“He lived his life totally” 1

ANNE WALMSLEY

ENIS WILLIAMS, who has died at his home in Georgetown, Guyana, aged seventy-five, is known especially for his brilliant D work in in the 1950s, in Nigeria in the 1960s, and in Guyana in the 1970s: all times of great ferment and creativity in the arts. Williams worked as artist, art historian and teacher, novelist, anthropo- logist and archaeologist. Yet, as the late Aubrey Williams said of his com- patriot (no relation), visiting him at Issano in 1970: “He lives his life totally, all the time, you can’t categorise his life, you can’t facet it, you can’t divide it up.” Dynamic, passionate, enthusiastic, at times autocratic and stubborn, Williams put his considerable intellectual powers, creative gifts and prodigious energy into a wide range of inter-connected work, in the many places, on three continents, where he lived. Denis Joseph Ivan Williams was born on 1 February 1923 in George- town, British Guiana (now Guyana). His father, Joseph Williams, from Berbice, was a merchant; his mother Isabel, née Adonis, was a lady’s maid/companion to the wife of the then colony’s British Minister of Edu- cation. Denis Williams’s vivid, early visual memories are of his mother’s oil-paints box and jewel box, of the nearby Botanical Gardens, and of walks through the capital city’s streets with his father. He drew con- stantly. The first exhibition of art in Georgetown in 1930, as he later said, “anchored my whole future; I knew I was made to do art.” The young

1Editors’ note: This is the complete text of an obituary published, with various cuts, in the Guardian (London, 4 July 1998) and in the Sunday Stabroek (Georgetown, 5 July 1998). The obituary in the Guardian was followed by personal reminiscences and tributes from Wilson Harris and John Picton. 214 ANNE WALMSLEY º

Denis Williams’s outstanding natural ability in drawing and painting drew the attention of the British Council representative in Georgetown. He was encouraged to apply for – and won – the first British Council scholarship awarded in the colony to study art in Britain. Williams studied fine arts at the Camberwell School of Art from 1946 to 1948. Camberwell was then the leading London art school. , , and Claude Rogers were among his teachers; his fellow students were mostly ex-service men and women. Teachers and students alike were all awakening, in the first year after World War II, to recent art developments on the Continent. On his return to British Guiana in mid-1949, Williams worked inten- sively on a series of paintings in oils on sacking, Plantation Studies, Origins, Burden or Release, which were shown at private exhibitions. Wilson Harris, who met him then for the first time, recalls that the paint- ings aroused considerable comment and some hostility. Michael Swan, the British writer and traveller, in Georgetown in 1955 for research on his subsequent HMSO book, recalls seeing some of this work and finding it “startling, frightening, violent in mood.” Williams was unable to find, as he had hoped, a senior, well-paid teaching post in Georgetown, and was back in London in May 1950. When Williams had exhibited in London at the Berkeley Gallery shortly before returning home, his paintings had been favourably noted by Wyndham Lewis. Now eager to establish himself as an artist in London and with a body of new work, Williams asked Lewis’s advice as to how best to show it. The result was a one-man exhibition at Gimpel Fils in December 1950. Its centrepiece was the painting Human World, repro- duced in TIME magazine, and bought by public subscription in British Guiana, becoming the first artwork in Guyana’s now extensive National Collection. The show was fully covered by Lewis in The Listener under the title “A Negro Artist,” which warmly acclaimed his paintings and hailed his “very remarkable talent.” The show resulted in Williams be- coming a visiting tutor at the Slade and being offered a teaching post at the Central (now Central Saint Martins) School of Art, where his col- leagues included Alan Davie, Keith Vaughan, Victor Pasmore, and Roger Hilton, who became a close friend and with whom he shared a show at Gimpel Fils in 1954. After Human World, Williams’s work changed radically in style, becoming wholly abstract and mathematically based, much influenced by Mondrian and the constructivists. His paintings were