David Bomberg
Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal
17 July - 28 October 2006
Abbot Hall Art Gallery presents an exhibition of one of the most important and influential British painters of the twentieth century, DAVID BOMBERG (1890-1957).
David Bomberg is now recognised as a significant painter of the modern movement in British art, and yet at the time of his death in 1957 his work was almost universally ignored and neglected by critics and collectors alike.
After a precocious period at the Slade School of Art from 1911-13, at the age of twenty three David Bomberg exploded onto the London art scene with his own daring, dynamic and innovative brand of ‘Vorticist’ painting, inspired by the machine-age and the modern industrial city. David Bomberg developed a unique visual language in which the human figure was reduced to angular, geometric shapes, taking the faceted forms of Cubist painting to new extremes, in order to express the dynamism of modern urban life.
However, David Bomberg’s enthusiasm for the revitalising energy of the modern industrial world was shattered by the horrors of the First World War when, in 1916, he was called to active service in France and experienced at first hand the devastation wrought by the new weapons of the machine-age. On his return to England he abandoned his radical early style, returning to more traditional figurative concerns and working from nature and ‘the life’. Moving away from the schematised abstraction of his pre-war work, he sought a more human approach and, in the years that followed his demobilisation in 1919, he strove to find a new visual language which satisfied his desire for greater naturalism, without sacrificing the qualities of simplicity and strong design so clearly demonstrated in his early work.
His turning point came in 1923 when he travelled to Palestine with his wife Alice, settling in Jerusalem where they lived until 1927. Embarking on a series of landscapes painted plein air, David Bomberg began to approach subjects with a precise and meticulous study of nature that had been engendered in him by his Slade training. Landscape painting would dominate David Bomberg’s output for the remainder of his career, and these works reveal his intense observation of nature as well as his passionate and brilliant handling of paint.
The exhibition at Abbot Hall focuses on the extraordinary variety, innovation and ability of David Bomberg as a painter and draughtsman, showing a selection of his finest works from throughout his career. Little of his work has been seen in public galleries as many of his finest paintings are in private hands, however, we will be borrowing ten key works from Tate, and many of the paintings are 3on loan from individuals, in addition to other major public collections.
A fully illustrated exhibition catalogue is available.
HABBOT HALL ART GALLERY
Kendal, Cumbria LA9 5AL
