David Bomberg

Ivor Novello
His estate sale, Giddy and Giddy of Maidenhead, 15th October 1957, where acquired by the father of the present owners

Original canvas. There is a very small protrusion to the canvas in the lower left corner where something has apparently become trapped between the canvas and the stretcher. The varnish has slightly discoloured in places and there is some minor frame abrasion along the lower edge. Generally the work is in excellent original condition. Ultraviolet light reveals a few specks of fluorescence to the light grey pigment in the lower right quadrant, but these appear to be media marks or the artist's hand. Held under glass in a gilt plaster frame; unexamined out of frame. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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Like virtually all his contemporaries, the return to the peacetime world after the end of World War I was hard for Bomberg. So much of what had seemed certain and possible before 1914 had been overturned in the mud of the Western Front, and the personal experiences of the artists often made the concerns of artistic movements seem irrelevant. For those who had been part of the avant-garde before 1914, experimenting with abstraction, and especially the machine-minded harshness of Vorticism, such forms seemed inappropriate at best. Crucially, the buying public and the dealers had also moved away from the avant-garde, and thus finding buyers for one's work was dependant on a small circle of enlightened patrons and collectors.

For Bomberg the question of how his art would go forward was a difficult one. Regardless of his war experiences, he seems to have felt that he had already pushed abstraction as far as he wished, and thus was left to find a new direction that would allow his voice to come forth. The paintings and drawings he produced in the 1919-1920 period show how he was to approach this. Growing out of the angular pre-war figures, he produced several series of drawings that explored a variety of thematic subjects, almost all incorporating stylised figures. Whilst there is still a good deal of apparent abstraction in these compositions, it is in fact an extreme simplification of forms and the light and shade.

Few paintings seem to have survived from this period of Bomberg's work, and those that have suggest that whilst the drawings seem to have flowed relatively easily, paintings were proving a more complex issue. Some of the paintings exist in several different versions, often with widely varying compositional stresses such as in the Barges on the Canal group, indicating that Bomberg was finding a good deal of difficulty in seeing how his work was to progress. Although it was completely in opposition to his pre-war practice, Bomberg experimented with working en plein air at this time, and it would seem that the present painting would fit in with this, and may well connect with the period he spent living in a farmhouse near Alton in Hampshire with his first wife, Alice Mayes. Certainly the subject is resolutely non-urban, but one cannot escape from the feeling that the hand of man is not far away. The tree trunks stand in lines as one finds on a plantation and the disturbed area of ground in the foreground has a suggestion of cleared ground. The density of the foliage of the wood places us very much on the outskirts of this coppice and the churned ground, wonderfully rendered in chopped lines of grey and white, does little to encourage us to cross it. In fact, it is hard to not feel that there is some recollection of France and his wartime experience in this painting, even whilst he is trying to create a new visual language for himself.