David Bomberg

David Bomberg (1890-1957) was a British painter, born to Jewish immigrants in Birmingham and raised in the East End of London. Through his creative independence, Bomberg earned a reputation for audaciously going against the grain but though the radical significance of his work is now widely acknowledged and celebrated, his work received little recognition during his lifetime.

Bomberg studied under Walter Sickert at Westminster School of Art (1908-10) and the Slade School of Fine Art (1911-13) with the support of John Singer Sargent and the Jewish Educational Aid Society. Whilst at the Slade, Bomberg fell in with a group of avant-garde students inspired by European Modernism, particularly Cubism and Italian Futurism, and in 1913 travelled to Paris. There he met Picasso and Modigliani. While Bomberg’s earlier works; large, near-abstract paintings, based on cubist grid patterns, display the mechanistic influence of the European avant-garde, his self-portraits of the 1920s and 30s are more naturalistic and expressive.

From 1946 to 1953 Bomberg taught at the Borough Polytechnic in London. As a teacher he favoured an approach that allowed his students to find their own individual artistic vision and, as such, was highly influential on both Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach.

David Bomberg’s work is included in many public collections internationally. In the UK these include Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; Arts Council Collection and Tate, London. In the US Bomberg’s work is included in the collection of Museum of Modern Art, New York, and The Art Institute of Chicago.