Waterhouse & Dodd London are presenting a collection of works on paper sourced from the estate of David Bomberg’s granddaughter, Natalie Tachuk. Natalie was the daughter of Diana Holt, the only daughter of David Bomberg and Lilian Holt whose portraits you see on this page. Works from this collection have never been on the market before. To supplement our group we have been able to source many works by Bomberg from other private sources.
Bomberg is now widely revered as one of the greatest British artists of the 20th century and his teaching inspired a generation of artists who fell under his spell at the Borough Polytechnic in the 1940s and 1950s. A full Tate retrospective was held
in 1988 and a full monograph, now out of print, by Richard Cork was published in 1987. There now seems renewed interest in Bomberg’s work, with a major BBC program to be
broadcast in early 2014. Sarah MacDougall and Rachel Dickson, senior
curators at Ben Uri, are currently preparing a new monograph on the work
of David Bomberg, which Lund Humphries plan to publish in 2017. They would be interested in hearing from any owners of works by the artist for possible inclusion in the book. Please contact Jamie Anderson at Waterhouse & Dodd for further details.
Furthermore, the Borough Polytechnic (now the London South Bank University) holds regular exhibitions of Bomberg and the Borough Group at their purpose-built gallery in South London, The Borough Road Gallery. This is the permanent home of the Sarah Rose Collection, one of the greatest private collections of works by Bomberg and his pupils.
Born in Birmingham to a Polish Jewish family, Bomberg’s education began in earnest with a move to London in 1905 and evening classes under Walter Bayes at the City & Guilds. He was fortunate to study at the Central School of Art and under Walter Sickert at Westminster College, before joining the ranks of the ‘golden generation’ at the Slade School. Before World War I he worked for a period at Roger Fry’s Omega Workshop and he travelled to Paris, meeting Picasso, Derain and Modigliani.
It was during this time that his work attracted the attention of Wyndham Lewis who invited him into the Vorticist fold. Bomberg also exhibited with the New English Art Club and was a founder member of the London Group. The war was to have a profound effect on the artist and his work, as it did on his contemporaries, and after the cessation of violence he pulled back from the near abstraction of his Vorticist work to a more figurative and expressionist style. A keen traveller, he produced many of his greatest post War works outside the UK, and the 1920s saw his first trips to Spain and Palestine.
Bomberg was the inspiration behind the formation of the Borough Group in 1946, which later became the Borough Bottega. It centered on those artists taught by Bomberg at the Borough Polytechnic and included Auerbach and Kossoff, but also less well known artists such as Dennis Creffield and Miles Richmond.
Bomberg returned to Ronda, Spain, in 1954 and made an unsuccessful attempt to establish a painting school in the town. By this time he had become the forgotten man of early British modernism. The Tate’s exhibition of Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism shamefully only included one theatre drawing included in a section labeled ‘other Vorticists’. He was not without supporters though, and by the time of his death in 1957 he had been made an honoury life member of the London Group (despite resigning shortly before). It was not long before the critical reappraisal of his work began. In 1964 Marlborough Gallery held an exhibtion of his work (the gallery that had become the agents to Auerbach and Kossoff) and the Arts Council arranged a touring retrospective in 1967 which included exhibitions at the Tate and four other city locations.