Denis Williams was born in Georgetown, British Guiana (now Guyana) in 1923 and won a British Council scholarship to study art in Britain in 1945; he enrolled the following year at Camberwell School of Art in London. In 1955 Williams was awarded a prize for 'Painting in Six Related Rhythms', his entry to the 'Young Artists Exhibition' at the New Burlington Galleries and in 1956 he participated in the seminal exhibition <em>This is Tomorrow</em> held at the Whitechapel Gallery. In later years he returned to Guyana, where he was responsible for much of the development in the arts, including establishment of a national museum, national collection and art school.
Artist, archaeologist and novelist Denis Williams was born on 1 February 1923 in Georgetown, British Guiana (now Guyana) to Joseph, a merchant, and his wife, Isabella, née Adonis, a seamstress and amateur painter. In 1931 he visited the country’s first Arts and Crafts Exhibition and soon afterwards began to take Saturday morning art classes along with a number of expatriate British amateur artists, winning first prizes in watercolours, oils and drawing after his first year. He became a member of the newly formed Guianese Art Group and in 1945 won a British Council scholarship to study art in Britain. The following year he enrolled at Camberwell School of Art in London where his notable teachers included painters, William Coldstream, Lawrence Gowing, and Victor Pasmore. He graduated in 1948 and in 1949 exhibited at the Berkeley Galleries where his paintings were commended by no less a figure than artist and critic Wyndham Lewis in The Listener. Later that year Williams married Welsh-born Catherine Alice Hughes in London and together they brought up five daughters. Following a brief return visit to Guyana, in December 1950 Williams exhibited four large paintings in tempera and oil, entitled Four Dimensions of Anguish, at Gimpel Fils in Mayfair (established in 1946 by émigré sons of French art dealer, René Gimpel, who had perished in 1945 in Neuengamme concentration camp). The exhibition, which also featured the work of naive painter, Scottie Wilson, was positively reviewed in Time magazine, and in The Listener, Lewis referred to Williams ‘very remarkable talent’ as a ‘Negro artist’ (Wyndham Lewis, The Listener, 7 December 1950). One of the pieces from the Four Dimensions of Anguish series, Human World was purchased by public subscription in Guyana and became the basis of its national art collection.
In 1955 Williams was awarded a prize by distinguished judges, Graham Sutherland, Herbert Read and Anthony Blunt, for Painting in Six Related Rhythms, his entry to the Young Artists Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries, London. The following year he participated in the seminal This is Tomorrow exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, alongside Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi, and William Turnbull, among others. He also taught as a visiting tutor at the Slade School of Fine Art and at the Central School of Art and Crafts, as a result of which he developed significant friendships with fellow artist-teachers Roger Hilton — with whom he shared several exhibitions — and Keith Vaughan.
Despite a successful career as an artist in Britain, Williams subsequently rejected his ‘self-perceived’ identity as a ‘Black Englishman’ (A. Walmsley, interview with Denis Williams, 26-27 November 1993) and in 1957 he left London for Khartoum, Sudan with his wife and children. Williams taught at The Technical Institute of Khartoum’s School of Art before moving, in 1962, to Nigeria at the invitation of Ulli Beier, a German-born editor and promoter of African culture. He taught at the newly founded Institute of African Art at the University of Ife, and, after four years, at the University of Ibadan’s School of African and Asian Studies where he undertook archaeological and anthropological research and established museum collections of African artefacts, culminating in Icon and Image: A Study of Sacred and Secular Forms of African Classical Art (1974). During this time, he also wrote his second novel, The Third Temptation (1968) while on holiday with his family in Wales, where it is set.
Williams left Nigeria for Guyana in 1967 where he spent the remaining 30 years of his life. In 1969 he delivered the Edgar Mittelholzer lectures in Georgetown entitled ‘Image and Idea in the Arts of Guyana’ and in 1974 moved to the capital as Guyana’s first Director of Art. There he established key institutions: the Burrowes School of Art, of which he was first principal, the Walter Roth Museum, of which he was director, and the Museum of African Heritage. He also co-ordinated the national art collection and initiated the opening of a national gallery at Castellani House in 1993. His own contribution to public art was the vast mural Memorabilia II, in the National Cultural Centre in Georgetown. An MA in prehistory at the University of Guyana led to his appointment (in 1980) as visiting research scholar at the department of anthropology, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, USA. He was subsequently awarded an honorary DLitt by the University of the West Indies in 1989, and the Cacique crown of honour in Guyana. Denis Williams died of cancer at his home in Georgetown, Guyana on 28 June 1998. His work is represented in the UK in the Tate collection.
In late 2021 his work featured in the survey exhibition Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s-Now, Tate Britain.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Denis Williams]
Publications related to [Denis Williams] in the Ben Uri Library