Frank Walter
Courtesy of the Estate of Frank Walter
Francis Archibald Wentworth Walter, who called himself ‘7th Prince of the West Indies, Lord of Follies and the Ding-a-Ding Nook’, was born in 1926 in Antigua. A talented artist and prolific writer, Walter nurtured delusions of aristocratic grandeur, believing that his ancestry linked him to the noble houses of Europe, and this insecurity about his racial origins - he was a descendant of both plantation owners and slaves - made his life very difficult. After excelling at school, Walter became the first man of colour to manage an Antiguan sugar plantation, but he left this achievement behind him in order to tour Europe, either for professional reasons or, according to another story, in pursuit of family connections and social recognition. Having suffered a breakdown en route, Walter took various unskilled manual jobs that brought him little satisfaction, and he eventually returned to the Caribbean, where he farmed some land in Dominica and later ran a makeshift photographic studio in St.John’s, the capital of Antigua. During the last fifteen years of his life he lived in a rough isolated shack that he built himself, where he amassed about 25,000 pages of writings, as well as substantial numbers of his own paintings, sculptures, and photographs. Most of this work was unknown until shortly before his death and found in disorderly heaps afterwards. The paintings, which vary greatly in quality, range in subject from landscapes to abstract explorations of nuclear energy and sci-fi; they also include portraits, both real and imagined, including images of Adolf Hitler playing cricket and of Prince Charles and Princess Diana as Adam and Eve. Painted on scraps of cardboard and other found surfaces, his pictures are elementary and peculiar, but at their best they have a startling sense of innocence and intensity.
Walter's art has been known for less than a decade; it was first exhibited in 2013 at the Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh, in the company of paintings by Alfred Wallis and Forrest Bess. Four years later, Antigua and Barbuda staged a show entitled ‘Frank Walter: The Last Universal Man 1926–2009’ at their inaugural exhibition at the Venice Biennale, and in 2020 a major retrospective of his work took place at the Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt, buttressed by contributions from other artists that were chosen to provide a different ideological context for the man and his work. In the meantime, on another front, prestigious commercial galleries have shown his paintings, their value has soared, two very substantial catalogues have been published, and extravagant claims have been made for his significance. One well-known curator, having seen his show in Venice, proclaimed - apparently without irony - that Walter was ‘the Leonardo da Vinci of Antigua’. The awkwardness and naïveté of his work are now rarely mentioned, and the obvious epithets ‘outsider’ and ‘self-taught’ are avoided, doubtless because, as the art critic of The New Yorker once put it with regard to another artist, these terms are currently considered to be ‘romantic, patronising, and philosophically incoherent’. Nevertheless, it might not be unkind to suggest that Walter was actually a fine example of a ‘self-taught’ artist - in other words, someone who was not schooled in the ways of the art establishment - and that he was also an obvious ‘outsider’, simply because he was never quite who or what he wished to be. In any case, Walter would justifiably have felt delighted by his dramatic posthumous success, and it is certainly well deserved, as a substantial number of his paintings are both memorable and strangely beautiful.
For further exploration:
https://www.mmk.art/en/whats-on/frank-walter-eine-retrospektive/
https://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibitions/2021/frank-walter
https://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/project/frank-walter-at-douglas-hyde-dublin-7938
Courtesy of the Estate of Frank Walter