0:00:10 > 0:00:14The early 20th century unfolded with the logic of a dream.
0:00:14 > 0:00:18Britain was in the throes of a strange transformation.
0:00:18 > 0:00:23Absent voices bled from new technologies.
0:00:23 > 0:00:27Men built wings and took flight.
0:00:27 > 0:00:31Cities rose up, made of glass and steel.
0:00:32 > 0:00:37British artists witnessed this revolution.
0:00:37 > 0:00:40A new world cried out for a new kind of art.
0:00:40 > 0:00:47Prophetic, visionary, shaped by the rhythms of an imagined future.
0:00:48 > 0:00:53But this dream died in the wreckage of the early 20th century,
0:00:53 > 0:00:55World War I made sure of that.
0:00:55 > 0:01:01In 20 million blinks of an eye, a generation was all but erased.
0:01:01 > 0:01:04Artists attempted to make sense of the atrocity,
0:01:04 > 0:01:07to wrestle the conflict into meaning.
0:01:07 > 0:01:11This series tells the story of those British painters whose lives
0:01:11 > 0:01:15coincided with this world-changing moment.
0:01:15 > 0:01:18They had set out to depict a new world,
0:01:18 > 0:01:21but found themselves working in the rubble.
0:01:21 > 0:01:25David Bomberg was one of those painters.
0:01:25 > 0:01:29His early modernist works pushed art to its limits.
0:01:33 > 0:01:35Staccato,
0:01:35 > 0:01:38aggressive, flesh and bone tangled with the steel city.
0:01:38 > 0:01:41Then everything changed.
0:01:41 > 0:01:44He set aside his paintbrush
0:01:44 > 0:01:46and picked up a rifle.
0:01:46 > 0:01:50Fighting at the Somme, David Bomberg watched the world splinter
0:01:50 > 0:01:54and fall apart just like the works of art he'd created.
0:01:54 > 0:01:58He would spend the rest of his life searching for order
0:01:58 > 0:02:01in an increasingly disordered world.
0:02:01 > 0:02:08When he died in 1957, embattled and in poverty, he seemed
0:02:08 > 0:02:12to be no more than a footnote in the history of British art.
0:02:12 > 0:02:18However, the works that survived Bomberg tell their own story.
0:02:20 > 0:02:24Combative, iconoclastic, his art would always
0:02:24 > 0:02:28oscillate between dream and disillusionment.
0:02:28 > 0:02:33He remains the most elusively original British painter of the 20th century.
0:02:55 > 0:02:59Bomberg's origins were humble, impoverished.
0:02:59 > 0:03:02Born in Birmingham in 1890 to Jewish immigrant parents,
0:03:02 > 0:03:07his family soon moved to the East End of London.
0:03:07 > 0:03:10Its cramped narrow streets were his streets,
0:03:10 > 0:03:14its poverty-stricken people were his people.
0:03:14 > 0:03:19They filled his earliest work and they would haunt his later pictures.
0:03:22 > 0:03:26He was brought up in a house here on St Mark Street, one of 11 children,
0:03:26 > 0:03:28an experience that seems to have left him
0:03:28 > 0:03:31with a kind of claustrophobia,
0:03:31 > 0:03:37a horror of enclosed spaces, and a love of grand, open vistas.
0:03:37 > 0:03:42Little remains of the London that he knew. Much of this Jewish ghetto was
0:03:42 > 0:03:47flattened during the Second World War, but traces do still remain.
0:03:50 > 0:03:54Bomberg's father, Abraham, was a leather craftsman, but he was
0:03:54 > 0:03:59also a gambler who stumbled from one financial crisis to the next.
0:03:59 > 0:04:04Prone to fits of rage, he ruled over his wife with an iron fist.
0:04:06 > 0:04:08Rebecca was the family's guardian,
0:04:08 > 0:04:11she rebelled against the orthodox Jewish faith.
0:04:11 > 0:04:16She was devoted to David, the son who was always drawing,
0:04:16 > 0:04:20creating a studio for him in the adjoining flat.
0:04:22 > 0:04:26But Abraham Bomberg believed that art was no profession,
0:04:26 > 0:04:30and, around 1906, David began an apprenticeship as a lithographer.
0:04:33 > 0:04:37The young Bomberg did everything he could to develop his talent.
0:04:37 > 0:04:40He paid for evening classes with artists as illustrious
0:04:40 > 0:04:44as Walter Sickert.
0:04:44 > 0:04:48After a chance encounter in 1907, David Bomberg was asked to
0:04:48 > 0:04:51sit as a model for John Singer Sargent, the era's most
0:04:51 > 0:04:56celebrated painter of high society portraits.
0:04:58 > 0:05:00An artist so polished,
0:05:00 > 0:05:03he made the rich positively gleam with self-satisfaction.
0:05:13 > 0:05:15Here he is, Bomberg,
0:05:15 > 0:05:1716 years old, 17 years old,
0:05:17 > 0:05:20a young Jewish boy, would-be painter, from the ghetto,
0:05:20 > 0:05:24stepping into the grandest studio
0:05:24 > 0:05:28of the grandest artist of the day.
0:05:32 > 0:05:36Sargent saw in Bomberg raw, naked talent.
0:05:36 > 0:05:41He hoped that the young artist would study at the Slade School of Art,
0:05:41 > 0:05:44and knew exactly who could help him.
0:05:44 > 0:05:48Sargent would introduce him to influential Jewish patrons.
0:05:50 > 0:05:55Sargent, represents everything that Bomberg isn't - immensely wealthy,
0:05:55 > 0:05:59immensely successful, well-connected, utterly at ease,
0:05:59 > 0:06:04both with himself and with the high society whom he paints.
0:06:04 > 0:06:07In a sense, I think this was a crossroads moment for Bomberg.
0:06:07 > 0:06:12Will he choose to aim for all this,
0:06:12 > 0:06:17will he follow in the Sargent path to fame and fortune,
0:06:17 > 0:06:22or will he choose to side with those, and there are many,
0:06:22 > 0:06:27who want to take a sledgehammer to all of this?
0:06:34 > 0:06:38On the Continent, artists had systematically dismantled
0:06:38 > 0:06:40the genteel conventions of the past.
0:06:44 > 0:06:48Out went the low-toned colours and mirror-like surfaces
0:06:48 > 0:06:51of academic painting.
0:06:51 > 0:06:55Instead, an art that set out to make it new.
0:06:55 > 0:06:58Modernism.
0:06:58 > 0:07:02Bomberg's world was shaken by the Art-Quake of 1910,
0:07:02 > 0:07:07Roger Fry's Manet and the Post-Impressionists exhibition.
0:07:11 > 0:07:14Two years later, at Fry's second exhibition,
0:07:14 > 0:07:20Picasso and Braque's Cubism careered into the heart of polite Britain.
0:07:20 > 0:07:23David Bomberg was in thrall.
0:07:27 > 0:07:29But not everyone was intoxicated.
0:07:29 > 0:07:32Henry Tonks, artist and tutor at the Slade,
0:07:32 > 0:07:35summed up the general sentiment.
0:07:35 > 0:07:39"I shall resign if this talk of Cubism doesn't cease.
0:07:39 > 0:07:41"It's killing me."
0:07:49 > 0:07:52After an initial rejection,
0:07:52 > 0:07:55Bomberg was accepted to the Slade in April, 1911.
0:07:55 > 0:07:58Henry Tonks was one of his tutors.
0:07:58 > 0:08:01A contract had been drawn up with
0:08:01 > 0:08:07the Jewish Education Aid Society to fund Bomberg's time at art school.
0:08:07 > 0:08:10At the Slade, the emphasis lay on draughtsmanship.
0:08:10 > 0:08:13Students drew from life,
0:08:13 > 0:08:17every picture grounded in science and optics.
0:08:17 > 0:08:20But Bomberg was a hot-headed young student with
0:08:20 > 0:08:25a passion for everything new, and he wielded more than a paintbrush.
0:08:26 > 0:08:30He wrestled with life models,
0:08:30 > 0:08:33used his fists to protect other Jews
0:08:33 > 0:08:35from the anti-Semitism that was rife.
0:08:37 > 0:08:41And, when his teacher criticised one of his paintings,
0:08:41 > 0:08:44Bomberg hit his professor over the head with his palette.
0:08:48 > 0:08:52Bomberg studied with a trail-blazing group of young artists -
0:08:52 > 0:08:57William Roberts, Christopher Nevinson, Stanley Spencer.
0:08:57 > 0:09:01With one eye on the art of the past, and one eye on the future,
0:09:01 > 0:09:03Bomberg painted a series of pictures at the Slade
0:09:03 > 0:09:08that would produce a new kind of British art -
0:09:08 > 0:09:13radical, Jewish, working-class.
0:09:13 > 0:09:16And he did it all in just three years.
0:09:18 > 0:09:191911.
0:09:19 > 0:09:24Bedroom Picture owes a lot to his old teacher, Walter Sickert.
0:09:24 > 0:09:27The drab interior, the metal bed-frame,
0:09:27 > 0:09:31a longing for what is beyond the confines of the room.
0:09:31 > 0:09:351912, Island of Joy.
0:09:35 > 0:09:40A Dionysian frieze with a difference.
0:09:40 > 0:09:41In one picture,
0:09:41 > 0:09:46an artist's journey from figurative art to near abstraction.
0:09:50 > 0:09:54In October, 1912, his mother died suddenly.
0:09:54 > 0:09:57The death certificate recorded pneumonia as the cause.
0:09:59 > 0:10:02Bomberg responded with his first masterpiece,
0:10:02 > 0:10:06currently under wraps in the Tate store on the Old Kent Road.
0:10:21 > 0:10:24Vision of Ezekiel, 1912.
0:10:24 > 0:10:31A tangle of geometric figures emerging from death into life.
0:10:32 > 0:10:35Bomberg reversing time's arrow,
0:10:35 > 0:10:37his mother has just died, but what is he painting?
0:10:37 > 0:10:40He is painting that moment when all shall rise.
0:10:40 > 0:10:44It's the vision in which Ezekiel
0:10:44 > 0:10:48foresees the day on which God
0:10:48 > 0:10:52shall raise the Jews from the dry bones of their death,
0:10:52 > 0:10:55put his spirit into them and gather them together,
0:10:55 > 0:10:58take them to the Promised Land.
0:10:58 > 0:11:01A baby, a newborn child is held aloft
0:11:01 > 0:11:05at the centre of the painting.
0:11:06 > 0:11:08It's also Bomberg's response
0:11:08 > 0:11:15to the advent of truly Avant-Garde modern art,
0:11:15 > 0:11:17its arrival in England.
0:11:18 > 0:11:21Bomberg, almost alone among the painters of his day,
0:11:21 > 0:11:24immediately sees that this is a revolution
0:11:24 > 0:11:28and he wants to be part of it. That's what this painting says.
0:11:31 > 0:11:34He's decided to go geometric,
0:11:34 > 0:11:36to give art the kiss of life.
0:11:46 > 0:11:50Bomberg was just too angular for the Slade.
0:11:50 > 0:11:53He dressed like an East End tough and acted like one, too.
0:11:57 > 0:11:59His art was just as aggressive.
0:11:59 > 0:12:02But worst of all, Bomberg's tutors detected the
0:12:02 > 0:12:07"disturbing influence" that his views were having on other students.
0:12:09 > 0:12:13'Bomberg was unceremoniously ousted from the Slade
0:12:13 > 0:12:15'in the summer of 1913.'
0:12:21 > 0:12:27As an art student's riposte to being expelled, this takes some beating.
0:12:27 > 0:12:30David Bomberg, 23 years old,
0:12:30 > 0:12:36has created one of the great images of the 20th century.
0:12:36 > 0:12:38What an image!
0:12:38 > 0:12:40Jangling, jarring,
0:12:40 > 0:12:43disconcerting modernity itself,
0:12:43 > 0:12:47crammed into one monumental canvas.
0:12:47 > 0:12:49He called it In The Hold.
0:12:49 > 0:12:51Male workers,
0:12:51 > 0:12:55heroic figures toiling in the hold of a ship.
0:12:57 > 0:12:59We can see some vestigial figures,
0:12:59 > 0:13:04hands reaching up, reaching out of the hold as if to escape.
0:13:04 > 0:13:06A diagrammatic figure in blue
0:13:06 > 0:13:08advancing across the canvas,
0:13:08 > 0:13:12wearing what seems to be a peaked cap.
0:13:14 > 0:13:20But even at the moment we recognise these...what are they?
0:13:20 > 0:13:26Anchors tethering the image in the visible, representable world,
0:13:26 > 0:13:29we simultaneously lose those images
0:13:29 > 0:13:34because what he has created in this grid-form parody
0:13:34 > 0:13:37of the system formally
0:13:37 > 0:13:44used to scale up a nice easily readable representation of reality.
0:13:44 > 0:13:49What we experience is a kaleidoscope of shatterings.
0:13:51 > 0:13:55He's taken the language of Cubism and exploded it yet further.
0:13:55 > 0:14:00It's like a bomb has gone off inside a Cubist painting.
0:14:00 > 0:14:05So that the Cubists' determination to represent experience
0:14:05 > 0:14:07in the round and seen through time
0:14:07 > 0:14:10as we revolve around an object,
0:14:10 > 0:14:16Bomberg has taken that and made from it a painting that seems, actually,
0:14:16 > 0:14:19to do the opposite. It seems to envelop us
0:14:19 > 0:14:23and plunge US into ITS chaos.
0:14:31 > 0:14:34On the 28th of June, 1914, Gavrilo Princip assassinated
0:14:34 > 0:14:39the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne,
0:14:39 > 0:14:42Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
0:14:44 > 0:14:46The major powers of Europe retreated behind closed
0:14:46 > 0:14:50doors for a month of diplomatic manoeuvring.
0:14:50 > 0:14:53War was looming.
0:14:53 > 0:14:56Many were fearful, but some, an avant-garde few, thought war
0:14:56 > 0:15:00was just what the country needed,
0:15:00 > 0:15:03a necessary conflagration.
0:15:05 > 0:15:12"BLAST first (from politeness) ENGLAND
0:15:12 > 0:15:17"CURSE its climate for its sins and infections
0:15:17 > 0:15:23"DISMAL SYMBOL, set round our bodies, of effeminate lout within."
0:15:24 > 0:15:26In his 1914 publication, Blast,
0:15:26 > 0:15:31Wyndham Lewis screeched out a manifesto for the Avant-Garde.
0:15:33 > 0:15:35Capricious and manipulative,
0:15:35 > 0:15:39Lewis spearheaded a movement that was forging
0:15:39 > 0:15:42a striking kind of British modernism.
0:15:44 > 0:15:47"At the heart of the whirlpool is a great silent place where all
0:15:47 > 0:15:51"the energy is concentrated," he said,
0:15:51 > 0:15:55"And there, at the point of concentration, is the Vorticist."
0:16:00 > 0:16:02Lewis tried to draw Bomberg in,
0:16:02 > 0:16:04but Bomberg was wary,
0:16:04 > 0:16:07he wouldn't join any English club,
0:16:07 > 0:16:09no matter how sharp-edged.
0:16:09 > 0:16:13His work did appear in Vorticist exhibitions,
0:16:13 > 0:16:16but he remained defiantly alone.
0:16:16 > 0:16:20An army of one.
0:16:28 > 0:16:31I'm interested in that whole kind of period
0:16:31 > 0:16:33of abstraction
0:16:33 > 0:16:36and the whole kind of internationalness
0:16:36 > 0:16:38of Cubism.
0:16:38 > 0:16:42It's a bit like composers
0:16:42 > 0:16:45in the '70s and '80s, we all became Minimalists.
0:16:46 > 0:16:49There's a lot of very poor Minimalism, just as
0:16:49 > 0:16:53there's a lot of poor Cubism,
0:16:53 > 0:16:58but he had a vision which allowed him and encouraged him
0:16:58 > 0:17:01and made him take it beyond a nice, John Cage world,
0:17:01 > 0:17:08cheap imitation, to make something that is purely Bomberg.
0:17:10 > 0:17:14Like the young Bomberg, composer Michael Nyman has brought to his art
0:17:14 > 0:17:17a mathematical preoccupation with structure and repetition.
0:17:17 > 0:17:20His affinity for Bomberg is such
0:17:20 > 0:17:23that he could almost pass for his double.
0:17:23 > 0:17:25When I met Dinora,
0:17:25 > 0:17:28she took one look a me and said, "You're David Bomberg."
0:17:28 > 0:17:31She thought I looked really like her stepfather,
0:17:31 > 0:17:34so it doesn't really get any better than that.
0:17:42 > 0:17:45In July 1914, Bomberg set out his own manifesto
0:17:45 > 0:17:50in the foreword to his solo exhibition at the Chenil Gallery.
0:17:53 > 0:17:56"I appeal to a sense of form.
0:17:56 > 0:18:02"In some work, I completely abandon naturalism and tradition.
0:18:02 > 0:18:06"I am searching for an intenser expression.
0:18:06 > 0:18:10"I look upon Nature while I live in a steel city.
0:18:10 > 0:18:16"Where decoration happens, it is accidental.
0:18:16 > 0:18:20"My object is the construction of pure form.
0:18:20 > 0:18:25"I reject everything in painting that is not pure form."
0:18:27 > 0:18:31The exhibition brought together Bomberg's works under one roof.
0:18:31 > 0:18:34All, that is, except one picture.
0:18:34 > 0:18:39The most important canvas was not hung inside the gallery,
0:18:39 > 0:18:42but instead, outside on the street,
0:18:42 > 0:18:44garlanded in Union Jack bunting.
0:18:44 > 0:18:47A painting that was a slap in the face
0:18:47 > 0:18:50to British artistic conventions...
0:18:51 > 0:18:53..The Mud Bath.
0:19:03 > 0:19:06It looks like a dance, a joyous celebration.
0:19:06 > 0:19:10A world in which man has metamorphosed into machine.
0:19:10 > 0:19:14Bomberg took as his inspiration his experience
0:19:14 > 0:19:17at Schewziks's Vapour Baths just off Brick Lane in the East End.
0:19:17 > 0:19:20He would go and look down from the balcony at the men
0:19:20 > 0:19:23below purging themselves of the dirt of the day.
0:19:25 > 0:19:30Blue and white mechanomorphs emerge gleaming from red water,
0:19:30 > 0:19:33together forming a dancing Union Jack.
0:19:33 > 0:19:36Bomberg seems to imply that by bathing in their new-found
0:19:36 > 0:19:40Britishness, London's Jews can cleanse themselves
0:19:40 > 0:19:45of the grime of their past - their pogroms, their persecution.
0:19:45 > 0:19:48And yet...at the heart of the picture
0:19:48 > 0:19:54is a scything column, slashing the composition in half.
0:19:54 > 0:19:56A shadow of a doubt, perhaps.
0:19:56 > 0:19:59Bomberg's sense of uncertainty
0:19:59 > 0:20:02about how fully integrated immigrant Jews could truly be.
0:20:02 > 0:20:05Just a few days after the exhibition opened,
0:20:05 > 0:20:10and the picture caused traffic to grind to a halt, "it" started.
0:20:10 > 0:20:16Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on the 28th of July, 1914.
0:20:16 > 0:20:20Events soon escalated.
0:20:20 > 0:20:23Approaching 50,000 British Jews fought for king
0:20:23 > 0:20:25and country during World War I.
0:20:25 > 0:20:29It would be the single most traumatic event
0:20:29 > 0:20:32in the life of David Bomberg.
0:20:34 > 0:20:38War quickly took the sting out of the tail of the Avant-Garde.
0:20:38 > 0:20:44In November 1915, unable to find work as an artist,
0:20:44 > 0:20:47Bomberg enlisted in the Royal Engineers.
0:20:47 > 0:20:50The following year, he married his girlfriend, Alice,
0:20:50 > 0:20:54an event overshadowed when he was billeted to France,
0:20:54 > 0:20:56to fight at the Somme.
0:21:11 > 0:21:14"Wasting misery, venereal disease, delirium tremens,
0:21:14 > 0:21:21"courting disaster on a playing card are, in their killing process, all
0:21:21 > 0:21:28"too slow. War has learned to do the double-quick in half the time."
0:21:31 > 0:21:35If I want to really feel as though I am touching
0:21:35 > 0:21:41the experience of someone who fought in that carnage,
0:21:41 > 0:21:45I go to what I think of as the residuals of war.
0:21:45 > 0:21:47Which is the poems,
0:21:47 > 0:21:49the snatched sketches.
0:21:51 > 0:21:57It's very much the art of the broken pencil, the hurried composition.
0:21:57 > 0:22:00And if he was underrated as a painter,
0:22:00 > 0:22:04he was equally underrated as a writer, because these, for me,
0:22:04 > 0:22:08are among the most remarkable poems of the First War.
0:22:08 > 0:22:12And it makes me think that when we look at his paintings,
0:22:12 > 0:22:14we can never give them enough
0:22:14 > 0:22:18intellectual, moral, symbolic credit.
0:22:18 > 0:22:22Whatever we think is going on in Bomberg's work, there will be
0:22:22 > 0:22:25reams and reams and reams of this type of verse
0:22:25 > 0:22:28going on in his mind behind every image.
0:22:30 > 0:22:34"War does it by numbers. In a few counts, it hustled them to arms.
0:22:34 > 0:22:38"It fuddled with its fingers anyhow, with a bludgeon crushed a man,
0:22:38 > 0:22:43"splintered his brains, merged what remained in filth,
0:22:43 > 0:22:46"then, bent in no direction, lost its way.
0:22:46 > 0:22:48"War lost its way,
0:22:48 > 0:22:53"and left them in a tangle of no paths in a disused trench.
0:22:56 > 0:22:58"Near such a trench,
0:22:58 > 0:23:01"lying in an attitude, callous to what went on,
0:23:01 > 0:23:05"maggot-eaten, the fatted maggots,
0:23:05 > 0:23:11"dead, they found him when the refugees came back to cut the corn."
0:23:20 > 0:23:23News filtered through to Bomberg that two of his best friends,
0:23:23 > 0:23:26cornerstones of the British Avant-Garde,
0:23:26 > 0:23:30Isaac Rosenberg and TE Hulme, had been killed at the front.
0:23:33 > 0:23:36In 1917, he sketched a memorial for Hulme.
0:23:36 > 0:23:39Etched at the bottom is the inscription
0:23:39 > 0:23:40"He died for freedom and honour".
0:23:42 > 0:23:44Privately, however,
0:23:44 > 0:23:47Bomberg felt that war was neither noble nor heroic.
0:23:49 > 0:23:53Like many other soldiers at the front, Bomberg was gradually
0:23:53 > 0:23:58driven insane by the terrifying routine
0:23:58 > 0:24:03that alternated extreme boredom with total panic.
0:24:03 > 0:24:06Each day, a source of terror.
0:24:08 > 0:24:10Driven to despair,
0:24:10 > 0:24:16he decided to shoot himself in the foot with his own pistol.
0:24:17 > 0:24:20He could have been sent to the firing squad,
0:24:20 > 0:24:23but the authorities took a lenient line for once,
0:24:23 > 0:24:25and his life was spared.
0:24:26 > 0:24:30Finally permitted to withdraw from active service,
0:24:30 > 0:24:33Rifleman Bomberg returned to England,
0:24:33 > 0:24:36shell-shocked, like so many others.
0:24:36 > 0:24:39In the direct aftermath, he approached publishers
0:24:39 > 0:24:42with the poetry he'd written at the front.
0:24:42 > 0:24:43Replies came back.
0:24:43 > 0:24:45Every one, a rejection.
0:24:47 > 0:24:51A commission from the Canadian War Memorials Fund
0:24:51 > 0:24:53marked Bomberg's return to painting.
0:25:04 > 0:25:06Sappers At Work was commissioned
0:25:06 > 0:25:10to celebrate the heroism of a company of Canadian soldiers
0:25:10 > 0:25:11who dug tunnels under
0:25:11 > 0:25:13German trenches to lay explosives.
0:25:15 > 0:25:17But how much heroism
0:25:17 > 0:25:20could Bomberg see after the war,
0:25:20 > 0:25:22after his breakdown?
0:25:25 > 0:25:30I personally think this is a deeply troubling, uncertain picture,
0:25:30 > 0:25:36and I think its message was meant by Bomberg to be unsettling.
0:25:36 > 0:25:40He delivers that message through a series of quotations
0:25:40 > 0:25:43from one particular, famous painting of the past -
0:25:43 > 0:25:47Caravaggio's Martyrdom Of St Peter.
0:25:47 > 0:25:51From that masterpiece, Bomberg has taken this figure
0:25:51 > 0:25:55with his green-clad buttocks thrust in the face of the viewer,
0:25:55 > 0:26:00and these other figures, straining, hauling at a rope,
0:26:00 > 0:26:01pulling on a pulley.
0:26:04 > 0:26:06Now, in Caravaggio's painting,
0:26:06 > 0:26:13those men are engaged in crucifying Peter, killing a man.
0:26:15 > 0:26:18According to the terms of the commission, these men were meant to
0:26:18 > 0:26:24be seen as heroes, but Bomberg has cast them in the role of crucifiers,
0:26:24 > 0:26:26dark subterranean assassins
0:26:26 > 0:26:29bent on the destruction of others.
0:26:29 > 0:26:32It's a deeply ambiguous,
0:26:32 > 0:26:35extremely troubling picture.
0:26:35 > 0:26:37But what else can you expect
0:26:37 > 0:26:41if you ask a great artist to paint a memorial to war?
0:26:49 > 0:26:511921 marked the final break
0:26:51 > 0:26:53with Vorticism and Wyndham Lewis.
0:26:56 > 0:26:57Bomberg's contribution
0:26:57 > 0:26:59to Lewis' publication The Tyro
0:26:59 > 0:27:01was a stark goodbye
0:27:01 > 0:27:04to the Avant-Garde and all that.
0:27:05 > 0:27:08The Exit depicts a hunched man
0:27:08 > 0:27:13dragging himself out of a hatched, blackened room.
0:27:13 > 0:27:16Leaving behind a tangle of shadows, he walks into the light.
0:27:19 > 0:27:21Bomberg would spend the rest of his life searching
0:27:21 > 0:27:23for any source of illumination.
0:27:44 > 0:27:46Palestine.
0:27:46 > 0:27:48With the encouragement of the British government,
0:27:48 > 0:27:51many Jews were looking to build a new future here.
0:27:53 > 0:27:57Some of these Zionists employed Bomberg as an official artist,
0:27:57 > 0:28:00to document their utopian efforts.
0:28:03 > 0:28:08The artist, together with his wife Alice, arrived in Jerusalem in 1923.
0:28:15 > 0:28:18Bomberg was immediately struck by the colour
0:28:18 > 0:28:20and the radiance of Jerusalem.
0:28:20 > 0:28:24As he said years later, "I was just a poor boy from the East End,
0:28:24 > 0:28:26"I'd never seen the sunlight before."
0:28:29 > 0:28:33He found himself looking down on a Russian toy city,
0:28:33 > 0:28:36punctuated by its red roofs, jewelled with the gildings
0:28:36 > 0:28:38of the mosque spire.
0:28:44 > 0:28:46The British census the previous year had reported
0:28:46 > 0:28:50that around one tenth of the population in Palestine
0:28:50 > 0:28:52were Jews, the vast majority, Arabs.
0:28:54 > 0:28:58And life was tough here. This was not a land of milk and honey.
0:29:04 > 0:29:07Still dazed by his wartime trauma,
0:29:07 > 0:29:11and faced by a strange new environment, Bomberg recoiled
0:29:11 > 0:29:16from the human form and seemingly turned his back on his earlier work.
0:29:20 > 0:29:23In Roof Tops, Jerusalem, the houses look like
0:29:23 > 0:29:25the graves in the Jewish cemetery.
0:29:28 > 0:29:30Every home is also a mausoleum.
0:29:32 > 0:29:33The city is a labyrinth.
0:29:34 > 0:29:36Discord lives around every corner.
0:29:38 > 0:29:42Jerusalem is a puzzle, simmering in the sun.
0:29:45 > 0:29:49Other cityscapes present the world as if through a pane of glass,
0:29:49 > 0:29:53recalling the topographical art of the 19th century.
0:29:55 > 0:30:00But Bomberg's painting is hyperreal, stunned, muted.
0:30:06 > 0:30:12In 1925, two years after arriving in Palestine, Bomberg began work on the
0:30:12 > 0:30:18subject which had brought him to the region - the Zionist pioneer camps.
0:30:21 > 0:30:24Men toil over what appears more like an gaping wound than
0:30:24 > 0:30:27a landscape, attempting, perhaps, to cut out a cancer.
0:30:31 > 0:30:34And in The Quarrymen: Palestine Development,
0:30:34 > 0:30:37there is little evidence of transformation.
0:30:39 > 0:30:43A machine sits defunct in the rubble-strewn landscape.
0:30:43 > 0:30:47A pair of figures, walking wounded, watch over
0:30:47 > 0:30:50what appears to be the excavation of graves.
0:30:53 > 0:30:56These pictures suggest Bomberg's troubled attitude
0:30:56 > 0:30:57towards the pioneers' efforts.
0:30:59 > 0:31:03Hardly the images of a new utopia hoped for by the Zionists.
0:31:12 > 0:31:16Bomberg had avoided human suffering in Jerusalem.
0:31:16 > 0:31:20But, as news spread of a great atrocity,
0:31:20 > 0:31:24he was drawn to those who'd endured it. Fellow survivors.
0:31:26 > 0:31:31As a Jew, he had to smuggle himself into the Armenian Church
0:31:31 > 0:31:34in Jerusalem, where he spent several days painting scenes of devotion.
0:31:40 > 0:31:45By 1925, the Armenian population in the city had reached almost 15,000.
0:31:47 > 0:31:50Many were there fleeing what is now Turkey,
0:31:50 > 0:31:52where more than one million Armenians
0:31:52 > 0:31:53were systematically murdered
0:31:53 > 0:31:58in the 20th century's first genocide, which had begun in 1915.
0:31:59 > 0:32:02It's impossible to not see Bomberg's images
0:32:02 > 0:32:04through the lens of this massacre.
0:32:06 > 0:32:08He worked quickly, with thick strokes.
0:32:09 > 0:32:12This lends the images immediacy, the sense that Bomberg is
0:32:12 > 0:32:16finally present and keen to capture a fleeting moment.
0:32:22 > 0:32:23Figures are painted with the same
0:32:23 > 0:32:25vitality as their surroundings.
0:32:27 > 0:32:32In Washing Of The Feet, they fill the frame, pulsing with life.
0:32:32 > 0:32:36It's a small picture, but one that's pregnant with meaning.
0:32:36 > 0:32:40You can feel the artist's sense of respect, even reverence,
0:32:40 > 0:32:43for these people still clinging to
0:32:43 > 0:32:46their rituals in this, their darkest hour.
0:33:00 > 0:33:03Bomberg was painting the city from the rooftop
0:33:03 > 0:33:07of a building not far from here, close to the Wailing Wall,
0:33:07 > 0:33:10when a great earthquake struck the city.
0:33:10 > 0:33:12More than 300 houses were destroyed
0:33:12 > 0:33:15and more than 100 people lost their lives.
0:33:15 > 0:33:18Alice ran from their lodgings to find her husband.
0:33:18 > 0:33:23She discovered David Bomberg walking unruffled through a scene of chaos.
0:33:23 > 0:33:26When they later returned to the scene,
0:33:26 > 0:33:28they discovered that the house in which he had been painting
0:33:28 > 0:33:30had been completely destroyed.
0:33:30 > 0:33:33If he hadn't left, he would have been killed.
0:33:33 > 0:33:37He later said, "I'd rather go through ten bombardments
0:33:37 > 0:33:39"than another earthquake."
0:33:39 > 0:33:42He left Jerusalem more or less immediately afterwards.
0:33:42 > 0:33:46He wasn't ready to paint among the ruins, at least, not yet.
0:33:56 > 0:33:58Foggy, drab and grey.
0:33:58 > 0:34:02After the raking light of Jerusalem, London looked foul to his eyes.
0:34:04 > 0:34:07Palestine had taken its toll on his marriage.
0:34:07 > 0:34:09His relationship with Alice had deteriorated
0:34:09 > 0:34:11to the point where it was now over.
0:34:12 > 0:34:16And the general feeling about his new work?
0:34:16 > 0:34:19"So many styles, how is one to know the real Bomberg?"
0:34:21 > 0:34:25The artist's Palestine pictures perplexed the art world,
0:34:25 > 0:34:27but have found their devotees today.
0:34:45 > 0:34:49Bomberg is an extraordinary painter.
0:34:49 > 0:34:54He's unique, in that his painting can be described as poetry,
0:34:54 > 0:34:56as distinct from prose.
0:34:59 > 0:35:07Poetry lies in a fine line between abstract and figurative.
0:35:09 > 0:35:12I started collecting in 1980.
0:35:12 > 0:35:15I had some financial resources,
0:35:15 > 0:35:20but they were supplemented by my doing two jobs.
0:35:21 > 0:35:25I had a nine-to-five job, Monday to Friday,
0:35:25 > 0:35:31and I worked driving a taxi three nights a week in addition.
0:35:34 > 0:35:37The Borough Road Gallery, which opened in 2012,
0:35:37 > 0:35:40now houses Sarah Rose's extensive Bomberg collection.
0:35:46 > 0:35:52I find them exciting to look at, but also very calming.
0:35:53 > 0:35:58My breathing can go down to four shallow breaths a minute.
0:35:59 > 0:36:02Which relates it to some forms of medication
0:36:02 > 0:36:04which give this degree of rest.
0:36:05 > 0:36:09So, with Bomberg, I get the best of both worlds.
0:36:21 > 0:36:24In 1928, while walking around Central London,
0:36:24 > 0:36:27Bomberg recognised a face in the crowd.
0:36:27 > 0:36:31He had met Lilian Holt before. She had been married then,
0:36:31 > 0:36:34but was now estranged from her husband.
0:36:35 > 0:36:38"It wasn't a sexual attraction," Lilian later said.
0:36:38 > 0:36:43"We recognised the total commitment to art in each other."
0:36:43 > 0:36:45They were wedded shortly after.
0:36:45 > 0:36:50She encouraged her husband to work, but the results were faltering.
0:36:50 > 0:36:55His sister Kitty gave him money to travel. She suggested Spain.
0:36:58 > 0:37:00Bomberg chose Toledo because of his admiration
0:37:00 > 0:37:03for the great Spanish painter El Greco.
0:37:03 > 0:37:07It was El Greco's vision of the city that revitalised Bomberg's art.
0:37:15 > 0:37:19This is Bomberg's view of Toledo from the Alcazar, and how
0:37:19 > 0:37:22radically different it is from the Palestine pictures
0:37:22 > 0:37:23that preceded it.
0:37:23 > 0:37:27The handling is much rougher, raw, more immediate.
0:37:27 > 0:37:32There is a weird combination of the intricate and the abstracted,
0:37:32 > 0:37:35this is almost like a piece of sublime knitting.
0:37:35 > 0:37:41The city is represented as a chaotic intermeshing of paint strokes
0:37:41 > 0:37:47which, simultaneously, is completely convincing as a huddle of buildings.
0:37:48 > 0:37:52The landscape in the background seems to flow like molten lava,
0:37:52 > 0:37:54the sky boils with cloud.
0:37:57 > 0:38:00This is very much Bomberg's modern version of the
0:38:00 > 0:38:05spiritualised visions of Toledo painted by El Greco,
0:38:05 > 0:38:10and I think, that when one looks at this picture,
0:38:10 > 0:38:12one can sense that it marks
0:38:12 > 0:38:15a turning point in the artist's career.
0:38:15 > 0:38:17It's as if the shell-shock,
0:38:17 > 0:38:22the sense of trauma left on his mind by World War I,
0:38:22 > 0:38:27has finally lifted. The ringing in his ears has finally stopped,
0:38:27 > 0:38:35he can now hear the world, see the world, FEEL the world again.
0:38:35 > 0:38:39This painting inaugurates a whole phase in his art.
0:38:57 > 0:39:00Spain was to be his home for a large part of his later life.
0:39:03 > 0:39:07In 1934, Bomberg, together with his wife and stepdaughter Dinora,
0:39:07 > 0:39:09arrived here in Ronda.
0:39:11 > 0:39:15Lilian was pregnant with their daughter, Diana.
0:39:15 > 0:39:18Bomberg's response to this news?
0:39:18 > 0:39:22"We've got chickens, why not babies?"
0:39:22 > 0:39:25Ronda would bring him joy and a new sense of liberation.
0:39:33 > 0:39:36"In periods when the artist can be inspired and given freedom
0:39:36 > 0:39:40"to express this inspiration," Bomberg wrote,
0:39:40 > 0:39:41"we get great art."
0:39:45 > 0:39:48The town would inspire him to create some of his most luminous work.
0:39:50 > 0:39:53The complex interplay of Ronda's rooftops,
0:39:53 > 0:39:55light skimming across jewel-like facets.
0:39:57 > 0:40:00An ordinary street scene transfigured with
0:40:00 > 0:40:03rich hues and a plunging perspective.
0:40:05 > 0:40:08But there was one view that drew Bomberg back over and over.
0:40:09 > 0:40:12The epic panorama of Ronda itself.
0:40:21 > 0:40:26He once said that, for him, the past and the present
0:40:26 > 0:40:29were indistinguishable from one another,
0:40:29 > 0:40:31they coexisted in his experience of the world.
0:40:31 > 0:40:35And here you feel that with particular force.
0:40:35 > 0:40:38The town itself, you've got Islamic architecture built over
0:40:38 > 0:40:41Christian architecture built over Roman architecture,
0:40:41 > 0:40:47the whole thing constructed above this vast cliff face,
0:40:47 > 0:40:50which itself speaks of ancient, distant, geological time.
0:40:52 > 0:40:54I also think that what he found here was
0:40:54 > 0:40:57a kind of mirror for his own turbulent spirit.
0:40:59 > 0:41:04He had this very, very troubled sense of...
0:41:04 > 0:41:06the world as it was in his time.
0:41:07 > 0:41:11This new, post-war, troubled 20th century sense of existence,
0:41:11 > 0:41:14and he made it reflected in the symbols that he created
0:41:14 > 0:41:15here in his paintings.
0:41:15 > 0:41:18That bridge he was drawn to again and again,
0:41:18 > 0:41:22I think because it seemed to him to express the
0:41:22 > 0:41:25precarious nature of civilisation itself.
0:41:25 > 0:41:30A fragile lace-like structure suspended across a void.
0:41:38 > 0:41:41Within a few years, the vertiginous character
0:41:41 > 0:41:44of this place would be put to murderous use.
0:41:44 > 0:41:48Men would be flung to their deaths from Ronda Bridge
0:41:48 > 0:41:50during the Spanish Civil War.
0:41:56 > 0:41:59Bomberg had just begun to create some of his
0:41:59 > 0:42:02most compelling work, but now Spain
0:42:02 > 0:42:05was tearing itself apart, and he was forced to leave.
0:42:05 > 0:42:07There was nothing for it but to return to London.
0:42:26 > 0:42:301937 saw him obsessively painting his own reflection.
0:42:31 > 0:42:34Daubed with red as if engulfed by fire,
0:42:34 > 0:42:37charred sockets where his eyes should be.
0:42:37 > 0:42:39Blues and purples give him the appearance
0:42:39 > 0:42:42of a shrouded corpse, awkwardly propped.
0:42:44 > 0:42:48The double-headed Self-Portrait is a startling image
0:42:48 > 0:42:52of a dissolving mind. He is Janus-faced,
0:42:52 > 0:42:57head smeared across the canvas, in two places at once.
0:42:57 > 0:43:00He stopped painting altogether shortly afterwards.
0:43:03 > 0:43:06Two years passed, and the turmoil in Europe escalated into
0:43:06 > 0:43:09another full-blown world war.
0:43:12 > 0:43:14During the Blitz, London was a city under siege.
0:43:25 > 0:43:28Bomberg was struck by the seemingly miraculous way
0:43:28 > 0:43:32in which the city of London survived the incessant bombing of the Nazis.
0:43:37 > 0:43:40He got permission to climb to the top of a church,
0:43:40 > 0:43:42probably St Bride's, here in Cheapside.
0:44:10 > 0:44:14There you have it, St Paul's rising out
0:44:14 > 0:44:19of the bombed rubble of London. What an image.
0:44:20 > 0:44:24It's full of energy, it's raw, it's vibrant.
0:44:24 > 0:44:26Look at the way he's depicted the sky.
0:44:26 > 0:44:29This is London at the height of the Blitz, remember.
0:44:29 > 0:44:33I think that sky which - yes, it's full of weather - but it's also
0:44:33 > 0:44:37full of a sense of threat from Hitler's aerial bombardment.
0:44:38 > 0:44:41There is something very expressive I think about the way
0:44:41 > 0:44:43that he has used charcoal - burnt wood.
0:44:43 > 0:44:46That's what this image is made of, that's what this image SMELLS of.
0:44:46 > 0:44:49You can smell the burnt rubble of London.
0:44:50 > 0:44:55Why did he, day after day, climb to the top of St Bride's spire
0:44:55 > 0:44:58to look at St Paul's, risking life and limb?
0:44:58 > 0:45:02Well, I think it's because St Paul's, for him,
0:45:02 > 0:45:04stood for all his values.
0:45:04 > 0:45:10There it is - spirituality, beauty rising from chaos.
0:45:12 > 0:45:16I think it's also a symbol of Bomberg's sense of himself,
0:45:16 > 0:45:17it's his way of telling us
0:45:17 > 0:45:23that no matter what the world throws at him, he will persist.
0:45:25 > 0:45:32By 1945, much of London lay in ruins. But it would rise again.
0:45:32 > 0:45:35And the turbulent Bomberg, too, would be reborn.
0:45:43 > 0:45:46He started a class two days a week, here,
0:45:46 > 0:45:50at what used to be Borough Polytechnic.
0:45:50 > 0:45:53For the first time he was teaching art to committed artists.
0:45:56 > 0:45:59Bomberg's classes were to become the most adventurous
0:45:59 > 0:46:01and influential of their time.
0:46:01 > 0:46:05And for students such as Leslie Marr, they were a revelation.
0:46:09 > 0:46:14Bomberg sort of projected the idea into us that we
0:46:14 > 0:46:16were the most Avant-Garde group in England.
0:46:19 > 0:46:21It was almost like a monastic experience.
0:46:24 > 0:46:27We were all there and all had this common aim,
0:46:27 > 0:46:29and it generates a sort of energy which goes round everybody.
0:46:31 > 0:46:34And we were all lifted, I think, by this.
0:46:36 > 0:46:40Bomberg galvanised his students with his own artistic philosophy.
0:46:41 > 0:46:44One phrase was used over and over.
0:46:45 > 0:46:48"Our search is towards the spirit in the mass."
0:46:50 > 0:46:54What he was really saying was that there's much
0:46:54 > 0:46:57more in a landscape than just the view you get when you look at it.
0:46:59 > 0:47:01There are all sorts of things going on.
0:47:03 > 0:47:08When I paint landscape now, I'm conscious of all this going on,
0:47:08 > 0:47:11that the landscape is something quite different,
0:47:11 > 0:47:15much more interesting, much more mystical.
0:47:19 > 0:47:22In 1946, the Borough Group was formed.
0:47:22 > 0:47:25Miles Richmond and Dennis Creffield were amongst the members.
0:47:27 > 0:47:31And in 1947, they held their first exhibition.
0:47:31 > 0:47:34Just a year later, the cracks were beginning to show.
0:47:34 > 0:47:36It was only a matter of time
0:47:36 > 0:47:39before the group fell apart amidst the infighting.
0:47:41 > 0:47:43Other students remained outside of the Borough Group,
0:47:43 > 0:47:47but still committed to Bomberg's teachings and philosophy.
0:47:47 > 0:47:52Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff and Gustav Metzger among them.
0:47:59 > 0:48:02Metzger, who lost both parents in the Holocaust,
0:48:02 > 0:48:05arrived in Britain as a Kindertransport refugee.
0:48:08 > 0:48:10Much of the work that he painted with Bomberg at the
0:48:10 > 0:48:14Borough Polytechnic has remained in storage for more than 60 years.
0:48:16 > 0:48:18Rarely seen until now.
0:48:21 > 0:48:27One of the central points in his teaching was structure,
0:48:27 > 0:48:28go for the structure.
0:48:30 > 0:48:33I must say it had a very big influence on me,
0:48:33 > 0:48:37and the structure for Bomberg wasn't simply the drawing
0:48:37 > 0:48:41in front of him, or the painting.
0:48:41 > 0:48:44Structure is nature and society.
0:48:44 > 0:48:51Bomberg was, I suppose, you could call him a philosopher.
0:48:51 > 0:48:59He continually was probing himself and the students and the world.
0:49:03 > 0:49:08Metzger would eventually seek to transcend images altogether,
0:49:08 > 0:49:11inventing a corrosive alternative to painting which he called
0:49:11 > 0:49:13"auto-destructive art".
0:49:15 > 0:49:19But even his 1965 happening on London's South Bank,
0:49:19 > 0:49:22revealing St Paul's through an acid-burned canvas,
0:49:22 > 0:49:25evokes Bomberg's earlier work,
0:49:25 > 0:49:29exposing the fabric of the city as if through a veil.
0:49:35 > 0:49:42He would say things like, "There is a man somewhere, and he decides the
0:49:42 > 0:49:49"tempo of London, and when he wants he will adjust the levers
0:49:49 > 0:49:52"and things go faster. Or slower."
0:49:52 > 0:49:57Well, this is a beautiful way of summing up London.
0:49:59 > 0:50:02And he was poetic and prophetic,
0:50:02 > 0:50:06I think this is so important,
0:50:06 > 0:50:10Bomberg - if nothing else - had charisma.
0:50:13 > 0:50:16This charisma was lost on Bomberg's
0:50:16 > 0:50:18fellow staff at the Borough Polytechnic.
0:50:20 > 0:50:22He'd taken a wrecking ball to cherished beliefs
0:50:22 > 0:50:23about the teaching of art.
0:50:25 > 0:50:27He was fired from his post in 1953.
0:50:32 > 0:50:35Undeterred, Bomberg decided to follow his vocation
0:50:35 > 0:50:38as a teacher in Spain.
0:50:38 > 0:50:41He returned to Ronda in 1954 with his wife Lilian,
0:50:41 > 0:50:43to set up a painting school.
0:50:45 > 0:50:49The hope was that enough students would come to subsidise
0:50:49 > 0:50:53Bomberg's life in Ronda, giving the ageing artist time to paint.
0:50:53 > 0:50:57Brochures and advertisements were printed, offering
0:50:57 > 0:50:59"A course, summer and winter,
0:50:59 > 0:51:02"annually, for students of all countries
0:51:02 > 0:51:05"in painting, sculpture and architecture."
0:51:05 > 0:51:08They also did the hard sell on Bomberg's personal achievements
0:51:08 > 0:51:09as an artist.
0:51:11 > 0:51:13But it wasn't to be.
0:51:13 > 0:51:15A lack of interest from students
0:51:15 > 0:51:18and a feud with the owners of the Villa Paz made sure of that.
0:51:20 > 0:51:24They were evicted from the building before the course had even opened.
0:51:26 > 0:51:28The school may have failed,
0:51:28 > 0:51:31but his old students' dedication never faltered.
0:51:34 > 0:51:36Miles Richmond, together with his wife Susannah,
0:51:36 > 0:51:39joined the Bombergs in Ronda in 1954.
0:51:41 > 0:51:45And for the young Richmond, Bomberg's commitment
0:51:45 > 0:51:47to art was inspiring.
0:51:47 > 0:51:50Bomberg lifted the whole idea of art into a
0:51:50 > 0:51:53completely new level of significance.
0:51:53 > 0:51:59It was something of fundamental importance to him.
0:51:59 > 0:52:05I think he thought that good painting could change the world.
0:52:05 > 0:52:09I'd never met that kind of intensity or seriousness before.
0:52:13 > 0:52:14In his late sketches,
0:52:14 > 0:52:17Bomberg brought this intensity to the landscape of Ronda.
0:52:19 > 0:52:23They're among his most vital and accomplished works.
0:52:23 > 0:52:25Every one a meditation on the savage,
0:52:25 > 0:52:27but enduring, beauty of nature.
0:52:36 > 0:52:40It's a surreal situation to be talking about David Bomberg
0:52:40 > 0:52:43on the most easterly point of England.
0:52:45 > 0:52:48Like Bomberg, John Virtue forms strong attachments to
0:52:48 > 0:52:52specific places, returning repeatedly to
0:52:52 > 0:52:54this stretch of coast to sketch.
0:52:59 > 0:53:02The drawings he made in Andalucia, those drawings
0:53:02 > 0:53:05are rooted in Andalucia,
0:53:05 > 0:53:08it's got him by the throat, it's got him.
0:53:08 > 0:53:12The drawings are anchored, their strength comes from being in
0:53:12 > 0:53:13that particular location,
0:53:13 > 0:53:17it's the particularity of his work that gives it a strength.
0:53:29 > 0:53:35The elevation above the mess or the fix or the state you're in,
0:53:35 > 0:53:40if you can use your art to do that, it's really manipulating
0:53:40 > 0:53:44a disastrous situation to make a fantastically successful
0:53:44 > 0:53:46and lasting piece of art.
0:53:51 > 0:53:55The sophistication of an economy of means, the Minimalist
0:53:55 > 0:54:00economy of means to express complex, passionate and deeply felt ideas.
0:54:09 > 0:54:12The final year of Bomberg's life was darkened by news
0:54:12 > 0:54:14that had filtered back from Britain.
0:54:16 > 0:54:20The Tate had staged a major retrospective.
0:54:20 > 0:54:22Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists.
0:54:23 > 0:54:25Bomberg was barely mentioned.
0:54:39 > 0:54:42By May of 1957, Bomberg had so little money,
0:54:42 > 0:54:45he'd stopped feeding himself properly.
0:54:46 > 0:54:49With Lilian in England, Miles and Susannah Richmond
0:54:49 > 0:54:52made the decision to take him to the doctor in Gibraltar.
0:54:54 > 0:54:56To distract him from his pain, Richmond talked to
0:54:56 > 0:55:00Bomberg about Georges Braque's views on perspective.
0:55:02 > 0:55:05"Distance does not exist!" cried out Bomberg,
0:55:05 > 0:55:08then closed his eyes.
0:55:08 > 0:55:11Richmond thought the old man had fallen asleep.
0:55:11 > 0:55:12But he was unconscious.
0:55:14 > 0:55:19He was taken back to London, and just two days later, he died.
0:55:20 > 0:55:24The cause of death, sclerosis of the liver.
0:55:24 > 0:55:26Not due to alcohol,
0:55:26 > 0:55:28but malnutrition.
0:55:34 > 0:55:38His rehabilitation as an artist began almost immediately.
0:55:40 > 0:55:43The following year, the Arts Council held a survey
0:55:43 > 0:55:45of Bomberg's career,
0:55:45 > 0:55:48assembling 72 of his finest works
0:55:48 > 0:55:50under one roof.
0:55:52 > 0:55:55Absent from the exhibition was his final,
0:55:55 > 0:55:58and perhaps, most revealing painting.
0:55:58 > 0:56:02A searing image, but ultimately a triumphant one.
0:56:05 > 0:56:09This is David Bomberg's very last self-portrait, and he did not
0:56:09 > 0:56:14look in the mirror to paint it, he looked into his imagination.
0:56:14 > 0:56:16It's a symbolic self-image -
0:56:16 > 0:56:20Bomberg the tragic, anguished, doomed artist.
0:56:21 > 0:56:25He looks very much like Christ the Man of Sorrows,
0:56:25 > 0:56:28but it's a very eccentric, Bombergian vision
0:56:28 > 0:56:30of the artist as Christ.
0:56:30 > 0:56:34His face is almost entirely obscured by what some writers
0:56:34 > 0:56:36have called a headscarf.
0:56:36 > 0:56:39I take it to be one of his own last landscapes.
0:56:39 > 0:56:44It's as if he has wrapped his own head in one of his canvases,
0:56:44 > 0:56:47as if to suggest that here, at the end,
0:56:47 > 0:56:49all he has eyes for is the landscape.
0:56:51 > 0:56:54Like Christ, he clutches...
0:56:54 > 0:56:57the tools of his martyrdom,
0:56:57 > 0:56:59in this case not the nails,
0:56:59 > 0:57:02not the scourge, but the brushes.
0:57:04 > 0:57:08He clings to them, as if clinging to his art,
0:57:08 > 0:57:13in the hope that one day images like these will
0:57:13 > 0:57:15become the symbols of his resurrection.
0:57:23 > 0:57:25David Bomberg may have been the great misfit
0:57:25 > 0:57:28of 20th-century British art,
0:57:28 > 0:57:31but his spirit lives on in unexpected places.
0:57:33 > 0:57:36His classes at the Borough Polytechnic revolutionised
0:57:36 > 0:57:39the teaching of art, and inspired a generation.
0:57:41 > 0:57:47The Borough Group, Leon Kossoff Frank Auerbach
0:57:47 > 0:57:51- who later taught John Virtue - Gustav Metzger,
0:57:51 > 0:57:54whose auto-destructive art was a clarion call
0:57:54 > 0:57:56for The Who to smash their guitars.
0:57:58 > 0:58:02And the work that David Bomberg created endures, too,
0:58:02 > 0:58:05it continues to dance,
0:58:05 > 0:58:06the pulse of the city
0:58:06 > 0:58:09yielding to the pulse of nature.
0:58:09 > 0:58:14In turn, all giving way to the unstoppable rhythm of time.