Bomberg

Constable & Bomberg | Constable in depth | Bomberg in depth

Biography

David Bomberg (1890-1957) is recognised as one of the most exceptional artists in 20th century British-Art and a pioneer of early modernism, yet during his lifetime he was often disregarded and died in near obscurity. 

During the First World War, Bomberg fought at the Somme and, having witnessed the atrocities, he spent the rest of his artistic career trying to find or create order, moving frequently, painting and drawing landscapes of Palestine, Spain, Cyprus, Cornwall and London.

The son of Jewish immigrants from the East End of London his early life was a struggle. He posed as a life drawing model to fund evening classes with the artist Walter Sickert – whose influence can be seen from in Bomberg’s early work. The dark, limited palette and tightly cropped composition are reminiscent of Sickert’s interiors.

Awarded a scholarship to the Slade School of Art in 1911 Bomberg’s fellow students included Edward Wordsworth, Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash and Mark Gertler. Whilst he was admired by his contemporaries, Bomberg’s tutors found him argumentative and aggressive and in 1913 he was asked to leave. During his time at the Slade his paintings had swiftly moved from figurative to semi abstraction. His representation of the human form was charged with energy, the repetitive and the forms have become mechanical and full of excitement fro the new machine age.

Fighting in the trenches at the Somme deeply affected Bomberg. Where once he had drawn inspiration from the promise of progress he now associated machines with destruction and death.

David Bomberg was a visionary artist who lived a life of struggle and change. He was the most promising young British artist of his generation but was asked to leave art school having argued with his teachers and fellow students. He came the closest British artist to producing a major Modernist masterpiece with Vorticist works like 'In the hold' and 'Mudbath'. 

After moving beyond mainstream modern currents and trends, he was deserted and then attacked by former supporters and critics.

Two consecutive summer expeditions took place, firstly to Devon in 1946 and then to Cornwall in 1947. The latter six week painting trip was spent near Zennor on the Trendrine Farm. The wild landscape of West Penwith appealed to Bomberg, the warm colours he used echo those of his earlier Spanish paintings. As in Palestine, he preferred to paint in the evening, often capturing the vivid colours of the sunset in such paintings as ‘Trendrine in the Sun’, ‘Evening Cornwall’ and ‘Barnstaple Bay’.

In 1945, Bomberg began teaching drawing at the Borough Polytechnic in South London. He pioneered a teaching practice which inspired a generation of artists who attended his classes in the 1940s and 50s. Some of these would go on to be famous and influential in English painting, such as for example, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, and Dennis Creffield.

He encouraged freedom of expression and a rejection of the academic art-school traditions such as perspective and realism, in favour of capturing the 'Spirit in the Mass'- an attempt to convey the pure essence of the subject.

Bomberg's landscapes are highly crafted and painted with spirit and panache and yet at the same time, there is often a sense of personal struggle and an attempt to realise something new and possibly stronger than painting can achieve. 

Bomberg called his approach to painting dealing with 'the spirit in the mass.' There is a sense that he is straining towards, or has a vision and sensibility that could be described as religious or 'of belief' in its intensity. 

What this mix of struggle and painting facility produces in combination are a set of paintings which are sometimes highly realistic and detailed, at times romantic and sketchy, often moving towards abstraction and then again, sometimes highly expressive. 

The images can seem dislocated, sometimes they appear to be unbalanced, top heavy or lopsided. They can seem inelegant and lumpy, like an overly earnest remark at a social party which stops the conversation. They can also appear as poetic and even on occasion, picture-postcard kitsch. They are, however, always memorable and deeply engaging. 

At the end of his life Bomberg had been largely forgotten by the art galleries and critics. Despite this, he never doubted his artistic direction or his accomplishments, 'An artist whose integrity sustains his strength to make no compromise... is never degraded... no one part of the work’s periods should be selected for preferment to the detriment of another. It is all one - and shows the way of youth to age'. 

His final years were marred by failed attempts to secure a retrospective exhibition of his work or to persuade a national collection to purchase one of his paintings.

Feeling an outcast from the British art world, he spent time in Israel and Spain and died in poverty.

This work

This work seems to have all or most of the attributes of Bomberg’s work listed above: it is at first glance, inelegant to the point of being almost childlike in its production, it appears to have been made in one session. The brushstrokes are highly visible and there is a lot of ‘wet on wet’ painting as though it has all been painted in one go, and over the top of previous strokes to get the work finished. There is a feeling of struggling towards a resolution rather than easily working through processes or taking the work to a higher level in good order and in good time. 

A good example of this is the light pale yellow brushstrokes towards the top left of the sky, underneath the mass of dark blue and purple that form the top level of cloud. These strokes have been made in wet paint over wet paint (a process called ‘wet on wet’). They look hurried and almost muddy, as though the pale colour was becoming dirty with the dark colour underneath. There are also small inflections of the purple in the top left of these strokes and the dark blue is also clearly visible underneath as well.

Lower down on the left edge, the yellow of the sunlight which is in the deepest space of the background of the picture is bright and light tones, this shines against the other tones of the image. Near by, the blue of the water is even lighter in tone and, since we would expect blue to be darker in tone than yellow, this appears as somewhat unbalanced (technically, this is called ‘discordant colour’ by artists and art historians). This combines with the somewhat sickly aspect of the pale strokes discussed above to give the sky a dramatic and atmospheric effect and the painting an expressive value.

This expressive effect is further heightened by the thickening and physical nature of the paint which is realised in clear brushstrokes that are open and east to read. As a viewer, you feel that you can get a sense of how the artist made this work and see how it was done strokes by stroke. This brings you closer to the work and makes the experience more ‘real’ to you in an emotional or subjective fashion rather than in a cool, objective or photographic sense. We are being asked by Bomberg to recognise the authenticity of his processes and by extension, the authenticity of his experience of the landscape and its faithful recording in paint. I think this is what he means by the ‘spirit in the mass’.

Many modern artists, from Monet onwards, would work in this way, using multiple canvases simultaneously to achieve techniques and processes that required drying times and allowed them to continue working. 

By contrast this work feels like a one off that has been painted in one go, to ‘get it done’, with the imposition of the artist’s entire concentration on the work. Looking at this work, you get the feeling of him working hard to resolve things as a single piece.

As well as painting wet over wet, there is mixing of colour on the canvas so that, paint effects are created in the picture rather than mixed on the palette and applied as considered steps. 

This ‘live’ mixing which was always considered bad form and as evidence of amateurishness and lack of preparation by traditional and academic artists increases the feeling of spontaneity and the ‘off the cuff’ mood of the solutions to the visual language of the picture. A good example is in the green foreground paint that mixes with white on the extreme left edge. The brushstroke also touches the edge of the frame and this seems to visibly ‘barge into’ the edge in an ugly and crammed in effect. 

Most modern paintings follow an orthodoxy of making the middle of the picture the most busy and choppy area and eh. Allowing shapes and energy to enlarge and dissipate as they reach the edges and the corners of the painting (one only has to think of the analytical paintings of Picasso and Braque with their rounded and ‘tondo’ shapes to see how they avoided the outside edges and corners of the rectangular frame). 

Despite all this ‘heart on the sleeve’ edginess and inelegance, there is a a sense that this work has been consummately achieved. There is a range of interesting brushstrokes on display, some wet on wet, some dry on dry (as in the lower right of the brown colour in the foreground). 

The banded and horizontal striping of the scene creates a believable space and sense of a specific place. The different applications, thicknesses and scales of marks combine to create different speeds in the image so that it is not all one paced and unrelenting, but is rather instead, varied, interesting and allows the viewer different experiences as they look at the picture.

Most of all this painting succeeds and is memorable because it has a unity. There is a feeling that the different effects and the paint handling fit closely together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to create one unique image. 

This work doesn’t extend into the world but is separate, unique and convincing. It feels to be ‘autonomous’, that is to say, it doesn’t borrow from anything else, isn’t a part of anything else but stands on its own terms in the world as a separate experience for the viewer. 

Believing that art in general and painting in particular, can offer this kind of authentic and autonomous experience - something that others might call ‘profound’ - is more for the viewer to decide than for the artist. 

The artist, David Bomberg, clearly believed in the power of painting to offer and achieve this authenticity for the viewer. His whole life and the sincerity of his application of paint to achieve effects that combine in a vision attest to to this point of view. It only requires the viewer to agree, to complete the work.