
Gustav Metzger
IN THE LATE 1950S, I was an assistant at Drian Galleries in London, and that job brought me into close contact with Denis Bowen, who had a small exhibition space nearby called the New Vision Centre. On weekends I would earn extra money by working there. It was a pioneering avant-garde gallery, open-minded enough to exhibit radical artists whom no one else would look at. One day a small figure came in with a pile of paintings and set them up for Bowen to look at. They were figurative works in the David Bomberg style of Vorticism. Bowen, who was kind but didn’t mince words, told the artist that