English painter. The fifth child of a Polish immigrant leather worker, he spent his earliest years in Birmingham and then grew up in the Whitechapel area of London. He suffered considerable financial hardship while studying at evening classes given by Walter Bayes (1869-1956) at the City and Guilds Institute from c. 1905 to 1908 and by Walter Sickert at Westminster Art School from 1908 to 1910. With the help of John Singer Sargent and the Jewish Education Aid Society, he secured a place at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, in 1911. It was a period of dramatic change, stimulated in part by Roger Fry's two Post-Impressionist exhibitions and the display of Italian Futurist works at the Sackville Gallery, London, in 1912. Bomberg was the most audacious painter of his generation at the Slade, proving in works such as Vision of Ezekiel (1912) and Ju-jitsu (c. 1913; both London, Tate) that he could absorb the most experimental European ideas, fuse these with Jewish influences and come up with a robust alternative of his own. His treatment of the human figure, in terms of angular, clear-cut forms charged with enormous energy, reveals his determination to bring about a drastic renewal in British painting.
The direction taken by his art brought him into contact with Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists, but Bomberg resisted Lewis's attempts to enlist him as a member of the movement. He refused to let his work be illustrated in Blast magazine and appeared only in the ‘Invited to show' section of the Vorticist Exhibition held in London in June 1915. His precocious confidence did not require group solidarity. Bomberg's two great canvases of 1914, In the Hold (see fig.) and the Mud Bath (both London, Tate), take as their starting-point the East End of London, which Bomberg knew well, but he certainly did not produce documentary images of Whitechapel life. In the Hold, based on the subject of men at work on a ship moored at the docks, is dramatically fragmented by a grid that Bomberg has imposed on the figures, ladders and floorboards. The result is a flickering, darting canvas that conveys through its fractured elements the restless dynamism of the monumental labourers. The Mud Bath translates the spectacle of bathers at Schevzik's Vapour Baths, Whitechapel, into a harsh and strident painting. Half-human and half-mechanical, the blue and white figures hurl themselves around the red rectangle of water. The Mud Bath celebrates their energy in a taut and bracing manner but also reflects Bomberg's awareness that ‘I look upon Nature while I live in a steel city'. He made that assertion in the foreword to the catalogue of his first one-man show, held in July 1914 at the Chenil Gallery, London, where the Mud Bath was displayed outside the building and festooned with Union Jacks. ‘I APPEAL to a Sense of Form,' Bomberg proclaimed in the same militant statement, insisting: ‘My object is the construction of Pure Form. I reject everything in painting that is not Pure Form.'
The Chenil Gallery exhibition marked the triumph of Bomberg's early career and earned him the admiration of many experimental artists both in London and abroad. The show was reviewed enthusiastically in The New Age (9 July 1914) by T. E. Hulme, whose views about machine-age art coincided in many respects with Bomberg's vision of the new century. With the advent of World War I, everything changed dramatically. By November 1915 Bomberg had enlisted in the Royal Engineers, and his harrowing experiences at the Front brought about a profound transformation in his outlook. It can be seen most clearly in the large painting of Sappers at Work, which he carried out as a commission for the Canadian Government. The first version (1918-19; London, Tate) retains much of the freedom of colour and structure he had developed in the pre-war period, but it introduces recognizable figures that no longer conform to the mechanistic vision of the Mud Bath. When this version was rejected by the Canadian committee, Bomberg painted a far more realistic alternative (1919; Ottawa, N.G.), which introduced an almost photographic style in the treatment of the men working underground.
Bomberg never again returned to this dogged and limiting idiom, but he did explore a radically different path during the 1920s. His disillusion with the destructive power of the machine at war led to a few years spent experimenting with ways of making his stark pre-war style more rounded and organic. He travelled to Jerusalem in 1923 and concentrated on landscape painting. At first his paintings of Palestine were very tight and almost topographical in character. By the time he returned to London in 1927, however, his determination to base his art on first-hand experience of nature had led to a looser and more expressive approach. He developed an outspoken and impassioned language during a visit to Toledo in 1929, where he began to use the loose, gestural brushmark that characterized his later work. The nature of the landscape itself, his admiration for the work of El Greco and his profound dissatisfaction with the work he had recently produced in Palestine were all contributory factors.
Throughout the 1930s Bomberg's art became broader and more impassioned as he sought to convey the essence of his response to landscapes in Scotland and Spain. At Cuenca and Ronda and in the Asturian mountains, in works such as Valley of la Hermida: Picos de Europa, Asturias (1935; Sheffield, Graves A.G.), Bomberg allowed his vigorously handled paint a life of its own-even as he continued to depict the natural world around him. This work met with little approval in Britain, and during World War II his outstanding series of Bomb Store paintings did not lead to further commissions from the War Artists Committee, despite his repeated requests. While continuing to suffer from appalling neglect in the post-war years, Bomberg was an influential teacher at the Borough Polytechnic, London. His students included Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. His painting reached a climax at the same time with work done during expeditions to Devon and Cornwall and above all Cyprus (e.g. Castle Ruins at St Hilarion, 1948; Liverpool, Walker A.G.), where his search for ‘the spirit in the mass' resulted in fiery masterpieces charged with an exhilarating apprehension of the landscape he scrutinized. In 1954 he returned to Ronda with his wife Lilian and attempted to found a school of painting there, but the plan failed. His last years were darkened by the realization that his art remained overlooked and even belittled in Britain. His final landscapes and figure paintings, most notably the tragic Last Self-portrait (1956; London, C. St John Wilson priv. col., see Cork, pl. c65), include some of his most powerful works.