Donald Bowen
Curator who championed the art of the Commonwealth
DONALD BOWEN, who has died aged 101, was curator at the Commonwealth Institute for two decades, programming more than 200 exhibitions featuring artists from across the world at its West London headquarters.
He was keen to establish art from Africa, Asia and Australasia on an equal footing with more familiar European work. Exhibitions ranged from solo shows for the likes of the New Zealand glass artist John Hutton and the Ghanaian sculptor Vincent Kofi (both 1969) to group surveys such as Three Decades of Jamaican Painting, staged in 1971.
Donald Bowen was born in London on September 20 1917, the son of workers in the West End hotel trade. After the Sloane School in Chelsea he tried being a chartered accountant, but his passion was art and he enrolled in night classes at Chelsea School of Art.
Soon he met Austin Osman Spare, an eccentric English artist and occultist who lived in digs above the loading bay of a Woolworths at Elephant and Castle. While Spare was turning to surrealism in his drawings, and Bowen remained faithful to producing realistic renderings of landscapes, his impromptu teacher developed Bowen’s eye for detail.
War intervened, however, and in 1940 Bowen was part of the infantry advancing south from Arras. But when the allies were pushed back, Bowen was separated from his platoon. Travelling to Dunkirk on foot, he came across a wounded British soldier whom he helped to safety, and they were evacuated.
In 1943 he was commissioned into the Royal Engineers and left for India. Promoted to major, he was stationed in Lahore and then in Delhi. Despite succumbing to malaria, Bowen was mesmerised by India, and spent spare time sketching buildings and countryside.
Returning to London he enrolled at the Byam Shaw School, developing a passion for Dürer’s etchings. He worked as a draughtsman for Whitefriars stained glass studios between 1951 and 1953; his preparatory sketch work found its way into the heraldic windows for the Great Hall at Lincoln’s Inn.
On graduation he got a job as exhibitions officer at the Imperial Institute, becoming curator in 1962 when the museum became
the Commonwealth Institute and the Queen opened its modernist headquarters in Kensington.
Reviews of Bowen’s inaugural exhibition, Commonwealth Art Today, were mixed – a critic for Apollo sniffed that there was “no such thing as Commonwealth Art”. But his reputation grew. In 1963 Bowen organised the First Commonwealth Biennale of Abstract Art at the gallery, which he hoped would emphasise the institution’s forward-thinking nature.
Among the high-profile names exhibited during Bowen’s tenure were Frank Bowling, Aubrey Williams, Avinash Chandra, Ben Enwonwu and FN Souza. In 1964 he installed a bronze sculpture of a parrot by Ronald Moody in the museum grounds, a version of which stands today on the University of the West Indies campus in Jamaica.
Bowen gained a reputation as fastidious and sometimes adventurous. A show of Trinidadian carnival costumes featured “magnificent conglomerations of ostrich feathers, beads, shells sequins, gold and silver threads and much rich cloth”, Art News and Review reported in 1965, and was accompanied by a steel band.
In 1968 he took a research trip to West Africa and in 1969 the Canadian Society for Education invited him on a lecture tour. Bowen kept a pencil and sketch book at hand to record his travels.
He retired in 1979 but continued sketching in his Sutton home and occasionally taking on students. His topographical drawings were shown at the Sutton College of Liberal Arts and have been collected by the V&A and Falmouth Art Gallery. As well as more exotic views, later subjects included Cornwall and London.
Donald Bowen, born September 20 1917, died July 26 2019