David Bomberg British 1890 –1957
Bomberg, painter, born into a Jewish,low income household, Bomberg struggled to become an artist. However in 19111 he won a scholarship to the Slade School of Art, then under Henry Tonks. Among his contemporaries were Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer, C.R.W. Nevinson and Dora Carrington.
He was greatly influenced by cubism and futurism in the years immediately preceding World War I and was one of the original founders of the Vorticst movement. He was expelled from the Slade School of Art in 1913, with an agreement between the senior teachers Tonks, Frederick Brown and Philip Wilson Steer and because of his breach from the conventional figurative approach of the school and his adoption of Vorticism.
Bomberg moved to a more figurative style in the 1920s and his work became increasingly dominated by portraiture and landscapes drawn from nature. He gradually developed a more expressionist technique in the 1930’s. He travelled widely through the Middle East and Europe, notably Palestine and Spain, before the war.
From 1945 to 1953, he worked as a teacher at the Borough Polytechnic (now London South Bank University in London), where his pupils included Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Cliff Holden, Dorothy Mead, Gustav Metzger, Dennis Creffield, Cecil Bailey and Miles Richmond.
He died in 1957.
