Letters: Sir Alan Bowness obituary
JudithBronkhurstandSusanLintott
Sir Alan Bowness in 2015. Photograph: Tate
Sir Alan Bowness in 2015. Photograph: Tate
Mon 5 Apr 2021 12.38 EDT
Last modified on Mon 5 Apr 2021 14.50 EDT
As director of the Tate Gallery, Alan Bowness always included a gallery devoted to the Pre-Raphaelites in the permanent display, and the enormously popular exhibition devoted to them in 1984 attracted more than 200,000 visitors. The catalogue presented the fruits of first-hand research (I wrote on Holman Hunt), and many more exhibitions and books followed in Britain and internationally.
Judith Bronkhurst
Alan Bowness viewed his involvement with the opening of the Heong Gallery at Downing C0llege, Cambridge, in 2016 as a “wonderful last act”. Meeting the architect – Adam Caruso – was an important step in obtaining his commitment to the project.
Some achieve distinction in one or possibly two branches of the world of art, but few, if any, are outstanding in all of them. Alan Bowness – art historian, curator and museum director, critic and journalist, and a collector himself – was just such a man, for all his personal modesty and quiet public profile. What drove him was his love for, and thirst for knowledge of, 19th- and 20th-century art – painting and sculpture especially. This allowed him to become one of the most effective proselytisers for contemporary art, which in Alan’s heyday was very much a minority, and some would say elitist interest. (As an educator, he no doubt thought that every individual, with self-willed effort, might join in the pleasures that all the arts bring.)
Alan Bowness was an art historian whose eye and influence shaped the British contemporary art world over more than 40 years. He never sought the limelight, but his quiet self-assurance and belief in his own convictions inspired confidence in others and made him the most persuasive and effective voice in a talented post-war generation of curators, writers and critics.
In the late 1950s and through the 60s and 70s, he was a pioneering academic and a friend to a generation of abstract artists in England, whose work he championed in print and in the many committees on which he served. In the 80s he became a more public figure as the director of the Tate Gallery, where he made important acquisitions for the national collection, achieved a resolution of the long-running debate about how to honour J.M.W. Turner’s magnificent bequest to the nation and established a new northern outpost for the gallery in creating Tate Liverpool. In the 90s and beyond, he continued his patronage as
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As Alan Bowness stood in the middle of a disused warehouse on the Albert Dock in Liverpool at the end of a stormy and blustery day, he could see the potential. Where tea, silk, spirits and tobacco had