Hales Gallery to present Polish Rebecca by Frank Bowling at The Armory Show 2013

February 25, 2013

This year at The Armory Show Hales Gallery is proud to be featuring Polish Rebecca, an important work by Guyanese-born British artist Frank Bowling. This work, made by Bowling in 1971 in New York, has a significant role in the artist's career and also reflects on the political, social and artistic context of New York in the 1970s.

The painting has been exhibited just once at Frank Bowling's solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971, and never shown in public since. Polish Rebecca has acquired a certain historic gravitas and its importance has only increased over time.

This is a brief history of the making of Polish Rebecca (1971) and the significance of the Whitney exhibition within a 1970's New York. This text has been written after regular conversations with Frank Bowling upon the anniversary of the paintings re-showing forty two years later in 2013.

Frank Bowling and the making of Polish Rebecca

In 1966, Frank Bowling arrived in New York, checked into the Chelsea Hotel and began work at his newly appointed loft studio at 535 Broadway. It was the year that the pioneering American painter, Ad Reinhardt died.

Originally from Guyana in the Caribbean, Bowling had completed his education in London with contemporaries such as David Hockney, Peter Phillips and Patrick Caulfield (at the Royal College of Art) and upon receipt of a Guggenheim fellowship had made his way to join a growing community of immigrant artists working in the studios of down-town Manhattan.

Frank settled quickly and between 1967 and 1971 he was already making his voice heard as a contributing editor for Arts Magazine (1969-72). This was during a period of intense debate around issues of 'Black Art' in New York following the contentious Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition Harlem on my mind (1969). At this time, Bowling also made a show, 5 1 at State University, NY. Stony Brook, with Alvin Loving, Melvin Edwards, Jack Whitten, Daniel Johnson and William. T. Williams, five of America's most promising African-American artists and assisted the painter Larry Rivers as a curator for the controversial exhibition, Some American History at Rice University, Houston, Texas.(1969)

By 1969 Bowling's own paintings were progressing quickly, stylistically shifting dramatically, influenced by the new exciting environment of New York. Around this time he had embarked on an ambitious series of large works made by dividing the canvas in a geometric manner, staining the raw canvas with acrylic paint and then using brown paper stencils to spray paint shapes over the surface. Bowling had built an ingenious structure with guttering fixed to its perimeter which he used in pulling swaths of paint over the surfaces. Larry Rivers guided him in the use of an epidiascope which he used for projecting and stencilling map outlines, and Bowling's output increased as he became more familiar with these new materials and techniques.

Amid a growing atmosphere of dissatisfaction and protest surrounding the visual arts in New York, the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC) met with the Whitney director, John I.H.Baur and demanded better representation for black artists and curators at the institution. The Whitney Museum were responsive and presented twelve exhibitions featuring black artists, eleven solo and one group. Bowling's work had not gone un-noticed and he was among the six abstract artists offered solo shows. The newly appointed Robert M. Doty, who had joined the curatorial staff at Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970, oversaw these exhibitions (along with Marcia Tucker) up until 1975. This was indeed historically unprecedented and a ground-breaking moment for American Art history and indeed Bowling himself.

Bowling's show ran between November 4^th and December 6^th 1971 and gave him the opportunity to talk openly on his ideas and influences. Many of these ideas were included in an interview between him and Doty found in the pamphlet published for the exhibition (upon which we based this leaflet). An image of Polish Rebecca featured on the cover and much of the text inside was a distillation of Bowling's ideas (albeit on this occasion applied to his own work ) previously expressed in his six articles for Arts Magazine published in the three years preceding the show. Bowling made it very clear that he didn't believe in a distinct 'Black art' but in an art where works made by all artists were assessed within broader formal boundaries.

For the exhibition he showed six impressive large canvases, all completed earlier that year. The show also pushed the boundaries of what had been previously labelled 'American Art', opening it up to practitioners of international heritage based in the U.S.A. Retrospectively, the immense significance of this series of shows and the works they included have become clearer in the context of the civil rights movement and its cultural ramifications.

Bowling explained that he began using the symbolic images of vast continents including Australia, Africa and South America in these paintings because he was inspired by the cosmopolitan pulse of New York and his diverse friendships with the artist's that surrounded him; there was camaraderie amongst them. He also explains his intention to create a certain wistful emptiness in the vast expanses of colour. Polish Rebecca in particular has at its centre a greenish blue ghost of South America shrouded in what resembles a swirling mist.

Around the time of the Whitney show, Bowling's career was really taking off. The daytimes were spent painting at his studio in SoHo and in the evenings he hung out with a fashionable crowd at Mickey Ruskin's Max's Kansas City as well as Elaine's Restaurant on the upper east side. It was here that he was introduced to Jimmy Taylor by the poet, Frederick Seidel. Taylor was British and was resident in New York. He was a poet with an enthusiasm for Italian motorcycles and Frank and he became great friends. Rita Reinhardt (previously married to Ad Reinhardt) was also part of the scene and had readily entered into discussion with the young Bowling after meeting him at a book launch at Al Held's studio.

In 1970, the relationship between Reinhardt and Bowling continued. As with the majority of Bowling's paintings the titles hold a poetic significance in unfolding moments in the artist's life. Originally named Ziprowski, Reinhardt was born to a Polish father and a German mother and had relocated to New York after World War II. It was Jimmy Taylor who gave Rita Reinhardt the nickname 'Polish Rebecca'. Subsequently it was used as the title for one of his most expansive and adventurous painting to that date. Throughout Bowling's career he has continued to use the names of friends, lovers, acquaintances and those he admired as titles for his monumental and moving paintings.