David Bomberg was an English painter. He is mostly known for his early cubist pre-war portraits of people made of simple geometric forms of restricted colours. Among his post-war works which became closer to the figurative and expressionist style, were the portraits and landscapes from nature.
Background
Ethnicity:
David Bomberg's father was a Polish Jewish who immigrated to the United Kingdom.
David Bomberg was born on December 5, 1890, in Birmingham, United Kingdom. He was the seventh child in the family of Abraham Bomberg, a leather-worker, and Rebecca Bomberg who had eleven children in total.
When David was a five-year-old boy, the family relocated to Whitechapel in the East End of London. Bomberg was raised there the rest of his childhood.
Education
David Bomberg started his painting training when he became an apprentice of the lithographer Paul Fischer in 1905. At the same period, Bomberg was among the pupils of the City and Guilds of London Art School.
After three years under the Fischer’s tutelage, David started to attend the Central School of Arts and Crafts evening classes where he learned lithography and book production. To fulfil his goal of becoming an artist, David joined Walter Sickert's evening course at the Westminster School in 1907 as well and studied there the form and the representation of the "gross material facts" for three years.
Due to the help of John Singer Sargent and financial support from the Jewish Education Aid Society, David Bomberg pursued his artistic formation under Henry Tonks at the Slade School of Art in London which he entered in 1911.
While at the institution, Bomberg was a brilliant student and won many awards. The future artist had studied for two years the basics of technique and draughtsmanship and met Isaac Rosenberg who became his close friend.
Among other artist's fellows were such people as Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, William Roberts, Dora Carrington, Edward Wadsworth and Mark Gertler who became well-known artists afterwards.
David Bomberg started his artistic career in 1913 when he took part at his first group exhibitions, among which was the presentation of the Camden Town Group in December at Brighton City Art Galleries. This year, the artist travelled to Paris where he got acquainted with Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Max Jacob, Moise Kisling and Andre Derain.
The debut solo show of Bomberg’s works took place at the Chenil Gallery, Chelsea, London on July of 1914. The exhibition included his early paintings, The Mud Bath among others, and provided the artist with good reviews from art critics and brought him his first little popularity. Bomberg sold two of his drawings to the well-known collector from the United States John Quinn. One more exhibition of the same year was Twentieth Century Art: A Review of Modern Movements at the Whitechapel Gallery, in May.
Despite the successes of the first solo one-man show, David Bomberg had some financial issues. A year after his first steps to the art world, the artist co-founded the London Group and participated at their shows during his career. He also presented his creations at the exhibition of Vorticists at the Doré Galleries, but never joined the movement.
The same year, 1915, Bomberg joined the ranks of the Royal Engineers where he had served till the transfer to the King's Royal Rifle Corps the following year. While at the military service, in 1917, he received a commission from the Canadian War Memorials Fund to create a painting called ‘Sappers at Work’. The first version of the drawing made in a futurist manner was rejected, while the second one, more representational, was acquired by the National Gallery of Canada.
After the War, David Bomberg presented his artworks at the exhibitions organized in 1919 at the Adelphi Gallery and four years later at the Mansard Gallery.
From 1923 till 1927, the artist lived in the Middle East, Jerusalem, where he created his landscapes demonstrated after his return to London at the Leicester Galleries in February 1928, at his personal London studio and at the Ruskin Gallery in Birmingham on February of 1929.
The Middle East stint was followed by the trip to Spain in the 1930s, where David Bomberg also created his master landscapes presented later at the Bloomsbury Gallery in November 1932 under the title ‘Sixty Imaginative Compositions, Spanish and Scottish Landscapes and Other Works’ and at the Cooling Galleries in 1936 under the title ‘Recent Paintings of Spain’, both in London. A year later, the artist had a retrospective organized at the Foyle Art Gallery along with Horace Brodzky and Margarete Hamerschlag.
The last personal demonstration of the artist’s works while alive took place in 1943 at the Leger Gallery.
At the end of the Second World War, in 1945, David Bomberg occupied the post of a teacher of drawing at the Bartlett School of Architecture which he had held for four years. His teaching activity pursued at the Borough Polytechnic (now London South Bank University) where he had worked from 1945 to 1953. He taught such pupils as Frank Auerbach, Cliff Holden, Leon Kossoff, Leslie Marr, Dorothy Mead, and Gustav Metzger.
Inspired by the teaching manner and art style of Bomberg, his students formed two artistic groups, the Borough Group and the Borough Bottega, alongside which the artist had some exhibitions, one of which took place at the at the Heffer Gallery in Cambridge in June 1954.
During the last year of his life, the artist produced the series of writings, which expressed his thoughts on the art in a pre-war London. The same subjects appeared in his letters to William Roberts and to The Times magazine.
The Virgin of Peace in Procession through the Streets of Ronda, Holy Week
Bideford, Devon
John Rodker
Portrait of an Old Man
Eunice Levi
Hezekiah's Pool
Cyprus
Kitty, the Artist's Sister
Politics
David Bomberg became a member of the Communist Party in 1933, but left it the same year, in December, after the six-month stint in the Soviet Union.
Views
Quotations:
"I look upon Nature while I live in a steel city. 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."
Membership
Whitechapel Boys
,
United Kingdom
1914
London Group
,
United Kingdom
1915 - 1957
Connections
David Bomberg had romantic relationships with a ballet lover Sonia Cohen. In 1916, his wife became Alice Mayes, a dancer in the Kosslov ballet company. Eleven years later, they broke up and divorced in 1941.
The same year, the artist married Lilian Mendelson, a landscape painter. She had a daughter from her previous marriage whose name was Dinora. The common child of David and Lilian, a girl named Diana, was born in 1935.