Bomberg, David

Bomberg, David (1890–1957). British painter and teacher. He was born in Birmingham of Polish-Jewish immigrant parents and grew up in the Whitechapel area of London, where his father was a leather-worker. In 1908 he gave up an apprenticeship as a lithographer to devote himself to painting, encouraged by Sargent, who had noticed him drawing in the Victoria and Albert Museum. He studied under Sickert at Westminster School of Art (1908–10) and—with support from the Jewish Education Aid Society—at the Slade School (1911–13), where he won a prize for a drawing of his fellow-student Isaac Rosenberg. Whilst still a student Bomberg showed an advanced understanding of avant-garde Continental painting, particularly Cubism and Futurism (he visited Paris with Epstein in 1913), and his work has much in common with that of the Vorticists, although he turned down Wyndham Lewis's invitation to join the group. His best-known work of this time is probably In the Hold (Tate Gallery, London, 1913–14), a large, dazzlingly coloured abstraction of fragmented geometric forms, based on the subject of men working in the hold of a ship in the docks. It was one of the most discussed works at the first exhibition of the London Group in 1914, and in the same year Bomberg's first one-man show, at the Chenil Gallery, London, was well received critically (although sales were poor). In 1915 he enlisted in the Royal Engineers, then transferred to the King's Royal Rifles as a sapper, and in 1918 he was commissioned by the Canadian War Memorials Fund to make a large painting of Sappers at Work: A Canadian Tunnelling Company. His first version (Tate Gallery, London, 1918–19) was turned down as being too avant-garde, so he replaced it with a more conventionally naturalistic picture (NG, Ottawa, 1919).

In the years immediately after the First World War Bomberg continued to receive respectful press notices but to have difficulty selling his work. Dismaying of achieving success in Britain, he moved to Palestine in 1923 (at the suggestion of Muirhead Bone, whose advice he had sought) and for the next four years he lived mainly in Jerusalem, where he worked for the Zionist Organization, producing illustrations for newspapers and pamphlets. He returned to Britain in 1927 but continued to travel widely. In his illustrations for the Zionist Organization he had of necessity worked in a fairly naturalistic style and in his paintings he began moving away from abstraction to a heavily-worked, somewhat Expressionist figurative style, painting mainly portraits and landscapes. Much of his later career was devoted to teaching at various London colleges, most notably Borough Polytechnic, 1945–53. Many of his pupils, among them Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, found him an inspiring teacher. Auerbach recalls that in his classes ‘there was an atmosphere of research and radicalism that was extremely stimulating'. Bomberg's pupils exhibited together under the name Borough Group, 1947–50, and then as the Borough Bottega, 1953–6. In spite of the admiration he received from those who knew him well, Bomberg was by this time becoming increasingly embittered at the lack of general recognition for his work ( John Rothenstein writes that during his lifetime he was ‘the most neglected major British artist of his time'), and in 1954 he moved to Spain. He returned to England shortly before his death. Since then his reputation has soared.