David Bomberg

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David Bomberg
Self Portrait (1931), charcoal and wash.
Born	December 5, 1890(1890-12-05) Birmingham, England
Died	August 19, 1957 (aged 66) London, England
Nationality	English
Training	Westminster School of Art, Slade School of Art
Movement	Vorticism, Cubism, Futurism

David Garshen Bomberg (December 5, 1890 – August 19, 1957) was an English painter, and one of the Whitechapel Boys.

The most audacious of the exceptional generation of artists that studied under Henry Tonks at the Slade School of Art, Bomberg painted a series of complex geometric compositions combining the influences of cubism and futurism in the years immediately preceding World War I; 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.

His faith in the machine age shaken by the trauma of serving on the Western Front, Bomberg moved to a more representational style in the 1920s and his work became increasingly dominated by portraits and landscapes drawn from nature. Gradually developing a more expressionist technique he travelled widely through the Middle East and Europe.

From 1945 to 1953 he worked as a teacher at Borough Polytechnic (now London South Bank University) in London, where his pupils included Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Cliff Holden, Dorothy Mead and Miles Peter Richmondlink. London South Bank University have named one of their student accomidation halls in his honour (David Bomberg House).

Contents 1 Life and work 1.1 Early years 1.2 The Slade 1.3 Pre-war avant-garde 1.4 World War I 2 References in fiction 3 Further reading 4 External links 5 References

[edit] Life and work

[edit] Early years

Bomberg was born in the Lee Bank area of Birmingham, the seventh of eleven children of a Polish-Jewish immigrant leatherworker. In 1895 his family moved to Whitechapel in the East End of London where he was to spend the rest of his childhood.^[1]

After studying art at City and Guilds, Bomberg returned to Birmingham to train as a lithographer^[2] but quit to study under Walter Sickert at Westminster School of Art 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,^[3] alongside Roger Fry's 1910 exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists, where he first saw the work of Cézanne.^[1]

Bomberg's artistic studies had involved considerable financial hardship but in 1911, with the help of John Singer Sargent and the Jewish Education Aid Society, he was able to attain a place at the Slade School of Art.^[4]

[edit] The Slade

At the Slade Bomberg was one of the remarkable generation of artists that studied under Henry Tonks and included Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, Mark Gertler and Isaac Rosenberg. Bomberg and Rosenberg, from similar backgrounds, had met some years earlier and became close friends as a result of their mutual interests^[5].

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.^[6] His own style was rapidly moving away from these traditional methods, however, particularly under the influence of the March 1912 London exhibition of Italian Futurists that exposed him to the dynamic abstraction of Picabia and Severini, and Fry's second Post Impressionist exhibition in October of the same year, which displayed the works of Picasso, Matisse and the Fauvists alongside those of Wyndham Lewis, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell.^[7]

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."^[4] His dynamic angular representations of the human form, combining the geometrical abstraction of cubism with the energy of the Futurists, 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 he travelled to France with Jacob Epstein, where among others he met Modigliani, Derain and Picasso.^[8]

[edit] Pre-war avant-garde

Leaving 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 of the Bloomsbury Group's Omega Workshops before exhibiting with the Camden Town Group in December 1913. His enthusiasm for the dynamism and aesthetics of the machine age gave him a natural affinity with Wyndham Lewis's emerging vorticist movement, and five of his works featured in the founding exhibition of the London Group in 1914,^[1] 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 publication 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 which attracted positive reviews from Roger Fry and T. E. Hulme and attracted favourable attention from experimental artists nationally and internationally.^[4] 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 Jacks - causing "the horses drawing the 29 bus... to shy at it as they came round the corner of King's Road."^[7] "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."^[4]

With the help of Augustus John Bomberg sold two paintings from this exhibition to the influential American collector John Quinn.^[8]

[edit] World War I

Despite the success of his Chenil Gallery exhibition Bomberg continued to be dogged by financial problems. In 1915 he enlisted in the Royal Engineers, transferring in 1916 to the King's Royal Rifle Corps and in March of that year, shortly after marrying his first wife, being sent to the Western Front.^[1]

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 permanently destroying his faith in the aesthetics of the machine age.^[7] 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.^[8]

Bomberg died in London in 1957, his critical stock rising sharply thereafter.

A major retrospective of Bomberg's work was held at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1988.

In 2006, Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal (Cumbria) 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).

[edit] References in fiction

In Restless, William Boyd's 2006 novel, there is a reference to a portrait by Bomberg of one of the book's major (fictional) characters. The painting is said to occupy a place in the National Portrait Gallery in London.

[edit] Further reading

• Paintings and drawings. London, Arts Council 1967. (Exhibition catalogue.)
• David Bomberg, 1890-1957 / [by] Roy Oxlade. London: Royal College of Art, 1977. ISBN 0902490230
• David Bomberg : the later years / [edited by Nicholas Serota and Jennifer Brook]. London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, [1979] (Exhibition catalogue) ISBN 0854880453
• David Bomberg in Palestine, 1923-1927 / [curator in charge, Stephanie Rachum ; assistant curator, Hedva Raff ; English editing, Barbara Gingold]. Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1983. (Exhibition catalogue.) ISBN 9652780154
• David Bomberg, 1890-1957: a tribute to Lilian Bomberg, March 14-April 12, 1985. London: Fischer Fine Art Ltd., [1985?] (Uxbridge, Middlesex: Hillingdon Press)
• Richard Cork, David Bomberg (Yale, 1987). ISBN 0300038275
• David Bomberg: Spirit in the Mass; Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, 17 July - 28 October 2006. (Lakeland Arts Trust, 2006). (Exhibition catalogue.) ISBN 1902498283
• David Bomberg en Ronda; Museo Joaquin Peinado, Ronda, 1 - 30 October 2004. (Museo Joaquin Peinado, 2004). (Exhibition catalogue with text by Richard Cork and Michael Jacobs.) ISBN 0954505816
• In celebration of David Bomberg 1890-1957; Daniel Katz Gallery, London, 30 May - 13 July 2007). (Daniel Katz Ltd, 2007). (Exhibition catalogue with text by Richard Cork and Miles Richmond.) ISBN 9780954505851

[edit] 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

[edit] References