David Bomberg - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

David Garshen Bomberg was an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

painter

Painting

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...

, and one of the Whitechapel Boys

Whitechapel Boys

The Whitechapel Boys is a name given to a loose group of Anglo-Jewish writers and artists of the early 20th century. It is named after Whitechapel, which contained one of London's main Jewish settlements and from which many of its members came...

.

Bomberg was one of the most audacious of the exceptional generation of artists who studied at the Slade School of Art under Henry Tonks

Henry Tonks

Henry Tonks, FRCS was a British draughtsman and painter of figure subjects, chiefly interiors, and a caricaturist...

, and which included Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer

Stanley Spencer

Sir Stanley Spencer was an English painter. Much of his work depicts Biblical scenes, from miracles to Crucifixion, happening not in the Holy Land but in the small Thames-side village where he was born and spent most of his life...

, C.R.W. Nevinson and Dora Carrington

Dora Carrington

Dora de Houghton Carrington , known generally as Carrington, was a British painter and decorative artist, remembered in part for her association with members of the Bloomsbury Group, especially the writer Lytton Strachey....

. Bomberg painted a series of complex geometric compositions combining the influences of cubism

Cubism

Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture...

and futurism

Futurism (art)

Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasized and glorified themes associated with contemporary concepts of the future, including speed, technology, youth and violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane and the industrial city...

in the years immediately preceding World War I

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

; typically using a limited number of striking colours, turning humans into simple, angular shapes, and sometimes overlaying the whole painting a strong grid-work colouring scheme. He was expelled from the Slade School of Art in 1913, with agreement between the senior teachers Tonks, Frederick Brown and Philip Wilson Steer

Philip Wilson Steer

Philip Wilson Steer OM was a British painter of landscape and occasional portraits and figure studies. He was a leading figure in the Impressionist movement in Britain.-Life and work:...

, because of the audacity of his breach from the conventional approach of that time.

Whether because his faith in the machine age had been shattered by his experiences as a private soldier in the trenches or because of the pervasive retrogressive attitude towards modernism in Britain Bomberg moved to a more figurative style in the 1920s and his work became increasingly dominated by portrait

Portrait

thumb|250px|right|Portrait of [[Thomas Jefferson]] by [[Rembrandt Peale]], 1805. [[New-York Historical Society]].A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expression is predominant. The intent is to display the likeness,...

s and landscape

Landscape

Landscape comprises the visible features of an area of land, including the physical elements of landforms such as mountains, hills, water bodies such as rivers, lakes, ponds and the sea, living elements of land cover including indigenous vegetation, human elements including different forms of...

s drawn from nature. Gradually developing a more expressionist technique he travelled widely through the Middle East

Middle East

The Middle East is a region that encompasses Western Asia and Northern Africa. It is often used as a synonym for Near East, in opposition to Far East...

and Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

.

From 1945 to 1953, he worked as a teacher at Borough Polytechnic (now London South Bank University

London South Bank University

London South Bank University is a university in south London. With over 25,000 students and 1,700 staff, it is based in the London Borough of Southwark, near the South Bank of the River Thames, from which it takes its name...

) in London, where his pupils included Frank Auerbach

Frank Auerbach

Frank Helmut Auerbach is a painter born in Germany although he has been a naturalised British citizen since 1947.-Biography:Auerbach was born in Berlin, the son of Max Auerbach, a patent lawyer, and Charlotte Nora Burchardt, who had trained as an artist...

, Leon Kossoff

Leon Kossoff

Leon Kossoff is a British expressionist painter, known for portraits, life drawings and cityscapes of London, England....

, Cliff Holden

Cliff Holden

Cliff Holden FCSD is a British painter, designer, and silk-screen printer.Holden was educated at Wilmslow Modern School followed by Reaseheath School of Agriculture, where he studied agriculture and veterinary science....

, Dorothy Mead

Dorothy Mead

Dorothy Mead was a British painter.Mead was born in London, England,She first met David Bomberg when he was teaching at the Dagenham School of Art in 1945...

, Gustav Metzger

Gustav Metzger

Gustav Metzger is an artist and political activist who developed the concept of Auto-Destructive Art and the Art Strike. Together with John Sharkey, he initiated the Destruction in Art Symposium in 1966...

, Dennis Creffield

Dennis Creffield

Dennis Creffield is a British artist with work owned by major British art collections, including the Tate Gallery, Arts Council of England, the Government Art Collection, Leeds City Art Gallery, University of Leeds collection, University of Brighton collection and others.-Early life and...

, and Miles Richmond

Miles Richmond

Miles Peter Richmond was a British artist.Born Peter Richmond, in Isleworth, Middlesex, he added the name Miles in the 1980s, and became generally known as such. From 1940 to 1943 he attended Kingston School of Art, and then, as a conscientious objector worked on the land...

. David Bomberg House, one of the student halls of residences at London South Bank University, is named in his honour.

Early years

Bomberg was born in the Lee Bank

Lee Bank

Lee Bank is an inner city area of Birmingham, England. It is part of the Edgbaston and Ladywood wards, inside the Middle Ring Road, near to the centre of Birmingham...

area of Birmingham

Birmingham

Birmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 , and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a...

, the seventh of eleven children of a Polish

Poland

Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...

-Jewish immigrant leatherworker. In 1895, his family moved to Whitechapel

Whitechapel

Whitechapel is a built-up inner city district in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, London, England. It is located east of Charing Cross and roughly bounded by the Bishopsgate thoroughfare on the west, Fashion Street on the north, Brady Street and Cavell Street on the east and The Highway on the...

in the East End of London

East End of London

The East End of London, also known simply as the East End, is the area of London, England, United Kingdom, east of the medieval walled City of London and north of the River Thames. Although not defined by universally accepted formal boundaries, the River Lea can be considered another boundary...

where he was to spend the rest of his childhood.

After studying art at City and Guilds, Bomberg returned to Birmingham to train as a lithographer

Lithography

Lithography is a method for printing using a stone or a metal plate with a completely smooth surface...

but quit to study under Walter Sickert

Walter Sickert

Walter Richard Sickert , born in Munich, Germany, was a painter who was a member of the Camden Town Group in London. He was an important influence on distinctively British styles of avant-garde art in the 20th century....

at Westminster School of Art

Westminster School of Art

The Westminster School of Art was an art school in Westminster, London. It was located at 18 Tufton Street, Deans Yard, Westminster, and was part of the old Architectural Museum.H. M. Bateman described it in 1903 as...

from 1908 to 1910. Sickert's emphasis on the study of form and the representation of the "gross material facts" of urban life were an important early influence on Bomberg, alongside Roger Fry

Roger Fry

Roger Eliot Fry was an English artist and art critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developments in French painting, to which he gave the name Post-Impressionism...

's 1910 exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists, where he first saw the work of Cézanne

Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th...

.

Bomberg's artistic studies had involved considerable financial hardship but in 1911, with the help of John Singer Sargent

John Singer Sargent

John Singer Sargent was an American artist, considered the "leading portrait painter of his generation" for his evocations of Edwardian era luxury. During his career, he created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as well as countless sketches and charcoal drawings...

and the Jewish Education Aid Society, he was able to attain a place at the Slade School of Art.

The Slade

At the Slade

Slade School of Fine Art

The Slade School of Fine Art is a world-renownedart school in London, United Kingdom, and a department of University College London...

Bomberg was one of the remarkable generation of artists that studied under Henry Tonks

Henry Tonks

Henry Tonks, FRCS was a British draughtsman and painter of figure subjects, chiefly interiors, and a caricaturist...

and included Stanley Spencer

Stanley Spencer

, Paul Nash

Paul Nash (artist)

Paul Nash was a British landscape painter, surrealist and war artist, as well as a book-illustrator, writer and designer of applied art. He was the older brother of the artist John Nash.-Early life:...

, Ben Nicholson

Ben Nicholson

Benjamin Lauder "Ben" Nicholson, OM was a British painter of abstract compositions , landscape and still-life.-Background and Training:...

, Mark Gertler and Isaac Rosenberg

Isaac Rosenberg

Isaac Rosenberg was an English poet of the First World War who was considered to be one of the greatest of all English war poets...

. Bomberg and Rosenberg, from similar backgrounds, had met some years earlier and became close friends as a result of their mutual interests.

The emphasis in teaching at the Slade was on technique and draughtsmanship to which Bomberg was well-suited — winning the Tonks Prize for his drawing of fellow student Rosenberg in 1911. His own style was rapidly moving away from these traditional methods, however, particularly under the influence of the March 1912 London exhibition of Italian

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

Futurists

Futurism (art)

that exposed him to the dynamic abstraction of Picabia

Francis Picabia

Francis Picabia was a French painter, poet, and typographist, associated with both the Dada and Surrealist art movements.- Early life :...

and Severini

Gino Severini

Gino Severini , was an Italian painter and a leading member of the Futurist movement. For much of his life he divided his time between Paris and Rome. He was associated with neo-classicism and the "return to order" in the decade after the First World War. During his career he worked in a variety of...

, and Fry's second Post Impressionist exhibition in October of the same year, which displayed the works of Picasso

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...

, Matisse

Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter...

and the Fauvists

Fauvism

Fauvism is the style of les Fauves , a short-lived and loose group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism...

alongside those of Wyndham Lewis

Wyndham Lewis

Percy Wyndham Lewis was an English painter and author . He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the literary magazine of the Vorticists, BLAST...

, Duncan Grant

Duncan Grant

Duncan James Corrowr Grant was a British painter and designer of textiles, potterty and theatre sets and costumes...

and Vanessa Bell

Vanessa Bell

Vanessa Bell was an English painter and interior designer, a member of the Bloomsbury group, and the sister of Virginia Woolf.- Biography and art :...

.

Bomberg's response to this became clear in paintings such as Vision of Ezekiel (1912), in which he proved "he could absorb the most experimental European ideas, fuse these with Jewish influences and come up with a robust alternative of his own." His dynamic angular representations of the human form, combining the geometrical abstraction of cubism

Cubism

with the energy of the Futurists

Futurism (art)

, established his reputation as a forceful member of the avant-garde and the most audacious of his contemporaries; bringing him to the attention of Wyndham Lewis (who visited him in 1912) and Filippo Marinetti. In 1913, the year in which he was expelled from the Slade because of the radicalism of his approach, he travelled to France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

with Jacob Epstein

Jacob Epstein

Sir Jacob Epstein KBE was an American-born British sculptor who helped pioneer modern sculpture. He was born in the United States, and moved to Europe in 1902, becoming a British citizen in 1911. He often produced controversial works which challenged taboos on what was appropriate subject matter...

, where among others he met Modigliani

Amedeo Modigliani

Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was an Italian painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. Primarily a figurative artist, he became known for paintings and sculptures in a modern style characterized by mask-like faces and elongation of form...

, Derain

André Derain

André Derain was a French artist, painter, sculptor and co-founder of Fauvism with Henri Matisse.-Early years:...

and Picasso

Pablo Picasso

Pre-war avant-garde

Expelled from the Slade in the Summer of 1913, Bomberg formed a series of loose affiliations with several groups involved with the contemporary English avant-garde, embarking on a brief and acrimonious association with the Bloomsbury Group

Bloomsbury Group

The Bloomsbury Group or Bloomsbury Set was a group of writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists who held informal discussions in Bloomsbury throughout the 20th century. This English collective of friends and relatives lived, worked or studied near Bloomsbury in London during the first half...

's Omega Workshops

Omega Workshops

The Omega Workshops was a design enterprise founded by members of the Bloomsbury Group and established in 1913. It was located at 33 Fitzroy Square in London, and was founded with the intention of providing graphic expression to the essence of the Bloomsbury ethos...

before exhibiting with the Camden Town Group

Camden Town Group

The Camden Town Group was a group of English Post-Impressionist artists active 1911-1913. They gathered frequently at the studio of painter Walter Sickert in the Camden Town area of London.-History:...

in December 1913. His enthusiasm for the dynamism and aesthetics of the machine age gave him a natural affinity with Wyndham Lewis

Wyndham Lewis

Percy Wyndham Lewis was an English painter and author . He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the literary magazine of the Vorticists, BLAST...

's emerging vorticist

Vorticism

Vorticism, an offshoot of Cubism, was a short-lived modernist movement in British art and poetry of the early 20th century. It was based in London but international in make-up and ambition.-Origins:...

movement, and five of his works featured in the founding exhibition of the London Group

London Group

The London Group is an artists' exhibiting society based in London, England, founded in 1913, when the Camden Town Group came together with the English Vorticists and other independent artists to challenge the domination of the Royal Academy, which had become unadventurous and conservative....

in 1914, but his confidence in his own artistic vision led him quickly to distance himself from the vorticists' organisation. In July 1914 he refused any involvement in the vorticist literary magazine

Literary magazine

A literary magazine is a periodical devoted to literature in a broad sense. Literary magazines usually publish short stories, poetry and essays along with literary criticism, book reviews, biographical profiles of authors, interviews and letters...

BLAST and in June of the following year his work featured only in the "Invited to show" section of the vorticist exhibition at London's Dore Gallery.

1914 saw the highpoint of his early career — a solo exhibition at the Chenil Gallery in Chelsea

Chelsea, London

Chelsea is an area of West London, England, bounded to the south by the River Thames, where its frontage runs from Chelsea Bridge along the Chelsea Embankment, Cheyne Walk, Lots Road and Chelsea Harbour. Its eastern boundary was once defined by the River Westbourne, which is now in a pipe above...

which attracted positive reviews from Roger Fry

Roger Fry

and T. E. Hulme

T. E. Hulme

Thomas Ernest Hulme was an English critic and poet who, through his writings on art, literature and politics, had a notable influence upon modernism.-Early life:...

and attracted favourable attention from experimental artists nationally and internationally. The exhibition featured several of Bomberg's early masterpieces, most notably The Mud Bath (1914), which was hung on an outside wall surrounded by Union Flag

Union Flag

The Union Flag, also known as the Union Jack, is the flag of the United Kingdom. It retains an official or semi-official status in some Commonwealth Realms; for example, it is known as the Royal Union Flag in Canada. It is also used as an official flag in some of the smaller British overseas...

s — causing "the horses drawing the 29 bus... to shy at it as they came round the corner of King's Road."

"I look upon Nature while I live in a steel city" he explained in the exhibition catalogue "I APPEAL to a Sense of Form ... My object is the construction of Pure Form. I reject everything in painting that is not Pure Form."

With the help of Augustus John

Augustus John

Augustus Edwin John OM, RA, was a Welsh painter, draughtsman, and etcher. For a short time around 1910, he was an important exponent of Post-Impressionism in the United Kingdom....

, Bomberg sold two paintings from this exhibition to the influential American collector John Quinn

John Quinn (collector)

John Quinn was a second generation Irish-American corporate lawyer in New York, who for a time was an important patron of major figures of post-impressionism and literary modernism, and collector in particular of original manuscripts.- Life :...

World War I and after

Despite the success of his Chenil Gallery exhibition Bomberg continued to be dogged by financial problems. In 1915, he enlisted in the Royal Engineers

Royal Engineers

The Corps of Royal Engineers, usually just called the Royal Engineers , and commonly known as the Sappers, is one of the corps of the British Army....

, transferring in 1916 to the King's Royal Rifle Corps

King's Royal Rifle Corps

The King's Royal Rifle Corps was a British Army infantry regiment, originally raised in colonial North America as the Royal Americans, and recruited from American colonists. Later ranked as the 60th Regiment of Foot, the regiment served for more than 200 years throughout the British Empire...

and in March of that year, shortly after marrying his first wife, being sent to the Western Front

Western Front (World War I)

Following the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the German Army opened the Western Front by first invading Luxembourg and Belgium, then gaining military control of important industrial regions in France. The tide of the advance was dramatically turned with the Battle of the Marne...

.

World War I

World War I

was to bring a profound change to Bomberg's outlook. His experiences of its mechanized slaughter and the death of his brother in the trenches — as well as those of his friend Isaac Rosenberg

Isaac Rosenberg

Isaac Rosenberg was an English poet of the First World War who was considered to be one of the greatest of all English war poets...

and his supporter T. E. Hulme

T. E. Hulme

Thomas Ernest Hulme was an English critic and poet who, through his writings on art, literature and politics, had a notable influence upon modernism.-Early life:...

— permanently destroyed his faith in the aesthetics of the machine age. This can be seen most clearly in his commission for the Canadian War Memorials Fund, Sappers at Work (1918–1919): his first version of the painting was dismissed as a "futurist abortion" and was replaced by a second far more representational version.

The artist's book Russian Ballet
Russian Ballet (book)
Russian Ballet is an artist's book by the English artist David Bomberg published in 1919. The work describes the impact of seeing a performance of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, and is based on a series of drawings Bomberg had done around 1914, whilst associated with the Vorticist group of avant-garde...

, 1919, was the last work to use the pre-war vorticist idiom. Bomberg self-published this work whilst waiting for the Canadian Government's verdict on Sappers At Work; the next few years was to see him 'experimenting with ways of making his stark pre-war style more rounded and organic'.

In radical opposition to the prevailing currents in avant-garde art, stimulated as these were by the enthusiasm for mechanization in Constructivism

Constructivism (art)

Constructivism was an artistic and architectural philosophy that originated in Russia beginning in 1919, which was a rejection of the idea of autonomous art. The movement was in favour of art as a practice for social purposes. Constructivism had a great effect on modern art movements of the 20th...

in Russia

Russia

Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

following the Revolution, Bomberg went to paint and draw in Palestine

Palestine

Palestine is a conventional name, among others, used to describe the geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and various adjoining lands....

between 1923 and 1927, with the assistance of the Zionist Organization. There he brought together the geometric energies of his pre-war work as an "English cubist" with the tradition of figurative observation of the English landscape school of Turner

J. M. W. Turner

Joseph Mallord William Turner RA was an English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker. Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, but is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting...

, Constable

John Constable

John Constable was an English Romantic painter. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for his landscape paintings of Dedham Vale, the area surrounding his home—now known as "Constable Country"—which he invested with an intensity of affection...

, Girtin and Cottman.

The return to order

From there followed Bomberg's great period of painting and drawing in landscape, in Spain at Toledo

Toledo, Spain

Toledo's Alcázar became renowned in the 19th and 20th centuries as a military academy. At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 its garrison was famously besieged by Republican forces.-Economy:...

(1928), Ronda

Ronda

Ronda is a city in Spanish province of Málaga. It is located about West from the city of Málaga, within the autonomous community of Andalusia. Its population is approximately 35,000 inhabitants.-History:...

(1934–35 and 1954–57) and Asturias

Asturias

The Principality of Asturias is an autonomous community of the Kingdom of Spain, coextensive with the former Kingdom of Asturias in the Middle Ages...

(1935), in Cyprus

Cyprus

Cyprus , officially the Republic of Cyprus , is a Eurasian island country, member of the European Union, in the Eastern Mediterranean, east of Greece, south of Turkey, west of Syria and north of Egypt. It is the third largest island in the Mediterranean Sea.The earliest known human activity on the...

(1948) and intermittently in Britain, perhaps most powerfully in Cornwall. A six-month stay at Odessa

Odessa

Odessa or Odesa is the administrative center of the Odessa Oblast located in southern Ukraine. The city is a major seaport located on the northwest shore of the Black Sea and the fourth largest city in Ukraine with a population of 1,029,000 .The predecessor of Odessa, a small Tatar settlement,...

in the Soviet Union

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

in the second half of 1933, following Hitler's

Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...

seizure of power in Germany, led Bomberg on his return to London to immediate resignation from the Communist Party

Communist party

A political party described as a Communist party includes those that advocate the application of the social principles of communism through a communist form of government...

. During World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

, he painted Evening in the City of London (1944), showing the blitzed city viewed rising up to a triumphant, surviving St Paul's

St Paul's Cathedral

St Paul's Cathedral, London, is a Church of England cathedral and seat of the Bishop of London. Its dedication to Paul the Apostle dates back to the original church on this site, founded in AD 604. St Paul's sits at the top of Ludgate Hill, the highest point in the City of London, and is the mother...

on the horizon, since described as the "most moving of all paintings of wartime Britain" (Martin Harrison); a series of flower paintings saturated with turbulent feeling; and his single commission as a war artist, a series of "Bomb Store" paintings (1942) expressing Bomberg's expanded first-hand sense of the destructive powers of modern technology in warfare. These "Bomb Store" paintings convey a premonitory sense of the massive explosion that destroyed the underground store two years later, killing 68 people, and bear comparison with Piranesi's Carceri etchings.

Bomberg's superb draughtsmanship was expressed also in a lifelong series of portraits, from the early period of his Botticelli-like "Head of a Poet" (1913), a pencil portrait of his friend the poet Isaac Rosenberg

Isaac Rosenberg

Isaac Rosenberg was an English poet of the First World War who was considered to be one of the greatest of all English war poets...

for which he won the Henry Tonks Prize at the Slade

Slade School of Fine Art

The Slade School of Fine Art is a world-renownedart school in London, United Kingdom, and a department of University College London...

, to his "Last Self-Portrait" (1956), painted at Ronda, a meditation also on Rembrandt.

Unable to get a teaching position after World War II

World War II

in any of the most prestigious London art schools, Bomberg became the most exemplary teacher of the immediate post-war period in Britain, working part-time in a bakery school

National Bakery School

The British National Bakery School, a culinary school at London South Bank University, London, England, was founded in 1894 and is now the world's oldest bakery school.- History :...

at the Borough Polytechnic (now London South Bank University

London South Bank University

) in the working-class borough of Southwark. Though his students received no grant and were awarded no diploma, he attracted devoted and highly energetic pupils, with whom he exhibited on an equal basis in London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

, Oxford

Oxford

The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...

, and Cambridge

Cambridge

The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...

in two important artists' groupings in which he was the leading light, the Borough Group

Borough Group

The Borough Group was a collective of mid-20th century artists from the Borough area of Southwark, south London, England. The group was associated with the David Bomberg, who was then teaching a number of the artists that formed the group at the Borough Polytechnic, hence the name.Cliff Holden...

(1946–51) and the Borough Bottega (1953–55). He developed a deeply considered philosophy of art, set out in several pieces of writing, which he summed up in the phrase, "The Spirit in the Mass".

Following a collapse in Ronda

Ronda

, Bomberg died in London

London

in 1957, his critical stock rising sharply thereafter. In 1958, one of Bomberg's admirers, the painter Patrick Swift

Patrick Swift

Patrick Swift was an artist born in Dublin, Ireland. Patrick Swift was a painter and key cultural figure in Dublin and London before moving to the Algarve in southern Portugal, where he is buried in the town of Porches...

, unearthed and edited Bomberg’s outspoken and apocalyptic pensées, and was later to publish them, along with images of Bomberg's work, as "The Bomberg papers" in his ‘X’ magazine

X (magazine)

X, A Quarterly Review was a British arts review published in London which ran for seven issues between 1959-1962. It was founded and co-edited by Patrick Swift and David Wright...

. After his early success before the First World War, he was in his lifetime the most brutally excluded artist in Britain. Having lived for years on the earnings of his second wife Lilian Holt and remittances from his sister Kitty, he died in absolute poverty.

Posthumous reception

Thirty years after his death, a major retrospective of Bomberg's work was held at the Tate Gallery

Tate Gallery

The Tate is an institution that houses the United Kingdom's national collection of British Art, and International Modern and Contemporary Art...

, London, in 1988.

In 2006, Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal

Kendal

Kendal, anciently known as Kirkby in Kendal or Kirkby Kendal, is a market town and civil parish within the South Lakeland District of Cumbria, England...

(Cumbria

Cumbria

Cumbria , is a non-metropolitan county in North West England. The county and Cumbria County Council, its local authority, came into existence in 1974 after the passage of the Local Government Act 1972. Cumbria's largest settlement and county town is Carlisle. It consists of six districts, and in...

) mounted the first major exhibition of Bomberg's paintings for nearly twenty years: David Bomberg: Spirit in the Mass (17 July – 28 October 2006). Prior to that, the exhibition David Bomberg en Ronda at the Museo Joaquin Peinado in Ronda in Andalusia (1–30 October 2004) showed work by Bomberg in the city and environment which he had celebrated in paintings and drawings in 1934-35 and 1954-47. Work from one of the best collections in private hands was shown on the fiftieth anniversary of his death in the exhibition In celebration of David Bomberg 1890-1957 at Daniel Katz Gallery, Old Bond Street, London (30 May – 13 July 2007).

London South Bank University, the site of Bomberg's teaching at the former Borough Polytechnic, has received a gift of more than 150 paintings and drawings by Bomberg and his students in the Borough Group — principally Dorothy Mead, Cliff Holden, Miles Richmond

Miles Richmond

, and Dennis Creffield

Dennis Creffield

— to be known as the David Bomberg Legacy. Construction of a gallery to house and exhibit this body of work is planned. A fundraising drive is under way to assist the University in this project.

The collection is the work of Sarah Rose, a friend of Cliff Holden of over 50 years. The Nasher Museum of Art

Nasher Museum of Art

The Nasher Museum of Art is the art museum of Duke University, and is located on Duke's campus in Durham, North Carolina, USA. The $24 million museum was designed by architect Rafael Viñoly and opened on October 2, 2005...

at Duke University

Duke University

Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...

held an exhibition entitled The Vorticists
Vorticism
Vorticism, an offshoot of Cubism, was a short-lived modernist movement in British art and poetry of the early 20th century. It was based in London but international in make-up and ambition.-Origins:...

: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914-18 from September 30, 2010 through January 2, 2011. Tate Britain

Tate Britain

Tate Britain is an art gallery situated on Millbank in London, and part of the Tate gallery network in Britain, with Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It is the oldest gallery in the network, opening in 1897. It houses a substantial collection of the works of J. M. W. Turner.-History:It...

held an exhibition entitled The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World between the 14th of June and the 4th of September 2011. In the 2011 BBC series, British Masters, Bomberg was singled out as being one of the greatest painters of the 20th Century.

External links

Early works
Work inspired by WWI
Art Encyclopedia entry
Bomberg's works at the Tate Gallery
Fine Art — David Bomberg
Article on the Whitechapel Boys
David Bomberg: Spirit in the Mass exhibition at the Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, 17 July – 28 October 2006 (see also exhibition catalogue)
Guardian review of Abbot Hall exhibition
Laurie Stewart, Notes on the Borough Group of Artists
Cliff Holden, The History of the Borough Group of Artists, 2004
Connected, Spring 2009, Journal of alumni of London South Bank University

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Early years

The Slade

Pre-war avant-garde

World War I and after

The return to order

Posthumous reception

Further reading

External links