‘It’s Like the World Caught Up With Them’: Brothers Geoffrey and Boscoe Holder Get a Long Overdue Show

A unique exhibition at Victoria Miro’s north London outpost juxtaposes the woefully under-recognized painting practices of brothers Boscoe and Geoffrey Holder, both born in Trinidad in 1921 and 1930 respectively. The artists were prolific in their lifetimes, producing hundreds of colorful, highly atmospheric portraits and nude studies of models, friends, and family. In recent years, they have begun to receive a surge of long due recognition as works never before seen in a gallery finally go on display.

The elder brother by nine years, Boscoe showed an early interest in the arts, becoming an accomplished pianist and dancer from a young age. After moving to London with his family in 1950, he founded a successful dance company and performed at the Queen’s coronation in 1953 as well as at some of the city’s very first Caribbean carnivals. During this period he befriended people like playwright Noël Coward and artist Oliver Messel.

Alongside these interests, Boscoe developed a painting practice and exhibited at the ICA in London. After he returned to Trinidad in 1970, he regularly exhibited throughout the Caribbean and one of his paintings was presented to Prince Charles and Lady Diana as a wedding gift by the president of Trinidad and Tobago in 1981. Boscoe died in 2007 at the age of 85 in Port of Spain.

Geoffrey followed in his brothers footsteps, joining Boscoe’s dance company and eventually moving to New York City in the 1950s where he began performing at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet and on Broadway. Most notably in 1973, he played the villain Baron Samedi in the James Bond movie . Geoffrey was also friends with an international artistic milieu that included Josephine Baker and Alice Neel.

As well as dancing, acting, composing music, and writing, Geoffrey was a photographer, an art collector, and a painter, winning a Guggenheim Fellowship for this work in 1956. He died in Manhattan in 2014 at the age of 84.

Boscoe frequently depicted nude male subjects in a sensitive but eroticized painterly style though, unlike his more conventional portraits and seascapes, these were not usually exhibited publicly. Many of these works are therefore still unknown to the public, and have gained more of a following in the U.S. and Europe thanks to the efforts of American critic Hilton Als and Trinidad-based Scottish artist Peter Doig.

Boscoe’s paintings pulse with energy thanks to their vibrant palettes of green, red, orange, and purple, yet also evoke a dreamy languor. Abstracted backgrounds allow the focus to fall on the figure, sculptured and strong even in a state of repose.

Geoffrey’s paintings have clear overlaps with Boscoe’s, most notably in their attention to the human figure. However, the artist developed his own distinctive style.

“Geoffrey learnt everything from Boscoe,” said Geoffrey’s son Leo Holder in an interview with Victoria Miro. “The youngest of the family is almost by nature either going to be much more conservative or much more flex. I see a DNA but I see a separation of the DNA.”

Most of the examples on view at Victoria Miro were painted between the late 1970s and the 2000s. His wife, the dancer and actress Carmen de Lavallade, was an important muse. Some of his figures bathe in the distorting effects of water in a bath or pool while in other, more jubilant compositions groups of figures dance and do handstands.

“To see the contemporary nature [of Boscoe and Geoffrey’s work], it’s almost like the world caught up to them,” said Leo Holder.