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Painted in 1968-1970, Degaulle G.E.P. belongs to Frank Bowling’s highly coveted series of ‘Map Paintings’ - the series that established his international reputation and remains the defining achievement of his early career. Produced over five years following his move to New York in 1966, these works are formally inventive and politically resonant in equal measure, and are considered among the most significant achievements of post-war abstraction. First shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971, they were rediscovered at the 2003 Venice Biennale and celebrated in Bowling’s landmark retrospective at Tate Britain’s 2019. Bridging the gap between American Colour Field painting and Black historical experience, the series combines the scale and ambition of the former with the themes of migration, colonial history and the African diaspora – Bowling wasn’t trying to emulate his American contemporaries but instead create a new language that was distinctly his own. Degaulle G.E.P. is the first work from this ground breaking series to come to auction.
The present work’s title records a curious moment from its making: a pool of paint, applied to raw canvas on the studio floor, began to take the shape of a head. ‘At first look it seemed like a caricature of General de Gaulle’, Bowling later recalled, ‘but as the paint settled it looked less like de Gaulle and more like a map of South America’ (Bowling, interviewed by John Bunker, 2013). Beneath the surface lies a grid of repeated silkscreened photographs depicting two of Bowling’s sons. Sasha, seated on his father’s shoulders, appears along the lower part of the canvas, while Dan fills the two rows above. Bowling built the composition up over them so extensively that the faces can now only just be discerned, a feat of concealment that gives the surface much of its depth. The Gulf of California is visible towards the upper left and South America occupies the heart of the composition; the Brazilian coastline merging and the eponymous nose of de Gaulle. Bowling had been drawing the outlines of South America, Africa and his native Guyana freehand before his friend Larry Rivers introduced him to the epidiascope, a device that allowed him to trace these continental forms onto canvas with striking precision. Working on the studio floor, staining and pouring paint with a confident command of colour and gesture, he allowed each image to emerge and evolve as he worked.
Bowling’s choice of geography was as considered as it was distinctive. Maps – for an artist whose life was spent moving between continents – are inseparable from questions of migration and displacement, and he returns to them as a means of reflecting on the long afterlife of colonial history. Degaulle G.E.P., like all the map paintings, privileges the southern hemisphere, gently overturning the conventions of Western cartography, in which South America, Africa and the Caribbean are so often pushed to the map’s edge. In the present work, Bowling makes the map entirely his own, transforming an instrument of empire into something luminous and deeply personal.
This transformation nevertheless invited debate. Derek Walcott, the Nobel Prize-winning Saint Lucian poet, is said to have challenged Bowling for straying from ‘the Caribbean spirit’, suggesting that a true Caribbean artist ought to paint ‘cane-cutters and suffering’ rather than abstraction (Bowling, quoted in M. Jaggi, ‘Books: The Weight of Colour’, The Guardian, 24 February 2007). Bowling met this challenge with characteristic conviction – a conviction Degaulle G.E.P. embodies – both on canvas and in print. As a contributing editor at Arts Magazine through these same years, and as organiser of the landmark 5+1 exhibition at Stony Brook University in 1969, he made an eloquent case for abstraction as a wholly legitimate, unapologetically individual mode of expression for black artists, a practice the scholar Kobena Mercer would later term Bowling’s ‘diasporic abstraction’ (K. Mercer (ed.), Discrepant Abstraction, London, 2006, p. 203).
The title’s suffix, ‘G.E.P.’, denotes ‘Guyana Embassy Pictures’, the name given to a small and significant group of works exhibited at the Guyana Consulate in New York in 1972, in the exhibition Two Guyanese Painters: Frank Bowling and Philip Moore. Within the Map Paintings series, these works constitute a distinct chapter. Degaulle G.E.P., in addition, is closely related to Bowling’s monumental ‘Middle Passage’ paintings, which addressed the forced Atlantic crossing of enslaved Africans. It shares their palette, as well as their method of building over an underlayer of silkscreened family photographs. The present work is unique in combining the cartographic ambition of the ‘Map Paintings’ with the importance of the G.E.P. exhibited works and the historical weight of the ‘Middle Passage’ paintings.
The ‘Map Paintings’ were recently the subject of Frank Bowling’s Americas, the major touring exhibition of 2022-23, in which the present lot was included. As Gilane Tawadros, curator of Bowling’s Venice Biennale presentation, has commented, his ‘experiments in paint in the 1960s, and since, were way ahead of their time. He paved the way for other artists for whom political and aesthetic considerations are not seen as separate’ (quoted in M. Jaggi, op. cit.). Much as Hockney is synonymous with swimming pools and Warhol with Marilyn, Bowling’s ‘Map Paintings’ are considered the defining achievement of his early career. Relatively finite in number, most works from this formally innovative and politically resonant series are held in museum collections. The sale of Degaulle G.E.P. marks the first time a painting from this distinctive series has appeared at auction.
The present work’s title records a curious moment from its making: a pool of paint, applied to raw canvas on the studio floor, began to take the shape of a head. ‘At first look it seemed like a caricature of General de Gaulle’, Bowling later recalled, ‘but as the paint settled it looked less like de Gaulle and more like a map of South America’ (Bowling, interviewed by John Bunker, 2013). Beneath the surface lies a grid of repeated silkscreened photographs depicting two of Bowling’s sons. Sasha, seated on his father’s shoulders, appears along the lower part of the canvas, while Dan fills the two rows above. Bowling built the composition up over them so extensively that the faces can now only just be discerned, a feat of concealment that gives the surface much of its depth. The Gulf of California is visible towards the upper left and South America occupies the heart of the composition; the Brazilian coastline merging and the eponymous nose of de Gaulle. Bowling had been drawing the outlines of South America, Africa and his native Guyana freehand before his friend Larry Rivers introduced him to the epidiascope, a device that allowed him to trace these continental forms onto canvas with striking precision. Working on the studio floor, staining and pouring paint with a confident command of colour and gesture, he allowed each image to emerge and evolve as he worked.
Bowling’s choice of geography was as considered as it was distinctive. Maps – for an artist whose life was spent moving between continents – are inseparable from questions of migration and displacement, and he returns to them as a means of reflecting on the long afterlife of colonial history. Degaulle G.E.P., like all the map paintings, privileges the southern hemisphere, gently overturning the conventions of Western cartography, in which South America, Africa and the Caribbean are so often pushed to the map’s edge. In the present work, Bowling makes the map entirely his own, transforming an instrument of empire into something luminous and deeply personal.
This transformation nevertheless invited debate. Derek Walcott, the Nobel Prize-winning Saint Lucian poet, is said to have challenged Bowling for straying from ‘the Caribbean spirit’, suggesting that a true Caribbean artist ought to paint ‘cane-cutters and suffering’ rather than abstraction (Bowling, quoted in M. Jaggi, ‘Books: The Weight of Colour’, The Guardian, 24 February 2007). Bowling met this challenge with characteristic conviction – a conviction Degaulle G.E.P. embodies – both on canvas and in print. As a contributing editor at Arts Magazine through these same years, and as organiser of the landmark 5+1 exhibition at Stony Brook University in 1969, he made an eloquent case for abstraction as a wholly legitimate, unapologetically individual mode of expression for black artists, a practice the scholar Kobena Mercer would later term Bowling’s ‘diasporic abstraction’ (K. Mercer (ed.), Discrepant Abstraction, London, 2006, p. 203).
The title’s suffix, ‘G.E.P.’, denotes ‘Guyana Embassy Pictures’, the name given to a small and significant group of works exhibited at the Guyana Consulate in New York in 1972, in the exhibition Two Guyanese Painters: Frank Bowling and Philip Moore. Within the Map Paintings series, these works constitute a distinct chapter. Degaulle G.E.P., in addition, is closely related to Bowling’s monumental ‘Middle Passage’ paintings, which addressed the forced Atlantic crossing of enslaved Africans. It shares their palette, as well as their method of building over an underlayer of silkscreened family photographs. The present work is unique in combining the cartographic ambition of the ‘Map Paintings’ with the importance of the G.E.P. exhibited works and the historical weight of the ‘Middle Passage’ paintings.
The ‘Map Paintings’ were recently the subject of Frank Bowling’s Americas, the major touring exhibition of 2022-23, in which the present lot was included. As Gilane Tawadros, curator of Bowling’s Venice Biennale presentation, has commented, his ‘experiments in paint in the 1960s, and since, were way ahead of their time. He paved the way for other artists for whom political and aesthetic considerations are not seen as separate’ (quoted in M. Jaggi, op. cit.). Much as Hockney is synonymous with swimming pools and Warhol with Marilyn, Bowling’s ‘Map Paintings’ are considered the defining achievement of his early career. Relatively finite in number, most works from this formally innovative and politically resonant series are held in museum collections. The sale of Degaulle G.E.P. marks the first time a painting from this distinctive series has appeared at auction.