Sir Alan Bowness CBE (11 January 1928 – 1 March 2021) 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 (née Benton) 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 (New York), 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 (1972) 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 (1964) (with Lawrence Gowing) and Recent British Painting (1967) (with Norman Reid and Lilian Somerville). During the 1960s and 1970s he also curated exhibitions for the Arts Council, including Vincent van Gogh (1968), Rodin (1970), French Symbolist Painters (1972), and Gustave Courbet (1978, with Michel Laclotte), as well as Post-Impressionism (Royal Academy, London and National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1979–80). Retrospectives he curated of contemporary artists for the Tate Gallery include; Ivon Hitchens (1963), Jean Dubuffet (1966), Peter Lanyon (1968), and William Scott (1972). 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