Alan Bowness


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

Early life

Bowness was born in Finchley 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 Lebanon from 1946 to 1950.
From 1950 to 1953, he studied Modern Languages at Downing College, 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 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 and Recent British Painting . 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 he curated 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.

Later life 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 appointed a CBE in 1976 and knighted in 1988. He was 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.
Bowness died at his home in London on 1 March 2021, aged 93.
A selection of his writings, with an introduction by Dawn Ades, was published by Art Publishing Inc. in 2025.

Publications

Bowness's published writings 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

  • '.
  • ' .
  • Memories of Barbara, Ben and the St Ives Modernists.