Frank Walter: The Last Universal Man, 1926–2009
”What he left behind suggests that he is among the great visionaries of the late-20th and early 21st centuries.”
— Jerry Saltz, New York Magazine
Author: Barbara Paca, PhD
Foreword by His Excellency, Sir Rodney Williams, Governor General of Antigua and Barbuda
Introduction by Nina Khrushcheva, PhD
Contributors: The Rt. Honorable Patricia Scotland, Secretary-General of the Commonwealth; Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, KCMG, PhD; Caitlin Hoffman, MD; Marcus Nakbar Crump; Kenneth M. Milton; Sir Selvyn Walter
Hardcover, 9.5 x 12.5 inches
201 color images / 364 pages
ISBN: 9781942185185
Antiguan artist and writer Frank Walter (1926–2009) was an eccentric character now considered to be vastly under-recognized. Intellectually brilliant, Walter entertained delusions of aristocratic grandeur, namely the belief that the white slave-owners in his family linked him to the noble houses of Europe.
The self-styled “7th Prince of the West Indies, Lord of Follies and the Ding-a-Ding Nook” produced paintings that dealt with race, class and social identity, as well as abstract explorations of nuclear energy, portraits both real and imagined—including Hitler playing cricket, and Prince Charles and Princess Diana as Adam and Eve—and miniature landscapes of Scotland, the country that he fell in love with during a visit in 1960.
Walter typically painted in oil on rudimentary materials, with a marked immediacy and naivety. The first man of color to manage an Antiguan sugar plantation, Walter spent the last decades of his life in an isolated rustic home in Antigua, surrounded by his writings, paintings, and carvings. This book coincides with Antigua and Barbuda’s inaugural National Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale.