David Bomberg - WikiHQ

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 Slade School of Art under Henry Tonks, and which included Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer, C.R.W. Nevinson, and Dora Carrington. He was expelled from the Slade School of Art in 1913, with agreement between senior teachers Tonks, Frederick Brown and Philip Wilson Steer, because of the audacity of his breach from the conventional approach of that time.

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.

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 expressionist technique, he travelled widely through the Middle East and Europe.

From 1945 to 1953, Bomberg worked as a teacher at Borough Polytechnic (now London South Bank University) in London, where his pupils included Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Philip Holmes, Cliff Holden, Edna Mann, Dorothy Mead, Gustav Metzger, Dennis Creffield, Cecil Bailey, and Miles Richmond. David Bomberg House, one of the student halls of residences at London South Bank University, is named in his honour. He was married to landscape painter Lilian Holt.

Early years

thumb|Self-Portrait (1931), charcoal and wash.

David Bomberg was born in the Lee Bank area of Birmingham on 5 December 1890. He was the seventh of eleven children of a Polish Jewish immigrant leatherworker, Abraham, and his wife Rebecca. He was Orthodox but she less so and supported David's painting ambitions. In 1895, his family moved to Whitechapel in the East End of London 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 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, alongside Roger Fry's 1910 exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists, where he first saw the work of Paul Cézanne.

The Slade

thumb|right|Vision of Ezekiel, 1912, oil on canvas. [[Tate Gallery.]]

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. 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 Francis Picabia and Gino Severini, and Fry's second Post Impressionist exhibition in October of the same year, which displayed the works of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and the Fauvists alongside those of Wyndham Lewis, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell.

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

thumb|[[The Mud Bath (1914; Tate Gallery).]]

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'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. 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 Richard Cork 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).

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. 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. The collection is the work of Sarah Rose, who built her collection over thirty years. 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".

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.

In 2017, the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester mounted a major exhibition of Bomberg's work curated in partnership with the Ben Uri Gallery & Museum of St John's Wood, London.

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 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

External links

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
Cliff Holden, The History of the Borough Group of Artists, 2004
Connected, Spring 2009, Journal of alumni of London South Bank University