A Strong Sweet Smell Of Incense: Derek Boshier at the Robert Fraser show
//Sam Spade, Derek Boshier, 1966, on the back wall of this recreation of the office at Robert Fraser Gallery, Duke Street, London W1//
Derek Boshier’s 1966 work Sam Spade is given prominence in A Strong Sweet Smell Of Incense, the exhibition dedicated to the connoisseurship of the late art dealer Robert Fraser.
Boshier was a client until he foreswore painting for a decade or more in 1968. This was a particularly difficult period for Fraser, who was jailed over the infamous Redlands drug bust at Rolling Stone Keith Richards’ house the previous year.
//From Pace’s exhibition guide. The work in the background looks to be another of Boshier’s from the Sam Spade period//
Boshier has recounted how he became so frustrated over Fraser’s unwillingness to pass on payments in the 60s that he and his friend, the poet Christopher Logue, once broke into the Duke Street gallery and retrieved works Fraser had refused to release in lieu.
There is a document in the exhibition vitrine listing a number of Boshier works which were assigned to one of the gallery’s creditors, a transport company, when it crashed in 1969. He has heard hide nor hair of them since.
Now in private hands, Sam Spade is among the artworks arranged in the exhibition’s faithful recreation of Fraser’s office from a late 60s photograph; this also includes his Zeev Aram desk and Jann Haworth’s Cowboy (1964).
//Detail of Untitled, Keith Haring, 1983, Self Portrait (Pink), Andy Warhol, 1964, and (top) AWN Pugin, Untitled (12 Sections) 1840. Photo: Caz Facey//
A Strong Sweet Smell Of Incense is sensitively curated by Fraser’s friends, the artist Brian Clarke and biographer Harriet Vyner, and stresses the importance of this ultimately tragic figure to contemporary art with pieces by Bacon, Basquiat, Blake, Hamilton, Warhol and many more.
See details here.
If you haven’t read it already, I recommend Vyner’s indispensable Groovy Bob: The Life & Times Of Robert Fraser. Copies available here.
Derek Boshier: Rethink/Re-entry is the artist monograph I am editing; it is published by Thames & Hudson in November.