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