition by a public gallery in London. In 1987 Tate Britain, a London art gallery, bought one of his paintings, its first work by a living black British artist. In 2005 he became the first black artist to be elected a Royal Academician.
But commercial success continued to elude him; he was not represented by a UK gallery until in his seventies. Since then, several have shown his work – mainly the Rollo gallery in Fitzrovia, central London, and most recently the Hales gallery in Shoreditch, east London, which now represents him.
Hales director Paul Hedge, who sold “Polish Rebecca” last week, says that Bowling, the most important black artist of his generation, has been desperately undervalued, and museums should have more of his work.
His first exhibition for Bowling in 2011 coincided with an exhibition of his works on paper at the Royal Academy’s Friends Room, the publication of a monograph by Mel Gooding, and a room at Tate Britain devoted to his first purely abstract paintings of the 1970s.
Hedge says Bowling is being revalued along with a number of black American artists, in relation to British abstract painters such as Patrick Heron and John Hoyland, and the younger contemporary artists he shows.
Hedge said this is the first time he has priced one of Bowling’s works so high and sold it. “Polish Rebecca” is an exceptional example from a key period in Frank’s life, he says; its sale marks a new stage in his career. (The Telegraph)