Robert Bowden Returns to Norfolk After 60 Years

The Long Journey From Abstraction to Figuration

By Wiley Wood

In his native Pittsburgh, Robert Bowden teaches painting classes. Setting up his easel among his students, he often paints a small watercolor of the day’s subject, recording as he goes the succession of steps that bring him to the final product. Forty of these five-finger exercises will be shown at Aija’s second-storey gallery in Norfolk later this month, some with a step-by-step description of the painting process, all of them recent.

Also in the show will be a large blue abstract oil painting, “Spring,” painted in 1953. During the summer of 1952 as a rising junior at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Bowden came to Norfolk as a fellow of the Yale School of Art’s summer program. “It was an honor to be asked to go,” says Bowden. “I knew that Josef Albers, who taught at the Bauhaus in the 1920’s and 1930’s, was going to be there at some point. And students came from all the major universities on the East Coast.”

Abstract expressionism was in its heyday and the style exerted an irresistible pull on the students. “We were all abstract or non-objective painters,” says Bowden. The days were spent painting in the studio or outdoors. Nights were filled with discussions on the history and philosophy of art. The influence of de Kooning, who had recently taught under Albers at Black Mountain College, was felt strongly. Visiting professors included John Cage, the avant-garde composer, who performed for the students by plucking the wires of his prepared piano while twiddling the dial of a radio at full blare; Louis Kahn, the modernist architect, wearing his natty bowtie, whom Bowden remembers engaging in conversation all of a long afternoon; and Charlotte Moorman, the cellist, who performed topless. “Those six weeks were very intense,” says Bowden, “very sophisticated. And the teachers were excellent. It was the best part of my education.”

Between the small recent still lifes and the large abstraction from the early 1950’s lies a span of almost 60 years, during which Bowden pursued abstract painting, married and had children (he is the father of Lisa Carter, a Norfolk resident), started a graphic design business, abandoned abstraction, developed his style as a watercolorist of complex built environments, and taught art. Although his activities have centered around Pittsburgh, Bowden has produced suites of paintings on Florida, the Italian landscape, and, at the instigation of Brendan Gill, architecture critic for “The New Yorker,” Manhattan’s architectural gems.

Despite the visual disparity between the early work and the late, the abstract and the figurative, Bowden proposes them as points along a continuous line of development. He turned away from abstraction in the early 1970’s, but he held on to the discoveries he had made as a non-objective painter. As an instance he cites the tension created when a shape is made alternately to suggest a solid form and an empty space. “That sensitivity to creating the illusion of space in my work has been most rewarding,” says Bowden. “For me,” he adds, “abstraction still exists in my most successful works.”

In one of Bowden’s urban landscapes, a pale triangle at the bottom of a street scene may suggest a receding pavement; two neighboring blocks of color may represent buildings whose shapes overlap although a street lies between them; or a faint wash of color, framed by an arch in a Tuscan hill town, hints at a deep space beyond the immediate surroundings. Everywhere in Bowden’s work appears a playful alertness to the ways space can be rendered using two-dimensional shapes. Though smaller in scale, Bowden’s still lifes show the same ease and economy in rendering intricate relations.

When Bowden first returned to Norfolk in 1997 while driving across New England with his wife Diane (it was before his daughter moved here), he was gratified to find the town recognizably the same. “Architecturally, it hadn’t changed,” says Bowden. The village green and its surrounding structures, the Norfolk Library, and even the house where he had stayed 40-odd years before on Greenwoods Road East were all much as they had been. “Only Infinity Hall is different,” says Bowden, perhaps referring to the loss of Mubarek’s Grocery.

The show, whose title is “Then and Now,” will have an opening reception on Saturday, August 25 from 4 to 7 p.m. at Aija, in the Royal Arcanum Building at 3 Station Place in Norfolk, and will continue into September.