This week, a touring exhibition of the work of avant-garde artist David Bomberg opens at London’s Ben Uri Gallery. It was previously shown to great acclaim at the Pallant Gallery in Chichester, followed by the Laing Gallery in Newcastle. It coincides with the 60th anniversary of Bomberg’s death and includes about 40 major works, some unknown and never exhibited before.
I fell in love with Bomberg when I opened the 220-page illustrated monograph by Ben Uri curators, Sarah MacDougall and Rachel Dickson. The Ben Uri owns 14 Bombergs, most of them in storage because the gallery is too small, and this mystery — the sense of his being hidden away from us — especially drew me to him.
So what is so special about Bomberg? I was originally fascinated by his Ghetto Theatre, a gloomy red geometric narrative painting, in which the ghetto itself is the elephant in the room. Bomberg’s work in all its phases — Cubist, Abstract Expressionist, Vorticist, Modernist, Futurist, Fauvist — essentially defies definition because of his vibrant interweaving of so many elements, and, of course, his breathtaking clarity. They are also profoundly spiritual.
The fifth of 11 children born to Polish-Jewish parents in Birmingham in 1890, he soon moved to Whitechapel, the heart of immigrant life. He became absorbed into the artistic côterie known as the Whitechapel Boys.
Described as one of the most audacious of the exceptional generation of artists who studied at the Slade School of Art, which included Mark Gertler, Bomberg was expelled in 1913 because of his refusal to submit to any particular genre. But that’s what is so invigorating about him.
The rigid geometry of his work prior to the 1920s is influenced by his wartime experiences in the trenches. He depicted both world wars, worked as a graphic artist and featured in contemporary magazines.
From this period his sketchily drawn marching feet, fleeting, faceless people and the violence of his Sappers series are disturbing images, and a far cry from his rather wistful Woman Looking through a Window, from 1911 — although that work contains a hint of the angularity to come.
By the 1920s and ’30s he adopted a more figurative approach, and his work is dominated by portraits and landscapes.
Cornwall and Cyprus in the late 1940s inspired landscapes and sunsets that burst through the canvas with an incandescent brilliance; the work of someone deprived of sunlight, while at the same time conveying an ultimate cruelty.
Bomberg told the painter Ludwig Meidner: “even flowers can be painted so as to remind us of all the terror in the human breast!”
Bomberg was neglected in his lifetime, but today is recognised as one of the 20th-century’s leading British artists. It was not until 1988 that Richard Cork curated the Tate’s first solo exhibition of his work.
Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, were both students of Bomberg at the Borough Polytechnic. Watching him draw on the board, Kossoff realised “that, in drawing, what you are seeing and experiencing, you keep your freedom.” Auerbach describes him as having “probably the most original, radical, stubborn intelligence to be found in art schools.”
Bomberg faced discrimination because he was Jewish and also because of his immigrant status, although he considered himself English, and came late to a reconciliation with his Jewish identity.
The book contains a few introspective Expressionist portraits, including self-portraits which allude to his Jewishness, of which I found Hear O Israel, (1955) the most moving. A semi-abstract work, it shows a man enveloped in fiery, orange robes with a Torah scroll. It conveys a sense of total surrender and a kind of blessing.
Bomberg: Touring Exhibition is at the Ben Uri Gallery, June 21 to September 16
