Artist: David Bomberg
Date: 1890-1957
Bomberg was one of the most audacious of the exceptional generation of artists who studied at the Slade School of Art under Henry Tonks, and which included Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer, C.R.W. Nevinson, and Dora Carrington. Bomberg painted a series of complex geometric compositions combining the influences of cubism and futurism in the years immediately preceding World War I; typically using a limited number of striking colours, turning humans into simple, angular shapes, and sometimes overlaying the whole painting a strong grid-work colouring scheme.
The Vision of Ezekiel, 1912
The subject is taken from the Hebrew Bible. God guided the prophet Ezekiel to a valley full of bones and commanded him to speak: ‘There was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together.’ Skeletal yet animated, the figures appear to emerge from the platform. Bomberg’s painting style is often associated with vorticism.
In The Hold, 1914
Bomberg has divided the canvas into a grid of squares that are themselves divided. The effect of this is to shatter form, transforming the scene into a kinetic pattern of shape and dazzling colour. Though the image has become hard to decipher, the fragmented composition expresses the energy of men at work in an industrial environment
The Mud Bath, 1914
Bathing figures were a traditional way of depicting the nude, but here Bomberg brings the subject into the modern era by basing the scene on steam baths used by the local Jewish population near Bomberg’s home in east London. Bomberg was closely associated with a group of artists known as the vorticists. Their aim was to create art that expressed the modern world through imagery derived from machines and the urban environment. Here Bomberg reduces the human figure to a series of geometric shapes, a process he described as ‘searching for an intense expression’.