Black Life and Culture
Written by Frank Bowling
is black art about color?… The pressure of cultural nationalism on a global drift has given rise in the United States to a passionate, confused, but fashionable black nationalism, and with it a justified if shrill cry for cultural distinctiveness. The dilemma of adequately defining differences and giving them concrete form in aesthetic terms cannot be overstated, and is formidable due to confusion, urgency, and historical nearness.
Postscript
Written by Frank Bowling
From cradle to grave the black diaspora artist is haunted by originality informed by an historical memory of the Middle Passage and slavery mostly in the New World. Torn by reminders of the need for revenge and a driven desperate love of the enemy. In hot embrace through which all instincts towards revenge are consumed, some human secreted chemistry turns innocent anger to confusion equally innocent. Only to be replaced by a sometimes difficult and dangerous search for truth; truth to oneself.
THE SEARCH FOR FREEDOM: AFRICAN AMERICAN ABSTRACT PAINTING 1945-1975
Written by Frank Bowling
It’s doubtful whether by declaring that the discussion ‘Black Art’ is moribund will make it go away. Vanish! And so lighten a burden which often seems, in its onerousness, well night unbearable to those of us as artists, wh also happen to be ethnically African in origin. Yet the ramifications of Black art appear to me somewhat as institutionalized civil war. It’s an enduring irony that in a democratic republic such as is the current United States of America this aberrant, racist, rubbish continues to gain legality.
Formalism Versus New Art
At a time when my work was slowly moving away from the kind of undisciplined expressionism my sojourn at the Royal College of Art afforded me, I began to seek out, and to listen to, my more formally trained friends; these happened to be mainly architects and engineers. Then there was my friend Paul Harrison, who to me simply represented science; the image of science as a study of pattern and order.
Notes Along The Way
Written by Frank Bowling
In a piece of writing entitled “Notes Along the Way”, George Orwell mentions the cruel trick he once played upon a wasp. “I cut him in half”, wrote Orwell. “He [the wasp] paid no attention, merely went on with his meal …Only when he tried to fly did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him!”
Untitled
Written by Frank Bowling
After years of intense lobbying and sporadic linguistic fights for a return to the figure [or figuration] in Western painting, we now have a new generation of Pop-artists, currently described as New Wave or Punk. Even the work of older artists included in this “movement” seemed, when they first appeared between 1959/1963, a second-wave Pop [David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin, Malcolm Morley].
Formalism: A Selective View
Written by Frank Bowling
In the beginning, the modern movement welcomed and accepted Formalism for its appolonian and classical honing of matter drenched in expressionist and almost wantonly romantic excesses. Formalism was also identified with the Avant- Garde. Except in the widely dispersed European centers [mostly French and German city-centers, of which Paris in the late 19 th century was the capital], the most ardent contributors, respondents to and supporters of formalist theory and practice were based in Russia.
Revisionism Part 2: Color and Recent Painting
Written by Frank Bowling
A century ago the momentum which changed the course of that aspect of our awareness through culture called painting, declared itself within the confines of the art movement known as Impressionism. The story of Impressionism is often a dismal tale of fatigue to mind and muscle. The Franco-Prussian war exiled people from France, and all over Europe economic and religious revolutionary turmoil created havoc with human lives.
Structure of Color at the Whitney
Written by Frank Bowling
For one hell of a long time now, a body of works has needed a body of literature to go with it. This is why, after viewing The Structure of Color, an exhibition organized by Marcia Tucker, I had to get the catalogue. For apart from accepting that Mrs. Tucker “knows what she likes,” the show seemed purposeless.
It’s Not Enough to Say “Black Is Beautiful”
Written by Frank Bowling
The problems of how to judge black art by black artists are not made easier by simply installing it; here a painter examines the works of Williams, Loving, Edwards, Johnson and Whitten as both esthetic objects and as symbols expressing a unique heritage and state of mind.