LONDON — It’s been a long road, in one sense, for the painter Frank Bowling, who has netted his first major retrospective in Britain after a half-century at work. In another, he has walked one of the shortest roads of all.

Mr. Bowling, born in Guyana 85 years ago, has lived for more than five decades in the London district of Pimlico, and he always came back to the Thames-side neighborhood even after setting up a studio in New York. For a while, he also worked from a studio behind the Tate Gallery, and learned by heart its collection of British landscapes and society portraits.

Now, that museum (renamed Tate Britain in 2000, after Tate Modern opened) has given over its galleries to Mr. Bowling’s abstract paintings, some runny and mucky , others alive with lambent color. For all the show’s momentousness, it’s too small and narrow to assess his Atlantic-spanning career — and a bit too eager to inscribe Mr. Bowling into a British practice of low-risk, landscape-fixated, not-quite-abstraction.

Certainly this show is less globally engaged than the survey of Mr. Bowling’s work that opened at the Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2017, which was organized by Okwui Enwezor, the museum’s former director, who died in March.