David Bomberg

www.jewsfww.london ! David Bomberg Although English born (1890 in Birmingham), Bomberg was part of the large Jewish immigrant community in London’s East End, his Polish family having moved to London to build a better life. He went to the Slade School of Fine Art, where he met Mark Gertler, Isaac Rosenberg and Clare Winsten. These and other artists, including Bernard Meninsky and Jacob Kramer, became known as the ‘Whitechapel Boys’ (and Girl). The East End brought together people from many parts of Europe, their faith and language providing a common focus for otherwise diverse groups of people. The Whitechapel Boys (and Whitechapel Girl, Clare Winsten) reflected this diversity, as their family origins included Austria, Galicia, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine. They grew up within a mixed yet cohesive community, which was open to news and views from a range of homelands on the continent. Whatever their material poverty, Bomberg and his friends entered the art world being receptive to cultural ideas from abroad, particularly if these touched personal, artistic emotions. In 1910, he was inspired by Roger Fry’s exhibition ‘Manet and the Post- Impressionists’, at the Grafton Galleries, London. He was attracted by the rejection of naturalism in art as displayed by Impressionist painters. He became interested in colour, line and form in drawing, which he thought about, and he developed his techniques whilst at the Slade School of Fine Art between 1911 and 1913. Although surrounded by by fellow student artists of an extraordinary generation where change and modernism were the order of the day, Bomberg was the most adventurous and radical of them all. Roger Fry’s seminal exhibitions of Post- Impressionism shook the establishment and the established practice in Britain and was literally a revolutionary inspiration and call to action particularly to student and young emerging artists. The restrictions of form and palate were gone and artistic emancipation was there for whoever was confident and brave enough to experiment. He was the fifth child and poverty was a dominant continuous circumstance of the Bomberg household. However his mother, Rebecca, was determined to ensure his obvious and precocious talent was to be fulfilled and the Jewish Education Aid Society came to his rescue and funded his studies at the Slade. His teacher Henry Tonks was no fan of the new wave of modernist art styles and movements and did all he could to discount these avant-garde exhibitions but Bomberg saw the opportunity to express his imagination in forms that no other British artist had achieved. His Racehorses from 1913 is discussed in some depth below but already you can see a seismic change from a traditional subject matter of the same period exhibited perhaps at the Royal Academy. His Ghetto Theatre from 1920 further illustrates 1 www.jewsfww.london ! Bomberg’s distinctive ability to grow as an artist. His landscapes of Jerusalem from the mid 1920s and those of the rooftops of Toledo and drama of Ronda in the South of Spain from the late 20s, 30s and 50s, his London war and post war works from the 40’s together demonstrate why Bomberg is justly recognised today as a towering figure in 20th Century British art. The tragedy was that the acclaim and renown he posthumously enjoys today is diametrically opposite to his huge struggle to survive during his career. Bomberg enlisted in the British army in 1915 and served as a sapper (military engineer) with the Royal Engineers. His personal experiences during the First World War and the death of his brother deeply affected him. In March 1916 he married his first wife Alice Mayes only to be sent to the Front shortly after. The experiences of fighting in the First World War were harrowing. He shot himself in the foot, whether deliberate or not is unproven, but he was temporarily invalided out although he was soon after recalled to active service. In 1918 he was commissioned to produce a series of paintings of Sappers at work by the Canadian High Commission. He produced an extraordinarily abstract representation which was rejected and although his more toned down second version was accepted the initial refusal to understand or entertain the first version left him deeply disillusioned. Rejection and disillusionment were to become regular features in his extraordinary career. In 1938 he writes to Jacob Kramer, a fellow Jewish artist of great merit but sparse commercial success of his plans to re-organise Ben Uri as ‘their’ gallery through the Artists Committee including Bomberg himself, Jacob Kramer, Hans Feibusch, Horace Brodzky, Bernard Meninsky and Edward Wolfe saying ‘The Jewish artists are starving, none of us can work, most of us receive one form of charity or another – we can make a market for ourselves if we organise’ but the idea came to nothing from both the other artists and Ben Uri. After his death in 1957, following a career insufficiently understood and appreciated by museums, peers and collectors alike, his second wife Lilian whom he lived with since 1928 and married in 1941 worked tirelessly to demonstrate the true merit of her husband’s work and, unusually and in this case, thankfully, succeeded. Bomberg’s reputation as a teacher is secure as a result of the testimony and careers of many at the Borough Polytechnic including Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. His reputation as a leading figure in 20th Century British art is due to his wife Lilian and the few important gallerists who belatedly recognised his place. 2 www.jewsfww.london ! ‘Racehorses’ (1913) by David Bomberg (1890 – 1957), black chalk and wash on paper Like many of the ‘Whitechapel Boys’, David Bomberg was a keen supporter of modernist art. His drawing ‘Racehorses’ reflects this, with geometric shapes representing horses and riders. It also demonstrates David’s knowledge of continental theories such as Cubism and Futurism and his close association with the British art movement known as Vorticism. These will be considered below, but it is worth thinking about why he and his friends were open to novel ideas, whilst many British artists, critics and audiences rejected these trends. Bomberg produced Racehorses in 1913, marking his transition from art student to a confident artist possessing a clear idea of how his art should develop. His simplified drawing of horses at a race-course reflects both a familiarity with modernist ideas and a commitment to putting them into practice. At this time, he was interested in the Cubist approach to art, where objects are studied closely, broken up and re-drawn in abstract form. Elements of this approach are seen with the horses, represented as geometric shapes (influenced by the angular shape of seats used by art students in class and known as ‘donkeys’). Cubism was closely associated with art developments in France and contributed to the formation of the Futurist artistic model in Italy, which emphasised speed and 3 www.jewsfww.london ! technology, and which sought to portray objects as mechanistic (like machines). A number of British artists were interested in these developments and developed a theory known as Vorticism. This drew inspiration from the continental models, trying to capture a sense of movement in an image, and ‘Racehorses’ demonstrates this well. Simplified representations of horses and riders are shown jostling together as if at the start of a race, whilst racing horses seem to move quickly past on the race- course behind. Vorticism, formally founded by Percy Wyndham Lewis in 1914 (the year after Racehorses) was both short-lived and controversial within British art circles, its rejection of natural form upsetting many artists and audiences. Bomberg never joined the Vorticist movement but was in tune with its direction. Racehorses represents a critical stage in David’s personal artistic development and that of modernist art in Britain. One final aspect of ‘Racehorses’ is worth considering. He never specified which race-course was depicted, but some people have suggested that it might be Epsom, close to London and, like the drawing, having no fences or hurdles, just a running rail for the horses to follow. If this is so, Bomberg demonstrated his awareness of current affairs as well as modern art theories as Epsom race-course was where suffragette Emily Davison was knocked down and killed by the King’s horse, on 4th June 1913. 4 www.jewsfww.london ! ‘Sappers under Hill 60’ (1919) by David Bomberg (1890 – 1957), pencil, ink and wash on paper Bomberg enlisted in the British army in 1915 and served as a sapper (military engineer) with the Royal Engineers. His personal experiences during the First World War and the death of his brother deeply affected him. In artistic terms, this is demonstrated by a move away from his earlier Vorticist inspired optimism about the ‘machine age’ helping humanity. His technique of reducing human and animal forms to geometric shapes, as in Racehorses (1913) was replaced by a distinctive representation of such forms, although he retained a modernist interest in the dynamic (moving) qualities of human shapes. This change is illustrated by Sappers under Hill 60, produced in 1919 where the tunnelling soldiers (the sappers) are clearly visible amongst the supporting tunnel structures around them. They are given stylised facial features, angular bodies in the modernist style, but also distinct limbs that make them stand out from the tunnel structures. They are also positioned in the composition (arrangement of the picture) to parallel the tunnel supports. 5 www.jewsfww.london ! Sappers under Hill 60 is one of a number of studies produced by Bomberg, for his painting ‘Sappers at Work’, which he was commissioned (asked) to produce for the Canadian War Memorials’ Fund.

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