Description
Signed and dated 1938, oil on canvas, unframed
Dimensions
66cm x 58.5cm (26in x 23in)
Footnote
Provenance: The sitter and thence by descent to the sitter's family.
Anonymous sale; Christie's, South Kensington, 16 July 2008, lot 37, where acquired by the present owner
Note: Born in Birmingham in 1890 and brought up in Whitechapel, Bomberg was the son of Polish immigrants. Having displayed an innate early talent, he was sponsored by the Jewish Educational Aid Society to study at the Slade under Tonks, alongside the likes of Gertler and Stanley Spencer.
In 1913 however, he was expelled from the Slade with the consensus of his teachers being that his style was too radical. Nevertheless, persisting in this vein, in the period immediately preceding the First World War, he painted a number of notable geometric semi-abstract paintings, becoming associated with Percy Wyndham Lewis's Vorticist movement.
Included in the 'Cubist Room' at the Camden Town group show in Brighton in 1913, the following year, Bomberg helped to organize the Whitechapel's 20th Century Art show. A founding member of the London Group he was invited to show at the 1915 Vorticist exhibition. His best known work of this period, The Mud Bath, is now in the Tate.
During the war Bomberg served on the Western Front and the experience had a long-standing effect upon his art. In 1919, with the slaughter he had witnessed in the first conflict of the 'machine age' compounded by his disappointment at the rejection of a design for a Canadian War Memorial, he disappeared from public life. Instead he travelled extensively, notably to Palestine from 1923-27 and also to Russia, Greece, Spain and Morocco.
From 1929 Bomberg abandoned semi-abstraction and turned to an expressive figuration, using a muted palette and fluid brush strokes, to create deeply personal portraits and landscapes. The present work is an outstanding example of his work of the 1930s, during which period he perfected this new-found freedom.
From 1945 to 1953, he taught at Borough Polytechnic in London and had an important influence on an emerging generation of young artists, including Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. With them and other students he formed the Borough Group, active from 1947 to 1949.
Bomberg died in 1957 and remained for some years best known for his work of the Vorticist period. However, in 1988 he was rediscovered in a retrospective at the Tate and in the last few decades, he has come to be seen in his rightful position of an important pioneer of British post-war Expressionism.
Annie Lou Staveley was an American who moved to England after marrying her English Professor. She was fascinated by the ideas of the Greco-Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff. She studied his teachings and travelled to Paris numerous times to meet him. Staveley returned to America to set up her own Gurdjieff Work Centre, which is still active today.