Sir Alan Bowness, director of the Tate Gallery in the 1980s and son-in-law of Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, donated to the UL his extensive art history library, containing many exhibition catalogues and private view cards. In recent years several blog posts have been devoted to progress on the Bowness collection, the earliest in 2019. This year I have been working on adding more exhibition catalogues to the library catalogue. I have been struck by how relevant the collection is now as over and over again I have noticed links between it and the 2024 cultural world.
The concept of synchronicity, to describe apparently meaningful coincidences in one person’s life, was introduced by Carl Jung. This seems to have happened to me in relation to my work on the Bowness collection a few times in recent weeks. I often listen to the BBC Radio 4 arts programme Front Row on my commute into work. In one episode there was a discussion on March hares and one of the guests was the artist Sophie Ryder. Later that day I opened the next box of books to work on and came across Sophie Ryder: recent work (Bowness.b.1143) with a fine example on the front cover of the work she had been describing (Crawling Lady-Hare).
A few days later I heard another Front Row piece responding to the news of the death of the American sculptor Richard Serra and then shortly afterwards found a German exhibition catalogue of his works, Richard Serra: Skulpturen und Zeichnungen 1967-1983 (Bowness.b.1164). Serra died on 26th March and by the time I was cataloguing this book on 3rd April I was impressed (apologies for the library geekiness!) that his death date had already been added to the authorised form of his name by the Library of Congress.
In early April I saw a news story about the Marlborough Gallery closing later this year. In normal circumstances this would have probably meant little to me but I instantly thought of all the exhibition catalogues I had processed for Marlborough Gallery shows. These range from the 1960s (for the sculptor David Smith) through to the early 21st century (Paula Rego) and also include those for Tom Phillips and etchings and woodcuts by Ken Kiff.
In the back of the most recent of these, Paula Rego: new etchings 2009 (Bowness.b.1125) a list is given of artists that the Marlborough Gallery was agents for. This contains many well-known names:
Going back in time, I spotted a similar list in the back of the 1968 Brett Whiteley: recent work (Bowness.b.1249) with lists of artists represented and past exhibitions from the 1950s and 1960s:
Other Bowness collection books passing across my desk which relate to current or recent exhibitions include Georg Baselitz: new paintings (Bowness.b.1275) – an exhibition of his work runs until June 2024 in Bermondsey – and the 2010 Alice Neel: paintings (Bowness.b.1059). A major exhibition of Alice Neel‘s work was held at the Barbican in London in 2023 and while I did not visit it, I remembered hearing the Front Row review of it so her name was familiar to me. Our 2010 catalogue primarily contains portraits and I noticed that pretty much all the white subjects were named but the exhibition included portraits simply called ‘Black man’ and ‘The Arab’ with no further clues as to who these people were. This depersonalisation is something we are much more sensitive to now but Neel created these works in 1966 and 1976 respectively and I don’t believe that she meant to cause any offence, given that she lived in East Harlem and delighted in painting her neighbours, many of whom were immigrants and ethnic minorities.
Finally, one book which caught my eye because it made me feel very hungry was the 2014 Wayne Thiebaud exhibition catalogue (Bowness.a.300). Many of the paintings were of food including the one featured on the front cover with some very tempting cakes!
Katharine Dicks
Languages across Borders 