David Bomberg: Prophet in No Man's Land British Art at War: Bomberg, Sickert and Nash

The early 20th century unfolded with the logic of a dream.

Britain was in the throes of a strange transformation.

Absent voices bled from new technologies.

Men built wings and took flight.

Cities rose up, made of glass and steel.

British artists witnessed this revolution.

A new world cried out for a new kind of art.

Prophetic, visionary, shaped by the rhythms of an imagined future.

But this dream died in the wreckage of the early 20th century,

World War I made sure of that.

In 20 million blinks of an eye, a generation was all but erased.

Artists attempted to make sense of the atrocity,

to wrestle the conflict into meaning.

This series tells the story of those British painters whose lives

coincided with this world-changing moment.

They had set out to depict a new world,

but found themselves working in the rubble.

David Bomberg was one of those painters.

His early modernist works pushed art to its limits.

Staccato,

aggressive, flesh and bone tangled with the steel city.

Then everything changed.

He set aside his paintbrush

and picked up a rifle.

Fighting at the Somme, David Bomberg watched the world splinter

and fall apart just like the works of art he'd created.

He would spend the rest of his life searching for order

in an increasingly disordered world.

When he died in 1957, embattled and in poverty, he seemed

to be no more than a footnote in the history of British art.

However, the works that survived Bomberg tell their own story.

Combative, iconoclastic, his art would always

oscillate between dream and disillusionment.

He remains the most elusively original British painter of the 20th century.

Bomberg's origins were humble, impoverished.

Born in Birmingham in 1890 to Jewish immigrant parents,

his family soon moved to the East End of London.

Its cramped narrow streets were his streets,

its poverty-stricken people were his people.

They filled his earliest work and they would haunt his later pictures.

He was brought up in a house here on St Mark Street, one of 11 children,

an experience that seems to have left him

with a kind of claustrophobia,

a horror of enclosed spaces, and a love of grand, open vistas.

Little remains of the London that he knew. Much of this Jewish ghetto was

flattened during the Second World War, but traces do still remain.

Bomberg's father, Abraham, was a leather craftsman, but he was

also a gambler who stumbled from one financial crisis to the next.

Prone to fits of rage, he ruled over his wife with an iron fist.

Rebecca was the family's guardian,

she rebelled against the orthodox Jewish faith.

She was devoted to David, the son who was always drawing,

creating a studio for him in the adjoining flat.

But Abraham Bomberg believed that art was no profession,

and, around 1906, David began an apprenticeship as a lithographer.

The young Bomberg did everything he could to develop his talent.

He paid for evening classes with artists as illustrious

as Walter Sickert.

After a chance encounter in 1907, David Bomberg was asked to

sit as a model for John Singer Sargent, the era's most

celebrated painter of high society portraits.

An artist so polished,

he made the rich positively gleam with self-satisfaction.

Here he is, Bomberg,

16 years old, 17 years old,

a young Jewish boy, would-be painter, from the ghetto,

stepping into the grandest studio

of the grandest artist of the day.

Sargent saw in Bomberg raw, naked talent.

He hoped that the young artist would study at the Slade School of Art,

and knew exactly who could help him.

Sargent would introduce him to influential Jewish patrons.

Sargent, represents everything that Bomberg isn't - immensely wealthy,

immensely successful, well-connected, utterly at ease,

both with himself and with the high society whom he paints.

In a sense, I think this was a crossroads moment for Bomberg.

Will he choose to aim for all this,

will he follow in the Sargent path to fame and fortune,

or will he choose to side with those, and there are many,

who want to take a sledgehammer to all of this?

On the Continent, artists had systematically dismantled

the genteel conventions of the past.

Out went the low-toned colours and mirror-like surfaces

of academic painting.

Instead, an art that set out to make it new.

Modernism.

Bomberg's world was shaken by the Art-Quake of 1910,

Roger Fry's Manet and the Post-Impressionists exhibition.

Two years later, at Fry's second exhibition,

Picasso and Braque's Cubism careered into the heart of polite Britain.

David Bomberg was in thrall.

But not everyone was intoxicated.

Henry Tonks, artist and tutor at the Slade,

summed up the general sentiment.

"I shall resign if this talk of Cubism doesn't cease.

"It's killing me."

After an initial rejection,

Bomberg was accepted to the Slade in April, 1911.

Henry Tonks was one of his tutors.

A contract had been drawn up with

the Jewish Education Aid Society to fund Bomberg's time at art school.

At the Slade, the emphasis lay on draughtsmanship.

Students drew from life,

every picture grounded in science and optics.

But Bomberg was a hot-headed young student with

a passion for everything new, and he wielded more than a paintbrush.

He wrestled with life models,

used his fists to protect other Jews

from the anti-Semitism that was rife.

And, when his teacher criticised one of his paintings,

Bomberg hit his professor over the head with his palette.

Bomberg studied with a trail-blazing group of young artists -

William Roberts, Christopher Nevinson, Stanley Spencer.

With one eye on the art of the past, and one eye on the future,

Bomberg painted a series of pictures at the Slade

that would produce a new kind of British art -

radical, Jewish, working-class.

And he did it all in just three years.

1911.

Bedroom Picture owes a lot to his old teacher, Walter Sickert.

The drab interior, the metal bed-frame,

a longing for what is beyond the confines of the room.

1912, Island of Joy.

A Dionysian frieze with a difference.

In one picture,

an artist's journey from figurative art to near abstraction.

In October, 1912, his mother died suddenly.

The death certificate recorded pneumonia as the cause.

Bomberg responded with his first masterpiece,

currently under wraps in the Tate store on the Old Kent Road.

Vision of Ezekiel, 1912.

A tangle of geometric figures emerging from death into life.

Bomberg reversing time's arrow,

his mother has just died, but what is he painting?

He is painting that moment when all shall rise.

It's the vision in which Ezekiel

foresees the day on which God

shall raise the Jews from the dry bones of their death,

put his spirit into them and gather them together,

take them to the Promised Land.

A baby, a newborn child is held aloft

at the centre of the painting.

It's also Bomberg's response

to the advent of truly Avant-Garde modern art,

its arrival in England.

Bomberg, almost alone among the painters of his day,

immediately sees that this is a revolution

and he wants to be part of it. That's what this painting says.

He's decided to go geometric,

to give art the kiss of life.

Bomberg was just too angular for the Slade.

He dressed like an East End tough and acted like one, too.

His art was just as aggressive.

But worst of all, Bomberg's tutors detected the

"disturbing influence" that his views were having on other students.

'Bomberg was unceremoniously ousted from the Slade

'in the summer of 1913.'

As an art student's riposte to being expelled, this takes some beating.

David Bomberg, 23 years old,

has created one of the great images of the 20th century.

What an image!

Jangling, jarring,

disconcerting modernity itself,

crammed into one monumental canvas.

He called it In The Hold.

Male workers,

heroic figures toiling in the hold of a ship.

We can see some vestigial figures,

hands reaching up, reaching out of the hold as if to escape.

A diagrammatic figure in blue

advancing across the canvas,

wearing what seems to be a peaked cap.

But even at the moment we recognise these...what are they?

Anchors tethering the image in the visible, representable world,

we simultaneously lose those images

because what he has created in this grid-form parody

of the system formally

used to scale up a nice easily readable representation of reality.

What we experience is a kaleidoscope of shatterings.

He's taken the language of Cubism and exploded it yet further.

It's like a bomb has gone off inside a Cubist painting.

So that the Cubists' determination to represent experience

in the round and seen through time

as we revolve around an object,

Bomberg has taken that and made from it a painting that seems, actually,

to do the opposite. It seems to envelop us

and plunge US into ITS chaos.

On the 28th of June, 1914, Gavrilo Princip assassinated

the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne,

Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

The major powers of Europe retreated behind closed

doors for a month of diplomatic manoeuvring.

War was looming.

Many were fearful, but some, an avant-garde few, thought war

was just what the country needed,

a necessary conflagration.

"BLAST first (from politeness) ENGLAND

"CURSE its climate for its sins and infections

"DISMAL SYMBOL, set round our bodies, of effeminate lout within."

In his 1914 publication, Blast,

Wyndham Lewis screeched out a manifesto for the Avant-Garde.

Capricious and manipulative,

Lewis spearheaded a movement that was forging

a striking kind of British modernism.

"At the heart of the whirlpool is a great silent place where all

"the energy is concentrated," he said,

"And there, at the point of concentration, is the Vorticist."

Lewis tried to draw Bomberg in,

but Bomberg was wary,

he wouldn't join any English club,

no matter how sharp-edged.

His work did appear in Vorticist exhibitions,

but he remained defiantly alone.

An army of one.

I'm interested in that whole kind of period

of abstraction

and the whole kind of internationalness

of Cubism.

It's a bit like composers

in the '70s and '80s, we all became Minimalists.

There's a lot of very poor Minimalism, just as

there's a lot of poor Cubism,

but he had a vision which allowed him and encouraged him

and made him take it beyond a nice, John Cage world,

cheap imitation, to make something that is purely Bomberg.

Like the young Bomberg, composer Michael Nyman has brought to his art

a mathematical preoccupation with structure and repetition.

His affinity for Bomberg is such

that he could almost pass for his double.

When I met Dinora,

she took one look a me and said, "You're David Bomberg."

She thought I looked really like her stepfather,

so it doesn't really get any better than that.

In July 1914, Bomberg set out his own manifesto

in the foreword to his solo exhibition at the Chenil Gallery.

"I appeal to a sense of form.

"In some work, I completely abandon naturalism and tradition.

"I am searching for an intenser expression.

"I look upon Nature while I live in a steel city.

"Where decoration happens, it is accidental.

"My object is the construction of pure form.

"I reject everything in painting that is not pure form."

The exhibition brought together Bomberg's works under one roof.

All, that is, except one picture.

The most important canvas was not hung inside the gallery,

but instead, outside on the street,

garlanded in Union Jack bunting.

A painting that was a slap in the face

to British artistic conventions...

..The Mud Bath.

It looks like a dance, a joyous celebration.

A world in which man has metamorphosed into machine.

Bomberg took as his inspiration his experience

at Schewziks's Vapour Baths just off Brick Lane in the East End.

He would go and look down from the balcony at the men

below purging themselves of the dirt of the day.

Blue and white mechanomorphs emerge gleaming from red water,

together forming a dancing Union Jack.

Bomberg seems to imply that by bathing in their new-found

Britishness, London's Jews can cleanse themselves

of the grime of their past - their pogroms, their persecution.

And yet...at the heart of the picture

is a scything column, slashing the composition in half.

A shadow of a doubt, perhaps.

Bomberg's sense of uncertainty

about how fully integrated immigrant Jews could truly be.

Just a few days after the exhibition opened,

and the picture caused traffic to grind to a halt, "it" started.

Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on the 28th of July, 1914.

Events soon escalated.

Approaching 50,000 British Jews fought for king

and country during World War I.

It would be the single most traumatic event

in the life of David Bomberg.

War quickly took the sting out of the tail of the Avant-Garde.

In November 1915, unable to find work as an artist,

Bomberg enlisted in the Royal Engineers.

The following year, he married his girlfriend, Alice,

an event overshadowed when he was billeted to France,

to fight at the Somme.

"Wasting misery, venereal disease, delirium tremens,

"courting disaster on a playing card are, in their killing process, all

"too slow. War has learned to do the double-quick in half the time."

If I want to really feel as though I am touching

the experience of someone who fought in that carnage,

I go to what I think of as the residuals of war.

Which is the poems,

the snatched sketches.

It's very much the art of the broken pencil, the hurried composition.

And if he was underrated as a painter,

he was equally underrated as a writer, because these, for me,

are among the most remarkable poems of the First War.

And it makes me think that when we look at his paintings,

we can never give them enough

intellectual, moral, symbolic credit.

Whatever we think is going on in Bomberg's work, there will be

reams and reams and reams of this type of verse

going on in his mind behind every image.

"War does it by numbers. In a few counts, it hustled them to arms.

"It fuddled with its fingers anyhow, with a bludgeon crushed a man,

"splintered his brains, merged what remained in filth,

"then, bent in no direction, lost its way.

"War lost its way,

"and left them in a tangle of no paths in a disused trench.

"Near such a trench,

"lying in an attitude, callous to what went on,

"maggot-eaten, the fatted maggots,

"dead, they found him when the refugees came back to cut the corn."

News filtered through to Bomberg that two of his best friends,

cornerstones of the British Avant-Garde,

Isaac Rosenberg and TE Hulme, had been killed at the front.

In 1917, he sketched a memorial for Hulme.

Etched at the bottom is the inscription

"He died for freedom and honour".

Privately, however,

Bomberg felt that war was neither noble nor heroic.

Like many other soldiers at the front, Bomberg was gradually

driven insane by the terrifying routine

that alternated extreme boredom with total panic.

Each day, a source of terror.

Driven to despair,

he decided to shoot himself in the foot with his own pistol.

He could have been sent to the firing squad,

but the authorities took a lenient line for once,

and his life was spared.

Finally permitted to withdraw from active service,

Rifleman Bomberg returned to England,

shell-shocked, like so many others.

In the direct aftermath, he approached publishers

with the poetry he'd written at the front.

Replies came back.

Every one, a rejection.

A commission from the Canadian War Memorials Fund

marked Bomberg's return to painting.

Sappers At Work was commissioned

to celebrate the heroism of a company of Canadian soldiers

who dug tunnels under

German trenches to lay explosives.

But how much heroism

could Bomberg see after the war,

after his breakdown?

I personally think this is a deeply troubling, uncertain picture,

and I think its message was meant by Bomberg to be unsettling.

He delivers that message through a series of quotations

from one particular, famous painting of the past -

Caravaggio's Martyrdom Of St Peter.

From that masterpiece, Bomberg has taken this figure

with his green-clad buttocks thrust in the face of the viewer,

and these other figures, straining, hauling at a rope,

pulling on a pulley.

Now, in Caravaggio's painting,

those men are engaged in crucifying Peter, killing a man.

According to the terms of the commission, these men were meant to

be seen as heroes, but Bomberg has cast them in the role of crucifiers,

dark subterranean assassins

bent on the destruction of others.

It's a deeply ambiguous,

extremely troubling picture.

But what else can you expect

if you ask a great artist to paint a memorial to war?

1921 marked the final break

with Vorticism and Wyndham Lewis.

Bomberg's contribution

to Lewis' publication The Tyro

was a stark goodbye

to the Avant-Garde and all that.

The Exit depicts a hunched man

dragging himself out of a hatched, blackened room.

Leaving behind a tangle of shadows, he walks into the light.

Bomberg would spend the rest of his life searching

for any source of illumination.

Palestine.

With the encouragement of the British government,

many Jews were looking to build a new future here.

Some of these Zionists employed Bomberg as an official artist,

to document their utopian efforts.

The artist, together with his wife Alice, arrived in Jerusalem in 1923.

Bomberg was immediately struck by the colour

and the radiance of Jerusalem.

As he said years later, "I was just a poor boy from the East End,

"I'd never seen the sunlight before."

He found himself looking down on a Russian toy city,

punctuated by its red roofs, jewelled with the gildings

of the mosque spire.

The British census the previous year had reported

that around one tenth of the population in Palestine

were Jews, the vast majority, Arabs.

And life was tough here. This was not a land of milk and honey.

Still dazed by his wartime trauma,

and faced by a strange new environment, Bomberg recoiled

from the human form and seemingly turned his back on his earlier work.

In Roof Tops, Jerusalem, the houses look like

the graves in the Jewish cemetery.

Every home is also a mausoleum.

The city is a labyrinth.

Discord lives around every corner.

Jerusalem is a puzzle, simmering in the sun.

Other cityscapes present the world as if through a pane of glass,

recalling the topographical art of the 19th century.

But Bomberg's painting is hyperreal, stunned, muted.

In 1925, two years after arriving in Palestine, Bomberg began work on the

subject which had brought him to the region - the Zionist pioneer camps.

Men toil over what appears more like an gaping wound than

a landscape, attempting, perhaps, to cut out a cancer.

And in The Quarrymen: Palestine Development,

there is little evidence of transformation.

A machine sits defunct in the rubble-strewn landscape.

A pair of figures, walking wounded, watch over

what appears to be the excavation of graves.

These pictures suggest Bomberg's troubled attitude

towards the pioneers' efforts.

Hardly the images of a new utopia hoped for by the Zionists.

Bomberg had avoided human suffering in Jerusalem.

But, as news spread of a great atrocity,

he was drawn to those who'd endured it. Fellow survivors.

As a Jew, he had to smuggle himself into the Armenian Church

in Jerusalem, where he spent several days painting scenes of devotion.

By 1925, the Armenian population in the city had reached almost 15,000.

Many were there fleeing what is now Turkey,

where more than one million Armenians

were systematically murdered

in the 20th century's first genocide, which had begun in 1915.

It's impossible to not see Bomberg's images

through the lens of this massacre.

He worked quickly, with thick strokes.

This lends the images immediacy, the sense that Bomberg is

finally present and keen to capture a fleeting moment.

Figures are painted with the same

vitality as their surroundings.

In Washing Of The Feet, they fill the frame, pulsing with life.

It's a small picture, but one that's pregnant with meaning.

You can feel the artist's sense of respect, even reverence,

for these people still clinging to

their rituals in this, their darkest hour.

Bomberg was painting the city from the rooftop

of a building not far from here, close to the Wailing Wall,

when a great earthquake struck the city.

More than 300 houses were destroyed

and more than 100 people lost their lives.

Alice ran from their lodgings to find her husband.

She discovered David Bomberg walking unruffled through a scene of chaos.

When they later returned to the scene,

they discovered that the house in which he had been painting

had been completely destroyed.

If he hadn't left, he would have been killed.

He later said, "I'd rather go through ten bombardments

"than another earthquake."

He left Jerusalem more or less immediately afterwards.

He wasn't ready to paint among the ruins, at least, not yet.

Foggy, drab and grey.

After the raking light of Jerusalem, London looked foul to his eyes.

Palestine had taken its toll on his marriage.

His relationship with Alice had deteriorated

to the point where it was now over.

And the general feeling about his new work?

"So many styles, how is one to know the real Bomberg?"

The artist's Palestine pictures perplexed the art world,

but have found their devotees today.

Bomberg is an extraordinary painter.

He's unique, in that his painting can be described as poetry,

as distinct from prose.

Poetry lies in a fine line between abstract and figurative.

I started collecting in 1980.

I had some financial resources,

but they were supplemented by my doing two jobs.

I had a nine-to-five job, Monday to Friday,

and I worked driving a taxi three nights a week in addition.

The Borough Road Gallery, which opened in 2012,

now houses Sarah Rose's extensive Bomberg collection.

I find them exciting to look at, but also very calming.

My breathing can go down to four shallow breaths a minute.

Which relates it to some forms of medication

which give this degree of rest.

So, with Bomberg, I get the best of both worlds.

In 1928, while walking around Central London,

Bomberg recognised a face in the crowd.

He had met Lilian Holt before. She had been married then,

but was now estranged from her husband.

"It wasn't a sexual attraction," Lilian later said.

"We recognised the total commitment to art in each other."

They were wedded shortly after.

She encouraged her husband to work, but the results were faltering.

His sister Kitty gave him money to travel. She suggested Spain.

Bomberg chose Toledo because of his admiration

for the great Spanish painter El Greco.

It was El Greco's vision of the city that revitalised Bomberg's art.

This is Bomberg's view of Toledo from the Alcazar, and how

radically different it is from the Palestine pictures

that preceded it.

The handling is much rougher, raw, more immediate.

There is a weird combination of the intricate and the abstracted,

this is almost like a piece of sublime knitting.

The city is represented as a chaotic intermeshing of paint strokes

which, simultaneously, is completely convincing as a huddle of buildings.

The landscape in the background seems to flow like molten lava,

the sky boils with cloud.

This is very much Bomberg's modern version of the

spiritualised visions of Toledo painted by El Greco,

and I think, that when one looks at this picture,

one can sense that it marks

a turning point in the artist's career.

It's as if the shell-shock,

the sense of trauma left on his mind by World War I,

has finally lifted. The ringing in his ears has finally stopped,

he can now hear the world, see the world, FEEL the world again.

This painting inaugurates a whole phase in his art.

Spain was to be his home for a large part of his later life.

In 1934, Bomberg, together with his wife and stepdaughter Dinora,

arrived here in Ronda.

Lilian was pregnant with their daughter, Diana.

Bomberg's response to this news?

"We've got chickens, why not babies?"

Ronda would bring him joy and a new sense of liberation.

"In periods when the artist can be inspired and given freedom

"to express this inspiration," Bomberg wrote,

"we get great art."

The town would inspire him to create some of his most luminous work.

The complex interplay of Ronda's rooftops,

light skimming across jewel-like facets.

An ordinary street scene transfigured with

rich hues and a plunging perspective.

But there was one view that drew Bomberg back over and over.

The epic panorama of Ronda itself.

He once said that, for him, the past and the present

were indistinguishable from one another,

they coexisted in his experience of the world.

And here you feel that with particular force.

The town itself, you've got Islamic architecture built over

Christian architecture built over Roman architecture,

the whole thing constructed above this vast cliff face,

which itself speaks of ancient, distant, geological time.

I also think that what he found here was

a kind of mirror for his own turbulent spirit.

He had this very, very troubled sense of...

the world as it was in his time.

This new, post-war, troubled 20th century sense of existence,

and he made it reflected in the symbols that he created

here in his paintings.

That bridge he was drawn to again and again,

I think because it seemed to him to express the

precarious nature of civilisation itself.

A fragile lace-like structure suspended across a void.

Within a few years, the vertiginous character

of this place would be put to murderous use.

Men would be flung to their deaths from Ronda Bridge

during the Spanish Civil War.

Bomberg had just begun to create some of his

most compelling work, but now Spain

was tearing itself apart, and he was forced to leave.

There was nothing for it but to return to London.

1937 saw him obsessively painting his own reflection.

Daubed with red as if engulfed by fire,

charred sockets where his eyes should be.

Blues and purples give him the appearance

of a shrouded corpse, awkwardly propped.

The double-headed Self-Portrait is a startling image

of a dissolving mind. He is Janus-faced,

head smeared across the canvas, in two places at once.

He stopped painting altogether shortly afterwards.

Two years passed, and the turmoil in Europe escalated into

another full-blown world war.

During the Blitz, London was a city under siege.

Bomberg was struck by the seemingly miraculous way

in which the city of London survived the incessant bombing of the Nazis.

He got permission to climb to the top of a church,

probably St Bride's, here in Cheapside.

There you have it, St Paul's rising out

of the bombed rubble of London. What an image.

It's full of energy, it's raw, it's vibrant.

Look at the way he's depicted the sky.

This is London at the height of the Blitz, remember.

I think that sky which - yes, it's full of weather - but it's also

full of a sense of threat from Hitler's aerial bombardment.

There is something very expressive I think about the way

that he has used charcoal - burnt wood.

That's what this image is made of, that's what this image SMELLS of.

You can smell the burnt rubble of London.

Why did he, day after day, climb to the top of St Bride's spire

to look at St Paul's, risking life and limb?

Well, I think it's because St Paul's, for him,

stood for all his values.

There it is - spirituality, beauty rising from chaos.

I think it's also a symbol of Bomberg's sense of himself,

it's his way of telling us

that no matter what the world throws at him, he will persist.

By 1945, much of London lay in ruins. But it would rise again.

And the turbulent Bomberg, too, would be reborn.

He started a class two days a week, here,

at what used to be Borough Polytechnic.

For the first time he was teaching art to committed artists.

Bomberg's classes were to become the most adventurous

and influential of their time.

And for students such as Leslie Marr, they were a revelation.

Bomberg sort of projected the idea into us that we

were the most Avant-Garde group in England.

It was almost like a monastic experience.

We were all there and all had this common aim,

and it generates a sort of energy which goes round everybody.

And we were all lifted, I think, by this.

Bomberg galvanised his students with his own artistic philosophy.

One phrase was used over and over.

"Our search is towards the spirit in the mass."

What he was really saying was that there's much

more in a landscape than just the view you get when you look at it.

There are all sorts of things going on.

When I paint landscape now, I'm conscious of all this going on,

that the landscape is something quite different,

much more interesting, much more mystical.

In 1946, the Borough Group was formed.

Miles Richmond and Dennis Creffield were amongst the members.

And in 1947, they held their first exhibition.

Just a year later, the cracks were beginning to show.

It was only a matter of time

before the group fell apart amidst the infighting.

Other students remained outside of the Borough Group,

but still committed to Bomberg's teachings and philosophy.

Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff and Gustav Metzger among them.

Metzger, who lost both parents in the Holocaust,

arrived in Britain as a Kindertransport refugee.

Much of the work that he painted with Bomberg at the

Borough Polytechnic has remained in storage for more than 60 years.

Rarely seen until now.

One of the central points in his teaching was structure,

go for the structure.

I must say it had a very big influence on me,

and the structure for Bomberg wasn't simply the drawing

in front of him, or the painting.

Structure is nature and society.

Bomberg was, I suppose, you could call him a philosopher.

He continually was probing himself and the students and the world.

Metzger would eventually seek to transcend images altogether,

inventing a corrosive alternative to painting which he called

"auto-destructive art".

But even his 1965 happening on London's South Bank,

revealing St Paul's through an acid-burned canvas,

evokes Bomberg's earlier work,

exposing the fabric of the city as if through a veil.

He would say things like, "There is a man somewhere, and he decides the

"tempo of London, and when he wants he will adjust the levers

"and things go faster. Or slower."

Well, this is a beautiful way of summing up London.

And he was poetic and prophetic,

I think this is so important,

Bomberg - if nothing else - had charisma.

This charisma was lost on Bomberg's

fellow staff at the Borough Polytechnic.

He'd taken a wrecking ball to cherished beliefs

about the teaching of art.

He was fired from his post in 1953.

Undeterred, Bomberg decided to follow his vocation

as a teacher in Spain.

He returned to Ronda in 1954 with his wife Lilian,

to set up a painting school.

The hope was that enough students would come to subsidise

Bomberg's life in Ronda, giving the ageing artist time to paint.

Brochures and advertisements were printed, offering

"A course, summer and winter,

"annually, for students of all countries

"in painting, sculpture and architecture."

They also did the hard sell on Bomberg's personal achievements

as an artist.

But it wasn't to be.

A lack of interest from students

and a feud with the owners of the Villa Paz made sure of that.

They were evicted from the building before the course had even opened.

The school may have failed,

but his old students' dedication never faltered.

Miles Richmond, together with his wife Susannah,

joined the Bombergs in Ronda in 1954.

And for the young Richmond, Bomberg's commitment

to art was inspiring.

Bomberg lifted the whole idea of art into a

completely new level of significance.

It was something of fundamental importance to him.

I think he thought that good painting could change the world.

I'd never met that kind of intensity or seriousness before.

In his late sketches,

Bomberg brought this intensity to the landscape of Ronda.

They're among his most vital and accomplished works.

Every one a meditation on the savage,

but enduring, beauty of nature.

It's a surreal situation to be talking about David Bomberg

on the most easterly point of England.

Like Bomberg, John Virtue forms strong attachments to

specific places, returning repeatedly to

this stretch of coast to sketch.

The drawings he made in Andalucia, those drawings

are rooted in Andalucia,

it's got him by the throat, it's got him.

The drawings are anchored, their strength comes from being in

that particular location,

it's the particularity of his work that gives it a strength.

The elevation above the mess or the fix or the state you're in,

if you can use your art to do that, it's really manipulating

a disastrous situation to make a fantastically successful

and lasting piece of art.

The sophistication of an economy of means, the Minimalist

economy of means to express complex, passionate and deeply felt ideas.

The final year of Bomberg's life was darkened by news

that had filtered back from Britain.

The Tate had staged a major retrospective.

Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists.

Bomberg was barely mentioned.

By May of 1957, Bomberg had so little money,

he'd stopped feeding himself properly.

With Lilian in England, Miles and Susannah Richmond

made the decision to take him to the doctor in Gibraltar.

To distract him from his pain, Richmond talked to

Bomberg about Georges Braque's views on perspective.

"Distance does not exist!" cried out Bomberg,

then closed his eyes.

Richmond thought the old man had fallen asleep.

But he was unconscious.

He was taken back to London, and just two days later, he died.

The cause of death, sclerosis of the liver.

Not due to alcohol,

but malnutrition.

His rehabilitation as an artist began almost immediately.

The following year, the Arts Council held a survey

of Bomberg's career,

assembling 72 of his finest works

under one roof.

Absent from the exhibition was his final,

and perhaps, most revealing painting.

A searing image, but ultimately a triumphant one.

This is David Bomberg's very last self-portrait, and he did not

look in the mirror to paint it, he looked into his imagination.

It's a symbolic self-image -

Bomberg the tragic, anguished, doomed artist.

He looks very much like Christ the Man of Sorrows,

but it's a very eccentric, Bombergian vision

of the artist as Christ.

His face is almost entirely obscured by what some writers

have called a headscarf.

I take it to be one of his own last landscapes.

It's as if he has wrapped his own head in one of his canvases,

as if to suggest that here, at the end,

all he has eyes for is the landscape.

Like Christ, he clutches...

the tools of his martyrdom,

in this case not the nails,

not the scourge, but the brushes.

He clings to them, as if clinging to his art,

in the hope that one day images like these will

become the symbols of his resurrection.

David Bomberg may have been the great misfit

of 20th-century British art,

but his spirit lives on in unexpected places.

His classes at the Borough Polytechnic revolutionised

the teaching of art, and inspired a generation.

The Borough Group, Leon Kossoff Frank Auerbach

- who later taught John Virtue - Gustav Metzger,

whose auto-destructive art was a clarion call

for The Who to smash their guitars.

And the work that David Bomberg created endures, too,

it continues to dance,

the pulse of the city

yielding to the pulse of nature.

In turn, all giving way to the unstoppable rhythm of time.