- \n
- Counterpoints<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
20 October, 2017<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"\/standpoint\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/files_u28_bomberg_london.jpg\" "\\"Feature")
<\/p>\n\t \u201cThe Jewish artists are starving,\u201d wrote David Bomberg in 1938. \u201cNone of us can work, most of us receive one form of charity or another.\u201d Bomberg was one of the great British artists of the 20th century but he was born and died in poverty and suffered neglect for much of his career. <\/p>\n
Bomberg<\/em>, a new exhibition at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, marks the 60th anniversary of Bomberg\u2019s death. The show runs until February, and then tours to the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, and the Ben Uri Gallery, London, during 2018. Curated by Rachel Dickson and Sarah MacDougall, two leading champions of Jewish and refugee art, this major exhibition offers a chance to reassess Bomberg\u2019s career.<\/p>\n
Born in Birmingham in 1890, Bomberg was the seventh of 11 children of a Polish-Jewish immigrant leatherworker, Abraham and his wife Rebecca. In 1895 the family moved to the East End. Bomberg later studied with Walter Sickert and then became part of that \u201cgolden generation\u201d at the Slade on the eve of the First World War, which included \u201cThe Whitechapel Boys\u201d, a remarkable group of young Jewish artists, among them Mark Gertler, Isaac Rosenberg and Jacob Kramer. All were Yiddish-speaking sons of immigrants from the Russian Pale. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe Whitechapel Boys\u201d were an extraordinary group. \u201cIn all cases,\u201d wrote the critic John Russell Taylor, \u201cthe use of Jewish material coincides with the artists\u2019 most experimental phase.\u201d They had one foot in the old country and another in the new world of Edwardian London, tradition with a twist of Modernism. <\/p>\n
Art historians tend to speak of Bomberg\u2019s career in terms of artistic movements and form: his early relationship with Cubism and Vorticism, then a more figurative style in the 1920s, as he moved towards landscape and portraits, with a growing emphasis on colour and pigment rather than geometric form. <\/p>\n
However, there is another way of looking at Bomberg\u2019s career. He was always an outsider. He studied at the Slade but he was also a product of the Jewish East End. From the 1920s he spent much of his life living abroad: four years in Palestine, long periods in Spain, six months in the Soviet Union, time in Cyprus. He was attracted by the Mediterranean sun and landscape, but these places were also cheap for a poor artist.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/p>\n
In between these trips Bomberg returned to Britain, where he faced neglect and poverty. When he applied to work as a war artist he was turned down twice. His last one-man show in London was in 1943. He taught at the Borough Polytechnic after the war, where his pupils included Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, but only because the more prestigious art schools rejected him. He has been described as \u201cthe most brutally excluded artist in Britain\u201d.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/standpoint-cdn.trystandfirst.com\/uploads\/2019\/03\/files_u28_Bomberg_Ghetto_Theatre_Ben_Uri.jpg\"\/)
David Bomberg, Ghetto Theatre, 1920, Ben Uri Collection \u00a9 Ben Uri Gallery and Museum <\/strong><\/em>
\t Recognition came posthumously. The Arts Council held a Memorial Exhibition in 1958, there was a retrospective at the Tate in 1967, a major exhibition at the Whitechapel curated by Nicholas Serota in 1979 and at the Tate in 1988, curated by Richard Cork, and now this astonishing exhibition at Pallant House in collaboration with the Ben Uri.<\/p>\nOf course, art historians are right to talk of form and artistic movements. And some of the best critics, from John Berger and David Sylvester in the 1950s to Richard Cork today, greatly admired Bomberg. But we shouldn\u2019t forget the neglect and poverty. This exhibition, full of major works covering more than 40 years, should make us ask why such a great artist didn\u2019t receive the recognition he deserved in his lifetime.<\/p>\n
<\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/p>\n
<\/h3>\n
\n![\"\"](\"\/standpoint\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/costa-rica.jpg\"\/)
Central American exceptionalism: Costa Rica faces la pandemia<\/a>
\n
\n![\"\"](\"\/standpoint\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Uncle_Toby_and_Widow_Wadman_by_Charles_Robert_Leslie_CCWSH1157.jpg\"\/)
Tristram Shandy and the consolations of comedy<\/a>
\n
\n![\"Default](\"http:\/\/standpoint.thewebsitespace.com\/wp-content\/themes\/tws\/images\/thumbnail-default.jpg\"\/)
Letters: Parents first, Ancient and modern, Seeing red<\/a><\/p>\nWhat to read next<\/h6>\n
<\/h3>\n
\nCentral American exceptionalism: Costa Rica faces la pandemia<\/a>
\n
\nTristram Shandy and the consolations of comedy<\/a>
\n
\nLetters: Parents first, Ancient and modern, Seeing red<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"David Bomberg was one of the great British artists of the 20th century but was always an outsider and suffered neglect for much of his career<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7104,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=770"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}