Throw yourself in! | David Bomberg at Crossing Borders

David Bomberg, Calle San Pedro. Courtesy Osborne Samuel Gallery

Before WW1, Slade drop-out David Bomberg made his name as a radical, avant-garde artist, creating complex, geometric compositions, blending elements of cubism and futurism, such as In the Hold (c1914), now in the Tate collection. After the conflict (in which he served) came the ‘return to order’, and the painter found that the bottom had dropped out of the market for the type of work he was producing, try as he might to make it more rounded, and organic. To make ends meet, he moved to Hampshire in 1919, to set up a chicken farm.

Without Bomberg we wouldn’t have had Auerbach or Kossoff, so it’s just as well that his friend and supporter Muirhead Bone was looking out for him. Bone found the artist – whose parents had moved to England to escape the Polish pogroms – a commission from the Zionist Organisation to paint the austere landscapes of Palestine and roofscapes of Jerusalem, Petra and Jericho.

This was very much a transitional period for Bomberg, which he described as ‘painting postcards for government officials’, but it was formative, too, teaching him to work en plein air, directly in front of his subject.

On returning home, after five years, he could muster little appetite for painting the gently rolling English landscapes, so he set off for Spain, where he rediscovered his mojo. In 1929 he visited Toledo, where, influenced by the work of El Greco, he began employing a more expansive, urgent technique. In 1934 he spent several months in the city of Cuenca, perched on a rock ridge, straddled by ravines formed by the rivers Jucar and Huecar. The vivid, beautifully structured paintings he produced, in rich impasto, were once again ahead of their time.  

One of these, Calle de San Pedro (above), courtesy of Osborne Samuel Gallery, can be seen at the Crossing Borders exhibition on the second floor of Saatchi Gallery during British Art Fair. The exhibition celebrates the impact made on British art by immigrants, or the children of immigrants, whether that be Jews escaping persecution from Europe or colonial subjects arriving post-WW2 from the Caribbean or Asia. The show has been compiled by Colin Gleadell and curated by Monica Bohm-Duchen.

Two other artists of Jewish-immigrant descent, Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach, were both massively influenced by Bomberg, who taught them at Borough Polytechnic in the aftermath of WW2. Bomberg’s artistic reputation had by then faded, and he had been unable to find work in one of the more fashionable London art schools. But he was an inspiring, if highly unorthodox, teacher, whose philosophy – summed up by the mantra ‘throw yourself in!’ – transformed the lives and shaped successful painting careers of many of his students, who also included Dorothy Mead, Dennis Creffield and Gustav Metzger.