David Bomberg of the Whitechapel Boys
Whitechapel painter David Bomberg has been described as ‘the most audacious’ of the young group of East End artists, all born in the 1890s, who became dubbed ‘The Whitechapel Boys’. His refusal to be bracketed as a painter led to conflict, most strikingly when one major patron turned a commissioned work down … forcing a furious Bomberg to go back and have another go. And it also saw him undertake an extraordinary artistic journey, from his early cubist compositions to his later expressionist landscapes.
David Gershen Bomberg was the seventh of eleven children, born on 5 December 1890 to a family of Polish Jews in Birmingham. His father, a leatherworker, moved the family to Whitechapel when David was five years old. A talented artist, he left school to study at the City & Guilds of London Art School in Kennington, then returned to Birmingham to train as a lithographer.
It was a solid trade but not one for the young Bomberg. He raised the money to study painting at the Westminster School of Art, with help from the Jewish Education Aid Society and John Singer Sargent. The latter was the most successful English portrait painter of the time, and a geneous patron to other artists. At Westminster, Bomberg came under the tutelage of Walter Sickert. The great British painter would later, improbably, be collared as a suspect in the Whitechapel Murders, but in 1908 he was better known as a major figure in English Art, an impressionist who used London scenes and people as his material. This emphasis on the ‘gross material facts’ of London life made a big impact on Bomberg.
The young painter was now absorbing the work of Cezanne and the Post-Impressionists, whose number included Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec. As the movement mutated into Fauvism and Cubism, with new stars such as Matisse, Derain, Braque and Picasso, Bomberg began studies at the Slade School of Art. It was an astonishingly creative period, with professor of art Henry Tonks (’the most renowned and formidable teacher of his generation’) teaching Mark Gertler, Isaac Rosenberg, Gwen John, Ben Nicholson, Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer among others. There was a host of East Enders in there, and Bomberg won the Tonks prize in 1911 for his drawing of Whitechapel artist and poet Rosenberg.
But he was swiftly moving away from conventionally figurative and representational art. A 1912 London exhibition of work by the Italian Futurists opened his eyes to the abstractions of Severini and Picabia. In 1913 he travelled to France as a guest of the sculptor Jacob Epstein, and met Picasso, Derain and Modigliani.
The pace of change of European and English art in the early 20th century was furious, and it is a confusion of movements and schisms. Leaving the Slade in 1913, Bomberg first hooked up with the Omega Workshops of the Bloombsbury Group (whose members included Virginia Woolf, EM Forster, Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes, as well as painters Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant). There was a falling-out and Bomberg went on to exhibit with Sickert’s Camden Town Group in 1913. His fascination with the shapes and dynamics of the machine age saw him aligned with Wyndham Lewis’s shortlived Vorticists, but soon struck out on his own, with solo shows.
But despite a successful exhibition at the Chenil Gallery in Chelsea, money was a constant problem. Like fellow student Rosenberg, he appears to have enlisted in the army as much for a solid wage as any patriotic imperative. In 1915 he signed up for the Royal Engineers, transferring in 1916 to the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. In the same year he married his first wife and was sent to the Western Front. The mechanised slaughter of the trenches, which took the life of his own brother, killed Bomberg’s faith in the machine age.
He emerged from the service in 1918 a changed artist and with a commission from the Canadian War Memorials Fund. Bomberg was warned to ’steer clear of Cubism and Futurism’ but the resultant work was far too avant garde for the taste of the committee. They rejected the first version of ‘Sappers at Work: A Canadian Tunnelling Company’ as a ‘futurist abortion’. A furious Bomberg was mollified by his wife and persuaded to try again. Now the uniforms were literally correct and the board were happy. But in the new painting Bomberg totes a heavy beam, a metaphorical nod to the pressures of working to patrons’ demands.
The financial burden, at least, lifted with peacetime, and Bomberg travelled widely, visiting Palestine (1923-27), Spain (1934-35), Morocco (1930), Greece (1930) and Russia (1933). He increasingly worked in landscapes and portraits. From 1945, he combined his painting with teaching, and influencing a new generation of young London painters His pupils at Borough Polytechnic, by the Elephant and Castle, included Jewish emigres Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach.
Much of Bomberg’s work is in the Tate Collection (to which, many thanks for the images used here), at its various galleries around England. You can see Ju-Jitsu, currently hung in the Cubism, Futurism and Vorticism exhibition, ‘States of Flux’ on Room 2, Level 5 of Tate Modern on the South Bank.
(Room 2)
* Bomberg’s name is remembered in David Bomberg House, on Borough High Street, between London Bridge and the Elephant and Castle. A hall of residence for students at London South Bank University, it marks his stint as a teacher at the insitution in its days as the Borough Polytechnic.
pictures:
Vision of Ezekiel, (the Tate Gallery)
In the Hold 1913-14 (Tate Gallery)
The Mud Bath, 1914 (Tate Gallery)
Tregor and Tregoff, Cornwall 1947 (Tate Gallery)
Sappers at Work: A Canadian Tunnelling Company, first version (Tate Gallery)
Sappers at Work: A Canadian Tunnelling Company, final version (National Gallery of Canada)