CHAPTER ONE

The Pioneering Generation of
Caribbean Artists

When Rasheed Araeen included the sculpture of Ronald Moody in The Other Story: Afro-Asian artists in post-war Britain, Hayward Gallery, London, 1989, it was an opportunity for gallery audiences to acquaint themselves, or reacquaint themselves, with the work of an important Jamaican-born sculptor who had died about five years earlier. The Other Story brought together 11 of Moody’s key works, and collectively they formed a striking and impressive introduction to the exhibition. Whilst Moody had had a lifetime filled with making and exhibiting art, and undertaking other visual arts projects, it was only in the wake of his death that his work became more widely known, beyond the Caribbean art circles in which it had often been exhibited.

Moody was born in Jamaica in 1900 and was to spend well over half a century making art, right up until the time of his death in 1984. Though Jamaican by birth, Moody maintained something of an uneasy relationship with the country. There were no major exhibitions of his work in Jamaica during his lifetime, though he was awarded the prestigious Gold Musgrave medal by the Institute of Jamaica in the late 1970s. The first substantial exhibition of Moody’s work at the National Gallery of Jamaica took place in 2000, some 16 years after his death.

Moody was a sculptor who came to his practice after being inspired by visits to the British Museum, where he was particularly drawn to the galleries of Egyptian and Asian art. From his earliest work through to his later practice, Moody’s sculptures reflected his interest in ancient and world ideas of metaphysics (the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time, and space.) In contrast to this distinctive work, Moody produced a number of portraits, in a somewhat more conventional, though nevertheless striking, vein. These included a bust, made in 1946, of his brother Harold Moody. Some years previously, in the early 1930s, Harold Moody had been instrumental in founding, in London, the League of Coloured Peoples, which had the aim of racial equality for all peoples throughout the world, though the league’s principal focus of activity was the racial situation in Britain itself. Another very important bust produced by Ronald Moody was his rendering of Paul Robeson, the African-American singer, actor of stage and screen, and civil rights campaigner, in copper resin, in 1968.

3. Bird that Never Was arrives in Kensington (21 August 1964), press photograph with the following note:

Placed in position on the lawn of the Commonwealth Institute in High Street, Kensington, today, was a 7ft 10in tall, 5 cwt cast aluminium sculpture of a mythical “SAVACOU” bird, which was designed by Jamaican sculptor RONALD MOODY. The “SAVACOU” which existed only in Caribbean mythology, will remain there on view to the public for about a month before going to Jamaica where it will be placed in front of the Epidemiological Research Unit of the University of the West Indies, to whom it was presented by their director, and the director of a smaller unit in South Wales.

In looking at his sculpture, particularly his dramatic faces, heads, and figures, his work has the appearance not so much of racialised imagery (what we might term the Black image, or the Black form); instead, it presents itself to us as a compelling amalgamation of the breadth of humanity. It is in work such as Johanaan that we see most clearly the artist’s embrace of the transcendental and the metaphysical. Veerle Poupeye noted that ‘In the 1960s Moody became more actively interested in his Caribbean background. His best-known work of the period, Savacou (1964) represents a stylized, emblematic parrot figure inspired by the mythical bird deity of the Carib Indians.’¹ The work exists in both its finished form (as a commission for the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica) as well as in maquette form. The finished work, made of aluminium, is a dramatic and distinctive feature of the campus. A photograph of the work is reproduced in this book.

In the years following The Other Story, Moody’s niece, Cynthia Moody, worked tirelessly to preserve, safeguard and advance his legacy. A hugely significant landmark of this process was the acquisition by the Tate Gallery, in 1992, of the magnificent and imposing figure of Johanaan (sometimes known as John the Baptist). Unfortunately, Moody’s sculpture has yet to be the subject of a major monograph, though a number of texts on his life and practice have been published. Chief amongst them perhaps is Cynthia Moody’s own Ronald Moody: A man true to his Vision, which appeared in Third Text;² and Guy Brett’s substantial feature on Ronald Moody in the magazine Tate International Arts and Culture.³ The Brett article, ‘A Reputation Restored’, was introduced as follows: ‘Self-taught wood-carver Ronald Moody, a former dentist born in Jamaica, is revealed as one of Britain’s most remarkable Modernist sculptors in a new display at Tate Britain.’⁴

An invaluable appraisal of Moody and his work appeared in British magazine The Studio, in the January 1950 issue of the magazine.⁵ The writer, Marie Seton, had the measure of Moody when, early on in the text, she expressed the view that the sculptor’s work, ‘is concerned with man as an evolving type, is unique, haunting and far from easy to label.’ The wide-ranging text recalled moments of high drama in Moody’s life, particularly his escape, with his wife, from Nazi-occupied France. He had earlier moved to Paris, where his first one-man exhibition ‘took place towards the end of 1937 at the Galerie Billiet-Vorms.’ Recounting Moody’s flight, Seton wrote:

Then the German juggernaut approached Paris and many of Moody’s most beautiful works were dispersed across occupied France. Moody and his wife escaped from Paris with the stream of refugees and finally reached Marseilles on foot. For months the existence of a refugee kept him inactive. This terrible period has left its mark upon his later work, accomplished when at last he escaped to England (by the daring act of walking across the Pyrenees into Spain and crossing that country with the help of the ‘underground’ to Gibraltar.’⁶

Clearly a great admirer of Moody’s work, Seton noted, ‘With each work he has captured a greater degree of sensitivity within the human spirit and achieved a greater and more subtle feeling of spiritual unity.’⁷

Moody’s work was included in the exhibition Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance, which toured to galleries in the UK and the US in 1997 and 1998. Within the exhibition’s catalogue there is a fascinating full-page reproduction of a gallery installation view of Children looking up at Ronald C. Moody’s Midonz (Goddess of Transmutation), taken in 1939. Within the credit, neither the United States’ gallery nor the exhibition itself are identified. The exhibition was very likely to have been one sponsored by the Harmon Foundation, which was particularly active in exhibiting work by Negro artists during the 1930s.

Guyana (formerly British Guiana), a relatively small country nestled between Venezuela, Brazil and Surinam, produced several pioneering Caribbean artists who made their way to Britain during the mid twentieth century. These artists included Denis Williams, born in 1923, Aubrey Williams (1926), Donald Locke (1930) and Frank Bowling (1936). In years to come, another Guyana-born artist, Ingrid Pollard, born in 1953, would also figure prominently in narratives of Black artists in British art. Bowling first came to London at the age of 14, to complete his schooling. He was first a poet, eventually turning to painting in his late teens. After periods of study at art colleges in London, his career as a painter began in earnest with solo exhibitions in London in the early 60s. Bowling has come to be universally known and widely respected for his abstract paintings, ranging from large expansive affairs rich with colour and texture, through to smaller, much more compact works. He came to abstract art via figurative painting, at the beginning of the 1970s. Before that time, his art of the late 50s and 60s was figurative and resonated with distinct social and political narratives. Bowling himself cited the death of Patrice Lumumba (in 1961) as being one of his themes during this period.⁸

Whilst Bowling was born in Bartica, a tip of land by the Essequibo river, Williams was born in Georgetown, Guyana’s capital. After settling in London in his late twenties, he enrolled at St Martin’s School of Art and soon established a career as a prolific and on occasions widely exhibited artist. An active member of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), Williams came to be closely associated with the presence of Caribbean art/artists in London and his work was featured in a very significant number of Caribbean art exhibitions. One critic sought to explore the commonalities shared by Bowling and Williams.

On the face of it, Aubrey Williams and Frank Bowling have little in common apart from being modern artists from Guyana who chose to work in different modes of abstraction. Abstract expressionism was predominant when Williams enrolled at St Martin’s School of Art in London in the mid 1950s, whereas Bowling’s career began after he graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1962 when Pop Art was the rising paradigm of the mid 1960s. While such generational differences account for their dissimilarities as abstract artists, it could be observed, however, that Williams and Bowling shared a modernist commitment to the practice of painting as an intellectual activity that demanded continuous reflection on the ideas, sources and materials of their work.⁹

4. Aubrey Williams, Arawak (1959).

In a number of ways, the environment that Black immigrant artists found in the London art world of the 1950s and early 1960s was wholly conducive to their ambitions as artists and their keenness to contribute to the exciting culture of Modernism, which they regarded as having pronounced international dimensions that created a tangible commonality amongst artists. This moment ultimately proved to be something of a fleeting one, though whilst it lasted artists such as Williams and Indian artist Francis Newton Souza were able to exhibit regularly. Kobena Mercer described London’s environment of what he called ‘a post-colonial internationalism’:

Williams also participated in what could be called a post-colonial internationalism that played a significant role in the independent gallery sector. The New Visions Group, which hosted three solo exhibitions by Williams between 1958 and 1960, had been formed by South African artist Denis Bowen in 1951. Dedicated to non-figurative art, the group operated as a non-profit artists’-run organisation whose exhibition policy for the Marble Arch gallery it opened in 1956 promoted abstract artists from Commonwealth countries alongside tachisme, constructivism and kinetic art from various European contexts. Gallery One, set up by Victor Musgrave in 1953, hosted five exhibitions by the Bombay artist Francis Newton Souza, as well as exhibiting avant-garde Europeans such as Yves Klein and Henri Michaux for the first time in Britain. Such openness towards non-western artists was part and parcel of a broader generational shift. Artists such as Souza, Anwar Shemza and Avinash Chandra, who had already achieved professional recognition in India and Pakistan, featured in Gallery One’s widely acclaimed Seven Painters in Europe (1958) exhibition.¹⁰

Both Bowling and Williams secured significant exhibition opportunities for themselves, as young painters in London in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In this endeavour, the Grabowski Gallery (which one art historian succinctly described as having a ‘global outlook’)¹¹ was of huge importance. Grabowski Gallery, London, operated between 1959 and 1975. It was the art gallery of a Polish pharmacist, located at 84 Sloane Avenue, Chelsea, London SW3. In 1960, Williams exhibited there alongside Denis Bowen, Max Chapman, and Anthony Underhill, in an exhibition titled Continuum. In 1962, it was the venue for Image in Revolt, two concurrent solo exhibitions of paintings by Derek Boshier and Frank Bowling. Both artists were at the time in their early to mid twenties. Shortly thereafter, Grabowski Gallery again exhibited the work of Bowling in a group show that also included the work of two other artists from Commonwealth countries: William Thomson (Canada) and Neil Stocker (Australia). Williams also had a solo exhibition at Grabowski Gallery, in January of 1963. The extent to which Bowen and Williams worked together during the late 1950 and early 1960s was indicated in an addendum that Bowen wrote for an obituary on Aubrey Williams, published in the Guardian newspaper shortly after the artist died in 1990: ‘Aubrey Williams was one of the most outstanding and individual of the artists who exhibited at the New Vision Centre Gallery in London which I directed from 1956 to 1966.’¹²

These early career successes of Bowling and Williams were followed by other periods of notable accomplishments, though in the case of Williams, his most substantial exhibitions were very much posthumous endeavours, the artist himself dying in 1990. But for pretty much all of the rest of the twentieth century, these artists’ (and indeed other Black artists) periods of relative success very much alternated with periods during which they struggled to maintain professional visibility. To a great extent, this cycle of periods of relative visibility being punctuated by longer periods of invisibility was something that has to differing degrees characterised the history of Black-British artists from the mid twentieth century onwards. In some instances, as mentioned earlier, certain artists’ most successful episodes of visibility have been posthumous. Throughout the period covered by this book, the visibility of Black-British artists – both individual visibility and group visibility – has been subject to a variety of pressures, factors and on occasion, initiatives taken by artists themselves. Again, some of these initiatives have been taken at an individual level and some have come about as a result of group or institutional activity.

An indication of Bowling’s determination to succeed as an artist can be ascertained in the opening remarks of a review of the aforementioned exhibition he shared with Derek Boshier, Image in Revolt, at Grabowski Gallery in 1962:¹³

[Bowling] is twenty-seven years old and comes from British Guiana which he left about eleven years ago. Born to be an artist, he has felt a certainty of his own destiny that will not be denied, come hell or high water.¹⁴

Despite early career successes, Bowling found himself on a trajectory somewhat different from that of the white friends and colleagues with whom he had studied and enjoyed early exhibition opportunities. In one of his essays for The Other Story catalogue, Rasheed Araeen took up the dispiriting tale.

[Bowling] was on his way to a successful career when things began to go wrong. Although he considered himself part of that Royal College group (Hockney, Boshier, Kitaj, Phillips) which represented the emergence of ‘new figuration’ in Britain, [Bowling] found that he was being left out of group exhibitions, on the basis that his work was different from theirs.

Bowling himself refers to his apparent exclusion in decidedly unvarnished terms. ‘So I was isolated. It was a racist thing anyway, the whole thing.’¹⁵ Perhaps the most shocking and sobering passage of Araeen’s discussion of Bowling in The Other Story catalogue was the reference to an exchange that apparently confirmed Bowling’s marginalisation.

After [Bowling’s] exclusion from the important ‘New Generation’ exhibition at the Whitechapel in 1964, which featured all his friends who were later to become famous, he was shocked. He was confused because he had received critical acclaim from almost every art critic of note and there was tremendous enthusiasm for his work. When he tried to find out why he was turned down he was told: ‘England is not yet ready for a gifted artist of colour.’ ¹⁶

From then, up to the present day, Black-British artists have often found themselves not generally included, or not much more than a peripheral presence, in exhibitions that purport to be representative of wider or specific trends in British art. Notwithstanding apparent discrimination, there have been pronounced historical episodes during which artists such as Bowling, Williams and others enjoyed the professional company of other artists, thereby allowing, or enabling, them to be included in wider dialogues about artistic practice. One such exhibition was the 1st Commonwealth Biennale of Abstract Art, an innovative undertaking held at the Commonwealth Institute, London, in the autumn of 1963. The exhibition featured a number of artists from Commonwealth countries, many of whom had settled in Britain over the course of the preceding decade or so. For example, Aubrey Williams had been resident in England since 1954; South Asian artists such as Ashu Roy had lived in London since 1951, Viren Sahai since 1954, Kamil Khan since 1957 and Ahmed Parvez since 1955.

Within the 1st Commonwealth Biennale of Abstract Art were contributions from artists such as John Drawbridge, from New Zealand, James Boswell, also from New Zealand, and Bill Featherston, from Canada. The exhibition clearly demonstrated the extent to which abstract art had been embraced, championed and pioneered by artists from all over the world, including African, Asian and Caribbean countries of the Commonwealth. The exhibition was supplemented by contributions from ‘well and lesser-known artists from the United Kingdom’¹⁷ including Frank Avray Wilson, Peter Lanyon, Denis Bowen and Victor Pasmore. The slim accompanying catalogue had the following text on its back cover:

The aims of the Commonwealth Biennale are to bring to public attention the work of Commonwealth abstract artists living and working in the United Kingdom, to define the part played by them in the development of painting and sculpture in this country, and to draw to the attention of various Commonwealth countries the achievement of their nationals.

The grouping of the Exhibition is not intended to convey a specific trend in abstract art, but is rather a cross section of significant development in avant-garde work in the United Kingdom.

The Commonwealth Biennale will bring these aims into effect by means of exhibitions at two yearly intervals organised by the artists themselves and with the co-operation of the Commonwealth Institute, and by means of touring exhibitions of selected work in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth.

In his Foreword/Introduction, Charles Spencer wrote:

This exhibition, it will immediately be seen, is restricted to abstract painting. This in itself imposes and presents certain significant suggestions. On one level it establishes the fact that artists from 10 different countries, from widely different cultural backgrounds, and, needless to say, of different religious and racial origins, share a common technical and aesthetic language. Whatever has provoked them to express themselves in visual terms, and whatever philosophical or spiritual comment they wish to make, they have chosen the rather more difficult and complex method of non-figuration.

One of Bowling’s notable accomplishments of the early 1960s was having his work acquired for the Arts Council Collection, in 1962, making him one of the first Black artists to be thus recognised. But Bowling dealt with the frustrations of his halting career by becoming more and more interested in the American painting scene, particularly the exciting things that were continuing to happen in New York. By the early 1960s Bowling had taken the first of the innumerable transatlantic flights that enabled him to maintain studios in New York and London, and maintain profiles as an energetic and prolific painter on both sides of the Atlantic. As one critic noted:

Bowling, both as a man and as an artist, has travelled enormous distances during his life […] His art has continued to evolve, and is still evolving today […] In another decade he will doubtless be painting in some quite new, unforeseeable idiom and dimension’.¹⁸

Having decamped to the United States, it was in New York, around 1966, that Bowling met, engaged with, and was influenced by abstract artists, both African-American and European-American. Thus began Bowling’s enduring love affair with Modernism, something to which he has remained steadfastly loyal, decade after decade. He has been quoted as citing influential critic of modern art, Clement Greenberg, as a major influence on this important and seismic development (a pronounced embrace of abstract painting) in his practice: ‘Clem was able to make me see that modernism belonged to me also, that I had no good reason to pretend I wasn’t part of the whole thing’¹⁹. The central and pivotal esteem in which Bowling places Modernism is evidenced by his statement that ‘I believe that the Black soul, if there can be such a thing, belongs in modernism.’²⁰ It was perhaps this attachment to Modernism that made Bowling, particularly within a British context, such a unique and fascinating artist.

Thus, with his pronounced embrace of Modernism, Bowling consistently refused to aesthetically rule himself out of this main current of mid twentieth century art practice, and its enduring application. Herein lay one of his most interesting aspects. As a Black artist, he (and indeed a few other Caribbean-born artists such as Williams, and later, Winston Branch) confounded and frustrated stereotypes of what work a ‘Black artist’ should be producing or might be expected to produce. Through his painting, he relentlessly expressed the view that for him, art should not be burdened down by considerations of race, racism or racial/national identity, notwithstanding the unpleasant ways allegations of race prejudice impacted on his emerging career in early to mid 1960s London.

Bowling did not make an immediate transition from figurative to non-figurative painting. A particularly fascinating body of work, known as his map paintings, formed something of a bridge between his figurative and abstract practices. Bowling’s map paintings were produced at a time when he was moving away from explicit figuration within his painting, but had not yet adopted the non-figuration with which he is now most commonly associated. In an essay on Bowling’s map paintings, Kobena Mercer suggested that they

come from a key moment of transition. Produced between 1967 and 1971, the works have been acknowledged as a distinct strand in his oeuvre that arose out of a shift from figurative painting to post-painterly abstraction during the artist’s relocation from London to New York in this period.²¹

Positing that Bowling’s map paintings were ‘perhaps an attempt to recover an identity that he had tried to suppress in the past’, Rasheed Araeen has described these paintings as ‘a mixture of colour fields superimposed upon iconographic allusions to his mother’s house in Guyana, maps of South America with Guyana emphasised, maps of Africa, etc.’²² There are three remarkable aspects of Bowling’s map paintings. Firstly, the ways in which they seek to visually craft the biography, the identity of this African- Caribbean person around and within the motif of the outline of the South American continent, on which he himself was born. Secondly, the map paintings create a South America visually charged with and by pronounced signifiers of Pan-African, or African Diasporic, identity. And thirdly, Bowling’s map paintings laid claim to, or declared themselves a part of, a modernist tradition in which South America was included. It may have been a keenness on the artist’s part for his work to engage in a dialogue with Pan-Latin Americanism that led him, in the early 1970s, to exhibit at the Center for Inter-American Relations, on Park Avenue, New York.²³

Bowling’s achievements were, perhaps belatedly, acknowledged in dramatic fashion when he was elected to the Royal Academy in 2005, making him the first Black British artist to be elected to the Royal Academy in its 200-year history. Further recognition was to come when he was made an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in the Queen’s Birthday Honours of 2008).²⁴

Concurrent to twists and turns in Bowling’s career, Williams’ own career was no less dramatic. An active member of an important and influential group of like-minded writers, intellectuals, poets and artists known as the Caribbean Artists Movement, Williams came to be closely associated with the presence of Caribbean art/artists in London and his work was featured in a very significant number of Caribbean art exhibitions. Writing in 1968, Edward Brathwaite described Williams as ‘an internationally recognised Guyanese painter who, with [Orlando] Patterson was to become one of the leading theoreticians of the [Caribbean Arts Movement].’²⁵ The early years of Williams’ practice in the UK was, as mentioned earlier, characterised by the decidedly mixed exhibiting company he was able to keep. Mention has already been made of exhibitions such as Continuum at Grabowski Gallery, and 1st Commonwealth Biennale of Abstract Art at the Commonwealth Institute. To such exhibitions of Williams’ work can be added Appointment With Six, a group show held at the Arun Art Centre, which was at the time a functioning gallery in Arundel, West Sussex. The exhibition took place towards the closing months of 1966 and featured Williams showing alongside Gwen Barnard, Pip Benveniste, Oswell Blakeston, Max Chapman, and A. Oscar. (The exhibition came with a modest but important catalogue, which had something of a homemade feel and aesthetic. The works listed in the catalogue were priced in guineas).

A passionate believer in humanity’s art and culture in its many and varied forms, Williams was responsible for a substantial body of work and his paintings have found their way into a number of important collections, including that of the Arts Council. It might in some ways be difficult to characterise Williams’ art, as the work for which he is perhaps most known and celebrated contains both figurative and non-figurative elements. On the one hand, his paintings reflected his interests in such varied subjects as aboriginal South American culture, cosmology, and the music of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. On the other hand, his work also declared an interest in form, shape, colour and composition. As art critic Guy Brett, a long-time friend and admirer of Williams noted, ‘Williams’ painting fluctuates between representational references and abstraction.’²⁶ Alongside such paintings there exists Williams’ sensitive and faithful renderings of bird life. In his concluding remarks in one of his essays on Williams, Brett cautioned against the instinct to typecast Williams’ practice.

It may be futile to try to explain painting. But it is also true that merely to name a motif in Williams’ painting as ‘pre-Columbian’ or Mayan does not suggest the complicated life it leads in its changed form within his work, where it moves between past and present, between natural and artificial beauty, between excitement and warning. To grant Aubrey Williams’ paintings their enigma only awakens one to their links with the actual, contemporary world.²⁷

One of the few London galleries to support Williams’ work, up to the time of his death in 1990, was October Gallery. This was, and indeed remains, a hugely important central London venue that has been a staunch supporter of a wide range of artists from a plurality of diasporic backgrounds, including Williams. The artists exhibiting there are drawn from places that include the countries of Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. A major exhibition of Williams’ work was held at Whitechapel Art Gallery in the summer of 1998. It was, perhaps, belated recognition for this artist, who had, as mentioned, died some eight years earlier at the relatively young age of 64. Williams’ posthumous Whitechapel exhibition was organised in collaboration with the Institute of International Visual Arts (INIVA). Notwithstanding the substantial nature of this bringing together of paintings produced over several decades, Williams arguably still does not occupy a significant position in the declared history of British postwar painting. Williams himself recounted the despondency he felt upon realising that his position in the British art world was perhaps more marginal than he would have liked:

But then, after two years all my shows were ignored. I began to ask myself what was wrong with me, what was wrong with my work. For the next five years I was in a terrible confusion. You know, I thought I had hit the level which would see me through both economically and respectably as a recognised artist in the British community.²⁸

This sentiment, substantially, alarmingly, reflects the despondency and bewilderment felt by Frank Bowling on finding his progress emphatically stymied by a British art world apparently only prepared to allow his career to progress thus far and no further.

In a substantial obituary on Aubrey Williams,²⁹ Guy Brett revisited a number of the sentiments and ideas he had expressed about Williams and his art in other, previously published texts. Though the piece was written more than two decades ago, the extent to which Williams has posthumously been incorporated into the British art world is striking. Wrote Brett:

There is as yet no work by Williams in the Tate Gallery. Historical and artistic changes we have been living through in the past 40 years have still not sunk into the national psyche. There has never yet been the [recent] opportunity to compare directly the abstract paintings produced by Williams with those of his fellow ‘English’ artists working at the same time and in the same place, like Victor Pasmore, Alan Davie, Peter Lanyon or Peter Heron.³⁰

Since Brett wrote those words, the Tate has acquired several works by Williams, and he has been the subject of several major exhibitions. Brett concluded his obituary with;

The global ecological crisis was something he felt deeply. It was always coming up in his conversation: he would often take off and describe a bird, or the quality of the air in the rain forest, with inimitable precision and poetry. But he was not a doom merchant. He had, equally strongly, a sense of possibility and of danger. In this the painting and the person were one.³¹

Whilst Ronald Moody had arrived in England to pursue a professional career (in his case, dentistry) and Frank Bowling had arrived as a schoolboy to complete his education, other artists of what might be called the pioneering generation arrived to pursue or complete an art school education or to pursue fledgling careers as young artists. In this regard, Denis Williams, mentioned earlier, was particularly significant. Williams’ talent was recognised and by his early twenties he had secured a two-year British Council scholarship to the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in London. He was to live in London for the next decade or so, during which time he taught fine art and held several exhibitions of his work. These pioneering artists, primarily young men from the countries of Africa, Asia and the Caribbean migrated to London during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Some came directly. Others took an indirect route; for example, Rasheed Araeen came to London having first spent time in Paris. Each one though, took his own particular route to art practice, at a time when the UK was experiencing varying degrees of immigration from the areas of the world just mentioned. There was a pronounced sense in which these individuals were moving not so much from one part of the world to another, but from one part of the British Commonwealth to London – the centre of a Commonwealth of nations that literally covered the globe. These were the countries of the increasingly-former British Empire.

An exhibition such as the 1st Commonwealth Biennale of Abstract Art bore compelling testimony to this sense of coming together at the centre of the Commonwealth. As mentioned earlier, Aubrey Williams had been resident in England since 1954, and Ashu Roy and Kamil Khan were both born in Calcutta, India and had lived in London since 1951 and 1957 respectively; Viren Sahai too was born in India but had lived in London since 1954, and Ahmed Parvez was born in the pre-partition Indian city of Rawalpindi in 1926 and had lived in London since 1955. Evidence of the extent to which the artists of the world were, by the beginning of the 1960s, within comfortable reach of London audiences can be seen in the hugely important inaugural exhibition at the Commonwealth Institute, Commonwealth Art Today,³² that took place from late 1962 through to early 1963. Frank Bowling and Aubrey Williams represented British Guiana, Ivan Peries was one of the artists who represented Ceylon, and Avinash Chandra and Francis Newton Souza were two of the artists who represented India. By the early 1960s, the number of young painters in London from India was such that a number of them formed themselves into a group known as the Indian Painters Collective.³³

Sometimes showing with each other, sometimes showing in mixed exhibitions, and sometimes showing alone, these artists from the countries of South Asia represented a dynamic new presence in the London and UK art scene. India’s independence in 1947 provided something of a fillip to British interest in South Asian culture in a variety of ways. Prior to independence, a number of British activists and sympathisers had distinguished themselves through their conspicuous support for the Indian independence movement, which by the mid 1940s had already been active for several decades.

By the late 1950s, artists from elsewhere across the globe were, for the first time, being exposed to London’s gallery-going, and art-appreciative public. Such artists included the likes of Hussein Shariffe, a Sudanese artist who had studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and had also been a prizewinner, at the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition, in 1961. His first one-man exhibition had taken place at Gallery One, London, in 1959. In the years thereafter, like a number of artists referenced in this book, Shariffe became a largely forgotten figure.