17 Facts About David Bomberg

David Garshen Bomberg was a British painter, and one of the Whitechapel Boys.

David 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.

David Bomberg was expelled from the Slade School of Art in 1913, with agreement between senior teachers Tonks, Frederick Brown and Philip Wilson Steer, because of the audacity of his breach from the conventional approach of that time.

Whether because his faith in the machine age had been shattered by his experiences as a private soldier in the trenches or because of the pervasive retrogressive attitude towards modernism in Britain, David Bomberg moved to a more figurative style in the 1920s and his work became increasingly dominated by portraits and landscapes drawn from nature.

From 1945 to 1953, David Bomberg worked as a teacher at Borough Polytechnic in London, where his pupils included Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Philip Holmes, Cliff Holden, Edna Mann, Dorothy Mead, Gustav Metzger, Dennis Creffield, Cecil Bailey, and Miles Richmond.

David Bomberg was born in the Lee Bank area of Birmingham on 5 December 1890.

David Bomberg was the seventh of eleven children of a Polish Jewish immigrant leatherworker, Abraham, and his wife Rebecca.

David Bomberg was Orthodox but she less so and supported David's painting ambitions.

At the Slade School of Fine Art David Bomberg was one of the remarkable generation of artists described by their drawing master Henry Tonks as the School's second and last "crisis of brilliance" and which included Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, Mark Gertler and Isaac Rosenberg.

Still, David Bomberg was staunchly independent and despite Lewis' attempts he never officially joined Vorticism.

Alice and David enjoyed a trip to Paris with the proceeds of the sale of several pictures in 1914 which led to them marrying in 1916 after Bomberg had enlisted in the Royal Engineers in November 1915.

David Bomberg self-published this work whilst waiting for the Canadian Government's verdict on Sappers at Work; the next few years was to see him 'experimenting with ways of making his stark pre-war style more rounded and organic'.

In radical opposition to the prevailing currents in avant-garde art, stimulated as these were by the enthusiasm for mechanization in Constructivism in Russia following the Revolution, David Bomberg went to paint and draw in Palestine between 1923 and 1927, with the assistance of the Zionist Organization.

Unable to get a teaching position after World War II in any of the most prestigious London art schools, David Bomberg became the most exemplary teacher of the immediate post-war period in Britain, working part-time in a bakery school at the Borough Polytechnic in the working-class borough of Southwark.

David Bomberg developed a deeply considered philosophy of art, set out in several pieces of writing, which he summed up in the phrase, "The Spirit in the Mass".

Thirty years after his death, a major retrospective of David Bomberg's work curated by Richard Cork was held at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1988.

David Bowie purchased work by Bomberg and kept it in his private collection, part of which was sold at auction after Bowie's death in 2016.