David Bomberg (1890-1957)

Professions: Painter

David Bomberg (1890-1957)
David Bomberg (1890-1957)
East Valley, Cuenca: Afternoon
Jerusalem from Mount Olives

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David Bomberg Biography

(b Birmingham, 5 Dec 1890; d London, 19 Aug 1957). English painter. The fifth child of a Polish immigrant leather worker, he spent his earliest years in Birmingham and then grew up in the Whitechapel area of London. He suffered considerable financial hardship while studying at evening classes given by Walter Bayes (1869–1956) at the City and Guilds Institute from c. 1905 to 1908 and by Walter Sickert at Westminster Art School from 1908 to 1910. With the help of John Singer Sargent and the Jewish Education Aid Society, he secured a place at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, in 1911. It was a period of dramatic change, stimulated in part by Roger Fry’s two Post-Impressionist exhibitions and the display of Italian Futurist works at the Sackville Gallery, London, in 1912. Bomberg was the most audacious painter of his generation at the Slade, proving in works such as Vision of Ezekiel (1912) and Ju-jitsu (c. 1913; both London, Tate) that he could absorb the most experimental European ideas, fuse these with Jewish influences and come up with a robust alternative of his own. His treatment of the human figure, in terms of angular, clear-cut forms charged with enormous energy, reveals his determination to bring about a drastic renewal in British painting.

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