David Bomberg was born in Birmingham to Polish immigrants, he moved to London at the age of four. He was apprenticed to a lithographer before studying at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. He responded strongly to avant-garde currents in art - particularly to the rise of abstraction - but was never long associated with any school or movement. In 1914 however he started to produce work of an almost totally abstract nature. After World War I his style changed and became less angular. He moved away from London and spent several years travelling in Palestine, Spain and Cyprus. He began to develop as a landscape painter, using strong blocks of colour. The forceful use of charcoal in his drawings reflects his sense of the menace of landscape, some of his own bitterness, and the feeling recurrent in his work of struggling against a hostile environment. Bomberg was neglected by the art establishment during his lifetime, and the recognition of his position as one of the foremost draughtsman of the twentieth century was only gained after his death.

Glossary

  • Abstraction

    To abstract means to remove, and in the art sense it means that artist has removed or withheld references to an object, landscape or figure to produce a simplified or schematic work. This method of creating art has led to many critical theories; some theorists considered this the purest form of art: art for art’s sake. Unconcerned as it is with materiality, abstraction is often considered as representing the spiritual.

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

See in

  • Art Project