David Bomberg
David Bomberg | |
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Futurism |
David Garshen Bomberg (5 December 1890 - 19 August 1957) was a British painter, and one of the Whitechapel Boys.
Bomberg was one of the most audacious of the exceptional generation of artists who studied at the
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 portraits and landscapes drawn from nature. Gradually developing a more
From 1945 to 1953, he worked as a teacher at
Early years
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3c/DavidBomberg-SelfPortrait19.png)
Bomberg was born in the
After studying art at
Bomberg's artistic studies had involved considerable financial hardship but in 1911, with the help of
The Slade
At the Slade School of Fine Art Bomberg was one of the remarkable generation of artists described by their drawing master Henry Tonks as the School's second and last "crisis of brilliance" and which included Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, Mark Gertler and Isaac Rosenberg.[1] (The "first crisis of brilliance" had occurred in the 1890s, with Augustus John, William Orpen and others.) Bomberg and Rosenberg, from similar backgrounds, had met some years earlier and became close friends as a result of their mutual interests.[2]
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.
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."
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
"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."[10]
With the help of Augustus John, Bomberg sold two paintings from this exhibition to the influential American collector John Quinn.[13] Alice and David enjoyed a trip to Paris with the proceeds of the sale of several pictures in 1914 which led to them marrying in 1916 after Bomberg had enlisted in the Royal Engineers in November 1915.
World War I and after
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ab/Sappers_at_work_-_Canadian_Tunnelling_Company%2C_R14%2C_St_Eloi_Art.IWMART2708.jpg/220px-Sappers_at_work_-_Canadian_Tunnelling_Company%2C_R14%2C_St_Eloi_Art.IWMART2708.jpg)
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c1/David_Bomberg.jpg/220px-David_Bomberg.jpg)
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.[7]
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 and his supporter T. E. Hulme – permanently destroyed his faith in the aesthetics of the machine age.[12] 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.[13]
The artist's book Russian Ballet, 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'.[7]
In radical opposition to the prevailing currents in avant-garde art, stimulated as these were by the enthusiasm for mechanization in
The return to order
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From there followed Bomberg's great period of painting and drawing in landscape, in Spain at
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 for which he won the Henry Tonks Prize at the Slade, to his "Last Self-Portrait" (1956), painted at Ronda, a meditation also on Rembrandt.
Unable to get a teaching position after 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
Following a collapse in Ronda, Bomberg died in London in 1957, his critical stock rising sharply thereafter. One of Bomberg's admirers, the painter Patrick Swift, unearthed and edited Bomberg's pensées, and was later to publish them, along with images of Bomberg's work, as 'The Bomberg Papers' in his ‘X’ magazine (June 1960).[14] 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, fellow artist 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 curated by
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).[9] 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 1954–57. 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).[16]
London South Bank University, the site of Bomberg's teaching at the former Borough Polytechnic, 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, and Dennis Creffield — the David Bomberg Legacy.[17] The gallery, formally launched on 14 June 2012, to display the artworks donated to the university by Sarah Rose has been made possible by the Heritage Lottery Fund.[18] The collection is the work of Sarah Rose, who built her collection over thirty years.[18] The London South Bank University Borough Road Gallery will hold two exhibitions a year drawn from the Sarah Rose collection.
The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University held an exhibition entitled The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914-18 from 30 September 2010 through 2 January 2011.[19] Tate Britain held an exhibition entitled The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World between 14 June and 4 September 2011. In the 2011 BBC series, British Masters, Bomberg was singled out as being one of the greatest painters of the 20th Century. He was one of the six artists included in Dulwich Picture Gallery's 2013 summer exhibition, "Nash, Nevinson, Spencer, Gertler, Carrington, Bomberg: A Crisis of Brilliance, 1908-1922".[20]
David Bowie purchased work by Bomberg and kept it in his private collection, part of which was sold at auction after Bowie's death in 2016.[21]
In 2017 the
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. In A Palestine Affair, a 2003 novel by Jonathan Wilson, the character "Mike Bloomberg" is loosely based on Bomberg's life, as acknowledged by the author: "Richard Cork's 'David Bomberg' [was] ... of inestimable value to me in constructing this fiction". Glyn Hughes's novel, Roth (Simon & Schuster, London, 1992) – its leading a character a London Jewish painter, its cover carrying a reproduction of one of Bomberg's Cyprus landscapes – is also loosely based on the author's reflections on Bomberg.
References
- ^ ISBN 978-1-905847-84-6.
- ^ a b Jean Moorcroft Wilson — Isaac Rosenberg (2008)
- ISBN 0-500-09211-7. Archivedfrom the original on 1 November 2016. Retrieved 12 December 2014. Philip Holmes' website]
- ^ Miles Richmond's website Archived 2 October 2016 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ a b "David Bomberg" Archived 2 February 2014 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved 29 January 2014.
- ^ "David Bomberg: an East End childhood" www.tandfonline.com[permanent dead link]
- ^ . Retrieved 18 January 2008.
- ^ "The artist David Bomberg". Digital Ladywood. Archived from the original on 21 July 2011. Retrieved 19 January 2008.
- ^ a b Cork, Richard (2006). "David Bomberg: Spirit in the Mass". Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal. Archived from the original on 24 September 2007. Retrieved 19 January 2008.
- ^ a b c d Cork, Richard. "David Bomberg". Tate. Archived from the original on 22 June 2008. Retrieved 18 January 2008.
- ^ "David Bomberg biography". Mark Barrow Fine Art. Archived from the original on 27 September 2007. Retrieved 19 January 2008.
- ^ a b c Hubbard, Sue (4 September 2006). "Back in the frame". The Independent. Find Articles at BNET.com. Retrieved 19 January 2008. [dead link]
- ^ a b c Raynor, Vivien (25 September 1988). "A Neglected British Genius". The New York Times. Retrieved 20 January 2008.
- ^ David Bomberg, 'The Bomberg papers', X, Vol. I, No. 3 (June 1960); An Anthology from X, Oxford University Press (1988)
- ^ Cork, Richard "How I Discovered Bomberg" Archived 4 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine Borough Road Gallery, Retrieved 29 January 2014.
- ^ Haden-Guest, Anthony "Modernist in Motion" The Financial Times, Retrieved 29 January 2014.
- ^ "A Lasting Legacy" (PDF). Connected. 6: 11–13. Spring 2009. Archived from the original (PDF) on 7 August 2011.
- ^ a b "Borough Road Gallery" Archived 1 February 2014 at the Wayback Machine The Public Catalogue Foundation, Retrieved 29 January 2014.
- ^ Nasher Museum Archived 8 March 2013 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved 17 September 2010
- ^ "Nash, Nevinson, Spencer, Gertler, Carrington, Bomberg: A Crisis, 1908-1922" Dulwich Picture Gallery, Retrieved 29 January 2014.
- ^ "Sotheby's: David Bowie's Art Captivates Collectors". Archived from the original on 1 January 2018. Retrieved 5 December 2016.
- ^ Hudson, Mark (30 October 2017). "Welcome catch-up with a brilliant but awkward outsider - Bomberg". The Daily Telegraph.
Further reading
- David Bomberg 1890–1957: Paintings and Drawings, Tate Gallery, London, Arts Council of Great Britain (organizer), 1967. (Exhibition catalogue.)
- Roy Oxlade, David Bomberg, 1890–1957. London: ISBN 0-902490-23-0.
- ISBN 0-85488-045-3.
- David Bomberg in Palestine, 1923–1927. Curator in charge, Stephanie Rachum; assistant curator, Hedva Raff; English editing, Barbara Gingold. Jerusalem: ISBN 965-278-015-4.
- David Bomberg, 1890–1957: a Tribute to Lilian Bomberg, March 14 – April 12, 1985. London: Fischer Fine Art Ltd. Uxbridge, Middlesex: Hillingdon Press, 1985.
- Kate Aspinall, ‘Artist Versus Teacher: The Problem of David Bomberg’s Pedagogical Legacy’, Tate Papers, no.33, 2020, https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/33/artist-versus-teacher-problem-david-bomberg-pedagogical-legacy
- ISBN 0-300-03827-5.
- David Bomberg: Spirit in the Mass; Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, 17 July – 28 October 2006. Lakeland Arts Trust, 2006. (Exhibition catalogue.) ISBN 1-902498-28-3.
- David Bomberg en Ronda; Museo Joaquin Peinado, Ronda, 1–30 October 2004. ISBN 0-9545058-1-6.
- 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 978-0-9545058-5-1
- ISBN 978-0-297-85145-5.
- The Bomberg Papers (Bomberg's pensées; unearthed and edited by Patrick Swift), X, Vol. 1, No. 3, June 1960; An Anthology from X (Oxford University Press 1988).
- Bomberg Sarah MacDougall & Rachel Dickson, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, London 2017 ISBN 978-0900157615
External links
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/4a/Commons-logo.svg/30px-Commons-logo.svg.png)
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/Wikiquote-logo.svg/34px-Wikiquote-logo.svg.png)
- 143 artworks by or after David Bomberg at the Art UK site
- Works by or about David Bomberg at Internet Archive
- 14 artworks by David Bomberg at the Ben Uri site
- Article on the Whitechapel Boys
- Guardian review of Abbot Hall exhibition
- Laurie Stewart, Notes on the Borough Group of Artists Archived 11 October 2008 at the Wayback Machine
- Cliff Holden, The History of the Borough Group of Artists, 2004
- Connected, Spring 2009, Journal of alumni of London South Bank University