Alan Bowness


Sir Alan Bowness CBE is a British art historian and former museum director. He was the Director of the Tate Gallery between 1980 and 1988.

Early life

Bowness was born in Finchley, London to Kathleen and George Bowness, a school teacher. He was educated at University College School in Hampstead. Leaving school at the end of the war, he worked with the Friends’ Ambulance Unit and the Friends’ Service Council in England, Germany and the Lebanon from 1946 to 1950.
From 1950 to 1953 he studied Modern Languages at Downing College, University of Cambridge. From 1953 to 1955 he was a postgraduate student at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, specialising in nineteenth-century French art.

1953 to 1980

Bowness was active as an art critic in the late 1950s and early 1960s, writing for The Observer, Arts, Art News and Review, The Times Literary Supplement and The Burlington Magazine. He became a Regional Art Officer for the Arts Council in 1956, with responsibilities for the South West of England. In April that year he visited St Ives, Cornwall, where he met a number of artists who had settled there, including Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Peter Lanyon and Patrick Heron. In 1957 Bowness married Sarah Hepworth-Nicholson, daughter of Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson.
In 1957 Bowness began teaching at the Courtauld Institute of Art. He became a Reader in 1967 and a Professor in 1978. His popular book Modern European Art has been translated into French, German, Italian and Korean.
During the 1960s Bowness co-curated two major exhibitions of contemporary art at the Tate Gallery, London. 54:64 Painting and Sculpture of a Decade was curated with Lawrence Gowing, and Recent British Painting with Norman Reid and Lilian Somerville. During the 1960s and 1970s he also curated exhibitions for the Arts Council, including Vincent van Gogh, Rodin, French Symbolist Painters and Gustave Courbet, as well as Post-Impressionism. Retrospectives of contemporary artists for the Tate Gallery include Ivon Hitchens, Jean Dubuffet, Peter Lanyon and William Scott.
Between 1960 and 1970, Bowness published complete catalogues of the sculpture of Barbara Hepworth. Following the artist’s death in 1975, Bowness ran the Hepworth Estate. In accordance with Hepworth’s wishes, he oversaw the opening of her former house and studio in St Ives as the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden in 1976. Since 2008 has been run by his daughter, art historian Sophie Bowness.

Tate Gallery 1980 to 1988

Between 1980 and 1988 Bowness was Director of the Tate Gallery. During this time he realised the expansion of Tate’s Millbank site by creating the Clore Wing to display the work of J.M.W. Turner, uniting the collection which had been divided between the British Museum and the Tate. He instigated the creation of Tate Liverpool, which opened in May 1988. At a time when Tate’s public grant had been capped, Bowness established patrons’ groups to fund the purchase of historic and contemporary work. Tate’s collection of post-war American and European art grew especially substantially during this time. Bowness also began the preparations for Tate St Ives.
The Turner Prize was established under Bowness’s directorship in 1984 as an initiative to foster interest in contemporary British art.

Other positions and honours

After retiring from the Tate, Bowness became Director of the Henry Moore Foundation, setting up the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, Yorkshire. He was made a CBE in 1976 and knighted in 1988. He is also an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art, the Courtauld Institute of Art and Downing College, Cambridge.
His collection of paintings by British artists, 1950–70, is bequeathed to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and his art history library to Cambridge University Library.

Publications

His publications include:
Introduction, Four English Middle Generation Painters: Heron / Frost / Wynter / Hilton.
Catalogue of works in J.P. Hodin, Barbara Hepworth.
William Scott: Paintings.
Henry Moore: Complete Sculpture, vol. 2 to vol. 6.
Alan Davie.
Peter Lanyon.
‘Vincent in England’ and catalogue, Vincent van Gogh.
The Complete Sculpture of Barbara Hepworth 1960­–69.
Gauguin.
Modern European Art.
Ivon Hitchens.
Victor Pasmore: with a catalogue raisonné of the paintings, constructions and graphics, 1926-1979, with Luigi Lambertini.
The Conditions of Success: How the Modern Artist Rises to Fame, based on the Walter Neurath Memorial Lecture, 1989.
Poetry and Painting: Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and their Painter Friends, based on the Zaharoff Lecture for 1991–2.
‘Ten Good Years’ in Generation Painting 1955–65: British Art from the Collection of Sir Alan Bowness.

Filmed interviews

Trewyn Studio.
Memories of Barbara, Ben and the St Ives Modernists.