David Bomberg

David Bomberg was a British painter renowned for his boldness within a remarkable generation of artists. Bomberg created a series of intricate geometric compositions that fused the influences of Cubism and Futurism.

Biography of David Bomberg

David Garshen Bomberg was born in 1890 in the Lee Bank area of Birmingham, England. He was the seventh of eleven children in a Polish-Jewish immigrant family. Bomberg moved to Whitechapel in London with his family in 1895 and spent his formative years there.

He began his education at the City and Guilds and later trained as a lithographer in Birmingham. Bomberg's artistic journey continued under Walter Sickert at Westminster School of Art from 1908 to 1910. He then secured a place at the Slade School of Fine Art in 1911, thanks to the support of John Singer Sargent and the Jewish Education Aid Society.

He was expelled from the Slade in 1913 due to his radical approach to art. He went on to exhibit with several avant-garde groups and participated in significant exhibitions such as his solo show at the Chenil Gallery in 1914.

World War I profoundly altered Bomberg's perspective. The mechanized violence of the war, coupled with the death of his brother in the trenches and the losses of his friend Isaac Rosenberg and supporter T. E. Hulme, irrevocably shattered his belief in the aesthetics of the machine age.

In stark contrast to the prevailing avant-garde trends influenced by the enthusiasm for mechanization in Russian Constructivism following the Revolution, Bomberg traveled to Palestine to paint and draw between 1923 and 1927, with support from the Zionist Organization.

Bomberg's prolific period of landscape painting and drawing followed, encompassing locations such as Toledo (1928), Ronda (1934–35 and 1954–57), Asturias (1935), Cyprus (1948), and intermittently in Britain. A six-month stay in Odesa in Ukraine during the latter half of 1933, after Hitler's rise to power in Germany, prompted Bomberg to resign from the Communist Party upon his return to London. During World War II, he created "Evening in the City of London" (1944), depicting the bombed city with a resilient St. Paul's Cathedral triumphantly rising on the horizon.

After World War II, despite being unable to secure a teaching position at any of London's leading art schools, Bomberg became a standout educator in post-war Britain. He taught part-time at a bakery school at the Borough Polytechnic.

Bomberg passed away in London on 19 August 1957. In 1988, thirty years after the artist's death, the Tate Gallery in London showcased a major retrospective of Bomberg's work.

David Bomberg's Art Style

In the years leading up to World War I, Bomberg created a series of intricate geometric compositions that fused Cubism and Futurism. His works typically featured a limited but striking color palette, transforming human figures into simple, angular shapes, and sometimes overlaying the entire painting with a bold grid-like color scheme.

However, after his disillusioning experiences as a private soldier in the trenches and the prevailing retrogressive attitude towards modernism in Britain, Bomberg shifted to a more figurative style in the 1920s. His focus increasingly turned to portraits and landscapes inspired by nature. As he developed a more expressionistic technique, Bomberg traveled extensively through the Middle East and Europe.

His dynamic, angular depictions of the human form, which blended Cubist abstraction with the energy of the Futurists, solidified his reputation as a prominent and daring member of the avant-garde.