DAVID BOMBERG (1890-1957) Biography
VORTICISM (1914-1918)

Provenance

Mrs Lilian Bomberg;
Private Collection, South Africa

Exhibition History

London, Adelphi Gallery, 1919

Description / Expertise

After the 1st war and his committed involvement with the Vorticist movement Bomberg became disillusioned with abstraction and his work became increasingly representational. This resulted partly from the rejection of his Sappers at Work: A Canadian Tunnelling Company in 1919, which had been commissioned by the Canadian War Records Office. He had also turned down an invitation from the Dutch architect Robert Vant T'Hoff to join the De Stijl movement which had not been an easy decision as it offered the possibility of Continental recognition when he was very much pressed for funds.

In 1919 he began a series of drawings done in pen and wash, which numbered upwards of one hundred and twenty-four works and to which the present drawing belongs. These were exhibited in the Spring by Frank Rutter who had recently opened his Adelphi Gallery. In one of his first pieces of art criticism, Herbert Read gave an account of the exhibition and noted:

'He does, it is true (and it is one of his virtues), express the crystallized sense of modernity. He tends, that is to say, to place himself at a remove from actuality - not by interposing an unnecessary screen of personal sentiment - but by rendering things in the terms of a more abstract, more precise and more logical beauty. Abstraction and precision are obvious qualities of these drawings. By their logical beauty I mean their direct expression of intellectual fact'.

'Perhaps the fact that Mr. Bomberg has ideas is his most remarkable peculiarity. And the way he will explore all the possibilities of an idea in a series of drawings seems to indicate that his mind is of that objective scientific kind that alone is capable of enduring work'.(1)

The inspiration for these drawings came from the many dance halls and theatres situated in the East End of London and they represent the last examples of his work concerned with the human figure in the urban context. Like a `frieze of life' constructed on one hundred variations, these pen and wash drawings represent one of Bomberg's most articulate and complete artistic statements. Bomberg noted: 'done in twelve parts, each part having twelve variations, each drawing was based on one of twelve patterns, the key to the whole. Each drawing had to be different; one might be groups of fishermen with nets, the other Ballet scenes or dancers. The problem: to expand the possibilities of one combination of forms into as many variations to exhaustion of possibilities without altering the juxtapositions, but slightly modifying and stressing the parts of the key. This was to prove that form plays one part, content another. Both can operate within one another, but (remain) basically unrelated'(2).


1. Herbert Read, Bomberg, Arts Gazette, London, 13 September, 1919.
2. William Lipke, David Bomberg: A critical study of his life and work, Evelyn, Adams and Mackay Ltd, London, 1967, page 48.