He showed in both group and solo exhibitions in Manhattan and San Francisco and was a founding member of American Abstract Artists.

He once said a painter should embrace many ideas, symbols, forms, tones, and colors and through metamorphosis make them into a new thing — a painting having a life of its own.

[2][note 1] In 1927 or 1928 he traveled to New York and took a room in a boarding house in the Lincoln Square neighborhood of Manhattan, an area that had been dubbed a "New Bohemia" when aspiring artists, writers, and practitioners of the performing arts congregated there during the first two decades of the 20th century.

[5] In 1931 a summer class that was taught by Hans Hofmann at the University of California, Berkeley, helped him to resolve his uncertainty about becoming a professional artist.

[1] In 1932 he enrolled in the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles and that same year he was given a solo exhibition at the Paul Elder Gallery in San Francisco.

[7][note 2] The following year he became a studio assistant in the School of Fine Arts that Hofmann was then directing on East 57th Street in Manhattan's gallery district.

[11] One early commission brought Bowden together with six fellow artists as assistants to Fernand Léger in a project to create murals for the French Line terminal in Manhattan.

The same year he also began participating in group shows by two similar organizations: Salons of America and Artists Gallery.

[22] At the end of the war he began to spend some months of the year in New York while continuing to live in California.

[19][28] After he moved to California, Bowden periodically returned to New York to visit friends and do business with gallery owners, but retained his permanent home in Marin City until his death in 1965.

"[28] Bowden's abstract composition with yellow background (1937), shown at left, is an example of his pure abstractionist style.

As a photographer, Bowden took many shots of New York painters who were his friends, including Willem de Kooning (1946, 1951), Ad Reinhardt (1959), Jackson Pollock, and Lee Krasner (1949).

He also made photographic portraits of Edward Weston (1951), Imogene Cunningham (1955), and other men and women prominent in the arts.

[33] Harry Clinton Bowden (senior) was born June 17, 1879, in Providence, Rhode Island and died January 20, 1963, in Los Angeles.