Boscoe Holder | Geoffrey Holder  

Victoria Miro Gallery, London 

1 June – 27 July 2024

Review by Nicole-Rachelle Moore

This is the first joint exhibition of paintings by the Holder brothers, Boscoe (1921 – 2007) and Geoffrey (1930 – 2014) and is the public debut of almost all these works. Art, dance, film, music and theatre were the creative realities in shaping their lives, with Boscoe already a prodigious musical talent by the age of nine in their native Trinidad and Tobago. His polymathic influence on Geoffrey’s development as a younger virtuoso is well known. As dancers and choreographers, Boscoe would leave Trinidad in 1950 for London and Geoffrey would travel to New York in 1953 to forge blazing paths and shed more light on their island home over the ensuing decades. Geoffrey’s son Leo Holder says that the brothers ‘always thought internationally’. 

Boscoe and Geoffrey Holder in London, 1961 Image Courtesy the Holder Family Archive 

On the ground floor of Victoria Miro, sixteen nude and semi-nude studies by Boscoe convey understated confidence and restrained energy. Titles like ‘Black Boots/Red Chair/Red Tie’ toy with the viewer’s sense of focus. Some of the poses by the models, more so than their faces, bring to mind actual and specific individuals. There is an intimate quietude in many of the works. While full of colour, Boscoe’s lush brushstrokes elicit a muted, soft effect. The artist’s son Christian Holder describes his father’s paintings here as having: ‘a quieter aspect … more introverted.’ 

In the back garden, past the gallery’s pond and palm trees, there is a climb of several steps up to the second gallery space with works by Geoffrey Holder. Fantasy, masquerade, memory, passion and playfulness emanate from nine untitled exhibits. One of them, a portrait of a beautiful, dark-skinned black woman in a head wrap and matching bodice, speaks to the brothers’ Martinique-born mother. The other paintings, including ‘Nude Lovers Embracing’ and ‘Woman on Man’s Shoulders’, continue to centre a self-affirming blackness found in both the Holder brothers’ works.

Attillah Springer writes in ‘Vetiver and Turpentine’, an essay that  accompanies the exhibition: ‘Now, put the idea out of your head that one was a painter who danced, and one was a dancer who painted. To compare them, to make them competitors, is to use the coloniser’s yardstick. To put a label on their talents is to deny the freedom they were always making in their songs, in their dances, in their paintings.’

Standing in the exhibition spaces, I find myself attaching memories of Trinidad Carnival to several of the paintings, feeling privy to a series of tableaux happening during the five significant days of Carnival with all its beauty and magic. Visiting Trinidad and Tobago in February 2024, the actor Phylicia Rashad remembered her time working with Geoffrey Holder on The Wiz as the most magical theatrical experience, saying that only being in Trinidad allowed her to understand that the artist ‘brought the magic of Trinidad to everything he did.’ This joint exhibition is full of magic that is both familiar and incredible.

https://online.victoria-miro.com/boscoe-holder-geoffrey-holder-london-2024/

Nicole-Rachelle Moore

Nicole-Rachelle Moore is a writer and educator