David Bomberg

Acquired by David Bowie, July 1994

Ronda, Museo Joaquín Peinado, David Bomberg en Ronda, 1st - 31st October 2004, cat. no.7, illustrated p.49;
Kendal, Abbot Hall Art Gallery, David Bomberg Spirit in the Mass, 17th July - 28th October 2006, cat. no.45, illustrated pl.45 and p.87.

The board appears sound. There are some small scuffs in places and some areas where the surface of the paint is slightly uneven, most apparent just to the right of centre, most likely to have occurred whilst the paint was still wet, with a couple of tiny corresponding possible losses. There are some small flecks of loss in places, most apparent at the centre of the left vertical edge, the upper right corner and the purple pigment at the centre of the upper edge, with one or two very small flecks of loss elsewhere. There is a pinhole apparent in each of the lower corners, and a scratch to the board in the lower left corner, thought to be in keeping with the artist's materials. There is a further scratch, with some associated losses, at the centre of the right edge, and also a small scratch in the lower right corner. There is a faint horizontal line running the width of the work in the centre, thought to be in keeping with the artist's techniques. There is some surface dirt and studio detritus in places. One or two of the raised elements of impasto are very slightly flattened. Subject to the above, the work appears to be in very good overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals a discoloured varnish. There are three small flecks of retouching, one to the peach pigment in the upper right quadrant, and two to the green pigment towards the top of the left vertical edge, with one or two tiny flecks elsewhere. There are also some further areas of fluorescence, which appear to be in keeping with the artist's materials. The work is presented in a painted and gilded wooden frame. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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In his youth, David Bomberg was an artistic rebel, enmeshed in avant-garde artistic circles and producing works of remarkable and audacious creative power.  His course as an artist was inextricably altered by the devastating experience of the First World War, which, as it had for so many of his contemporaries, pulled him back from the artistic ideals which had so inspired him. He spent much of the 1920s in Palestine, painting the austere landscape of the countryside and the tightly packed roof top views of the cities. These ordered renditions, which conveyed a white heat so alien to someone from the East End of London, received decent critical reviews upon their exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in 1928, but his old allies in the art world, and indeed Bomberg himself, felt that in their conventionality they had veered too far from his revolutionary early roots.  Bomberg sought a new direction in his stylistic development, and finding no inspiration in the English countryside, he set off for Spain.  

Bomberg settled initially in Toledo, perhaps in part due to his admiration of El Greco, who was little known in England, but whose work he had been introduced to in Palestine. While painting on a balcony he met two English women who happened to have an El Greco reproduction on hand and Bomberg was immediately struck by the ferocious and inventive intensity of the Spanish master.  Breaking from his controlled Palestinian style, Bomberg, first in Toledo in 1929, and later in Cuenca, Ronda and the Asturian mountains between 1934-5, began to produce paintings which combined an expressive and spiritual response to the landscape with an intellectual lucidity which had also typified El Greco’s otherworldly images. In works such as Plazuela de la Paz, Ronda, Bomberg developed an elemental and expressionist approach to the subject using a vivid, hot palette.  Using a new manner of tumultuous mark making, he came fully into his own mature style and began to convey the subjective experience of mass in all its fullness. He imbued the subject, whether it be the dramatic Spanish landscape, or the architectural structures of the towns he inhabited, with his own passionate response, using a much freer and more expressive manner of painting - the material qualities of the paint conveying the so-called ‘spirit in the mass’.