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Home , David Bomberg, The Mud Bath

BENJAMIN PROUST FINE ART LIMITED

London

DAVID BOMBERG 1890 – 1957

BARGEE 1921

Gouache on paper 27,5 x 23 cm Signed lower right, dates “21” lower left.

Related literature

Richard Cork, , The Gallery, London: 1988 William Lopke, David Bomberg: A critical Study of his Life and Work, A.S Barnes and Company, Cranbury NJ, 1968

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David Bomberg comes from a modest background; he grew up in the Slums of Birmingham and in the ghetto of London’s East End. His father was a Jewish leather – craftsman who had been forced by pogroms to leave his native . As the fifth child of a large family becoming an artist was not the most obvious career path. The family lived in crammed accommodations in and Bomberg had no hope in getting financial help from his father during his studentship. His mother was during her lifetime Bomberg’s biggest supporter and she created a studio for him so he could work in private. Bomberg was determined and he started following ’s evening classes at the Westminster School. He befriended fellow immigrants’ sons like and Mark Gertler and they were all able to study at the Slade with the help of the Jewish Education Aid Society, who loaned Bomberg the funds he needed to enter the School in April 1911. He entered the school at its height under Henry Tonka and he studied in the presence of an impressive generation of Slade students who included , Paul Nash, Christopher Nevinson and . (fig 1) The Slade School of art at time had become a revolutionary institution responsible for shaping the British Avantgarde. Bomerg’s time at the Slade school was marked by a number of ground breaking exhibitions. In November 1910 art dealer installed the famous exhibition, Manet and the Post Impressionists, at the Grafton Galleries. This was in October 1912 followed by a second exhibition in the Grafton Galleries, Second Post – Impressionist. This ground breaking exhibition introducing Picasso’s and Braque’s caused quite a stir, Paul Nash recalled that the exhibition seemed ‘to bring about a national upheaval… every canon of art, as understood was virtually shattered. These exhibitions left a deep impression on Bomberg and his earliest surviving painting show the influence of his former teacher Walter Sickert who was himself influenced by Post – Impressionist and the founder of the . In Bombergs Bedroom Picture we see a Camden Town group like interior with the figure of a woman leaning out of the window, her angular form, simplification and abstractness, according to Hulme in 1914, that Bomberg ‘ has all the time been more interested in form than in anything else.

In 1913 he went on a trip to Paris together with his friend Jacop Epstein. Sent by the Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery to select a Jewish Section for a major exhibition of Twentieth Century Art. A Review of Modern Movements he met many of the leading artists like Picasso and Modigliani. On his return Bomberg, interested in both cubism and , committed himself to experimenting with form with the aim to create pictorial renewal. In 1913 he was included in the most experimental section in the Exhibtion by the Camden Town Group and Others. By this time he had attracted the interest of the founder of the Vorticist. This radical modernist movement concerned itself with machine-age forms and energetic imagery as to blast away the legacy of the Edwardian past. Bomberg had begun to draw inspiration from the urban environment, the machine – age metropolis as he called it ‘I want to translate the life of a great city, its motion, its machinery, into an art that shall not be photographic, but expressive…’ Even though he shared a lot of the ideas of and his paintings were exhibited in their exhibitions he declined Lewis’s invitation to join the group. This fascination with the power of the machine was on the minds of most pre - war avant-garde British artist who were exploring the impact of machinery on modern society. Works from Bombergs pre war period like Ju-Jitsu (1913) the sixty four square grid is in a dynamic conflict with the abstract and represents a East End wrestling hall (fig 2), and (1914), the vibrant red rectangle represents the vapour baths found on Brick lane with human figures reduced to geometric shapes leaping, diving and stretching around it, clearly show Bomberg’s fascination with the machine age (fig 3). These early modernists works pushes art to its limits and Bomberg is steadily working on revitalising the language of painting. Bomberg received a lot of positive response from the press and was hailed as a ‘recognized leader’ in the futurist movement and modern art.

In 1914 at the age of 23 only a year after leaving the Slade School of Art, Bomberg staged a large solo exhibition of his modernist works in the Chenil Gallery. It received a lot mixed reactions from the critics and it aroused a high level of interest from both the public and the press. The Poet and Philosopher T.E. Hume concluded his review that Bomberg was ‘a artist of remarkable ability ‘. Unfortunately he was unable to sell the works at the exhibition and this combined with the onset of War made that Bomberg was feeling disheartened. With the war pursuing, patronage for the arts was decreasing and Bomberg was lacking funds. In November 1915 he decided to enlist with the and in 1916 he sailed for France with battalion to become part of the trench warfare. There was little time or desire for anything else and Bomberg was only able to execute a few small drawings. Like so many soldiers Bomberg was feeling the impact and strain of seeing the destruction of human lives on such an enormous scale. He was depressed and found life almost unbearable and he deliberately put a gun to his foot and pulled the trigger. All this left a mark on the development of his art which transformation after the war was profound. The war had impelled him to revise his attitude to industrialised society, he needed to believe in humanity’s ability to counter and survive the destructiveness of machine power. He started to remove himself from his near – abstraction, pre - war work in favour of a more rounded and organic vision of humanity moving to a more realistic treatment of his subjects. His previous focus on the human figure in an urban context slowly evolved and in his painting Barges, 1920 (fig 4) we can see the introduction of landscape painting. In the structured placement of the boats we recognize his earlier style and sense that he didn’t abandon abstraction completely but that it gave way to a freer handling of the brush and manipulation of pigment. The present gouache dates from this period where we see him slowly pulling away from the abstractness of the Vorticist Group and returning to a more realistic treatment of subjects. It was a sober time and Bomberg painted relatively little oil paintings using papers from his wife, Alice’s office as a medium. The Canal Barge, and Barge Family series are drawn from the artist’s experiences in Flanders and similar scenes in the country near London. In a letter from Alice Mayes to Lilian Bomberg, she wrote: ‘I have found some memories about a canal in Flanders where David was stationed with part of his company. David, speaking of this canal and how part of his duty was to ride out with messages, told me of how he was so interested in watching the barges on the canal that he missed his balance and fell in.’

Bomberg was struggling with life in London, struggling with finding recognition as an artist and in 1923 he decided to set of with his wife Alice for Israel with help of Palestine Foundation Fund. The 1920’s also saw his first trip to Spain to where he would return more frequently during his lifetime and which inspired him to paint some of his greatest landscape paintings. After the Second World War he started teaching at the Borough Polytechnic where he attracted a devoted group of pupils. Bomberg would be the inspiration behind the formation of the in 1946. The group would centre on those figures taught by Bomberg including , and . The fifties saw him return to Rhonda, Spain were his health would slowly deteriorate. After a collapse in 1957 he returned to London where he would die a few days later.

Fig 1. Photograph of the Slade School of Art Picnic, c. 1912. Bomerg is 3rd from left on the back row.

Fig 2 David Bomberg, Ju- Jitsu, 1913 Oil paint on board

Fig 3 David Bomberg, Mud Bath, 1914 Oil paint on Canvas

Fig 4 David Bomerg, Barges, 1919 Oil paint on canvas