David Bomberg David Garshen Bomberg ( 5 December 1890 – 19 August 1957 ) was an English painter , and one of the Whitechapel Boys . Bomberg was one of the most audacious of the exceptional generation of artists who studied at the Slade School of Art under Henry Tonks , and which included Mark Gertler , Stanley Spencer , C . R . W . Nevinson and Dora Carrington . Bomberg painted a series of complex geometric compositions combining the influences of cubism and futurism in the years immediately preceding World War I ; typically using a limited number of striking colours , turning humans into simple , angular shapes , and sometimes overlaying the whole painting a strong grid - work colouring scheme . He was expelled from the Slade School of Art in 1913 , with agreement between the senior teachers Tonks , Frederick Brown and Philip Wilson Steer , because of the audacity of his breach from the conventional approach of that time . Whether because his faith in the machine age had been shattered by his experiences as a private soldier in the trenches or because of the pervasive retrogressive attitude towards modernism in Britain Bomberg moved to a more figurative style in the 1920s and his work became increasingly dominated by portraits and landscapes drawn from nature . Gradually developing a more expressionist technique he travelled widely through the Middle East and Europe . From 1945 to 1953 , he worked as a teacher at Borough Polytechnic ( now London South Bank University ) in London , where his pupils included Frank Auerbach , Leon Kossoff , Cliff Holden , Dorothy Mead , Gustav Metzger , Dennis Creffield , Cecil Bailey and Miles Richmond . David Bomberg House , one of the student halls of residences at London South Bank University , is named in his honour . Life and work . Early years . Bomberg was born in the Lee Bank area of Birmingham , the seventh of eleven children of a Polish - Jewish immigrant leatherworker . In 1895 , his family moved to Whitechapel in the East End of London where he was to spend the rest of his childhood . After studying art at City and Guilds , Bomberg returned to Birmingham to train as a lithographer but quit to study under Walter Sickert at Westminster School of Art from 1908 to 1910 . Sickert ' s emphasis on the study of form and the representation of the " gross material facts " of urban life were an important early influence on Bomberg , alongside Roger Fry ' s 1910 exhibition " Manet and the Post - Impressionists " , where he first saw the work of Cézanne . Bomberg ' s artistic studies had involved considerable financial hardship but in 1911 , with the help of John Singer Sargent and the Jewish Education Aid Society , he was able to attain a place at the Slade School of Art . The Slade . At the Slade Bomberg was one of the remarkable generation of artists that studied under Henry Tonks and included Stanley Spencer , Paul Nash , Ben Nicholson , Mark Gertler and Isaac Rosenberg . Bomberg and Rosenberg , from similar backgrounds , had met some years earlier and became close friends as a result of their mutual interests . The emphasis in teaching at the Slade was on technique and draughtsmanship to which Bomberg was well - suited — winning the Tonks Prize for his drawing of fellow student Rosenberg in 1911 . His own style was rapidly moving away from these traditional methods , however , particularly under the influence of the March 1912 London exhibition of Italian Futurists that exposed him to the dynamic abstraction of Picabia and Severini , and Fry ' s second " Post Impressionist " exhibition in October of the same year , which displayed the works of Picasso , Matisse and the Fauvists alongside those of Wyndham Lewis , Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell . Bomberg ' s response to this became clear in paintings such as " Vision of Ezekiel " ( 1912 ) , in which he proved " he could absorb the most experimental European ideas , fuse these with Jewish influences and come up with a robust alternative of his own . " His dynamic angular representations of the human form , combining the geometrical abstraction of cubism with the energy of the Futurists , established his reputation as a forceful member of the avant - garde and the most audacious of his contemporaries ; bringing him to the attention of Wyndham Lewis ( who visited him in 1912 ) and Filippo Marinetti . In 1913 , the year in which he was expelled from the Slade because of the radicalism of his approach , he travelled to France with Jacob Epstein , where among others he met Modigliani , Derain and Picasso . Pre - war avant - garde . Expelled from the Slade in the Summer of 1913 , Bomberg formed a series of loose affiliations with several groups involved with the contemporary English avant - garde , embarking on a brief and acrimonious association with the Bloomsbury Group ' s Omega Workshops before exhibiting with the Camden Town Group in December 1913 . His enthusiasm for the dynamism and aesthetics of the machine age gave him a natural affinity with Wyndham Lewis ' s emerging vorticist movement , and five of his works featured in the founding exhibition of the London Group in 1914 , but his confidence in his own artistic vision led him quickly to distance himself from the vorticists ' organisation . In July 1914 he refused any involvement in the vorticist literary magazine " BLAST " and in June of the following year his work featured only in the " Invited to show " section of the vorticist exhibition at London ' s Dore Gallery . 1914 saw the highpoint of his early career — a solo exhibition at the Chenil Gallery in Chelsea which attracted positive reviews from Roger Fry and T . E . Hulme and attracted favourable attention from experimental artists nationally and internationally . The exhibition featured several of Bomberg ' s early masterpieces , most notably " The Mud Bath " ( 1914 ) , which was hung on an outside wall surrounded by Union Flags — causing " the horses drawing the 29 bus . . . to shy at it as they came round the corner of King ' s Road . " " I look upon Nature while I live in a steel city " he explained in the exhibition catalogue " I APPEAL to a Sense of Form . . . My object is the construction of Pure Form . I reject everything in painting that is not Pure Form . " With the help of Augustus John , Bomberg sold two paintings from this exhibition to the influential American collector John Quinn . World War I and after . Despite the success of his Chenil Gallery exhibition Bomberg continued to be dogged by financial problems . In 1915 , he enlisted in the Royal Engineers , transferring in 1916 to the King ' s Royal Rifle Corps and in March of that year , shortly after marrying his first wife , being sent to the Western Front . World War I was to bring a profound change to Bomberg ' s outlook . His experiences of its mechanized slaughter and the death of his brother in the trenches — as well as those of his friend Isaac Rosenberg and his supporter T . E . Hulme — permanently destroyed his faith in the aesthetics of the machine age . This can be seen most clearly in his commission for the Canadian War Memorials Fund , " Sappers at Work " ( 1918 – 1919 ) : his first version of the painting was dismissed as a " futurist abortion " and was replaced by a second far more representational version . The artist ' s book " Russian Ballet " , 1919 , was the last work to use the pre - war vorticist idiom . Bomberg self - published this work whilst waiting for the Canadian Government ' s verdict on " Sappers At Work " ; the next few years was to see him ' experimenting with ways of making his stark pre - war style more rounded and organic ' . In radical opposition to the prevailing currents in avant - garde art , stimulated as these were by the enthusiasm for mechanization in Constructivism in Russia following the Revolution , Bomberg went to paint and draw in Palestine between 1923 and 1927 , with the assistance of the Zionist Organization . There he brought together the geometric energies of his pre - war work as an " English cubist " with the tradition of figurative observation of the English landscape school of Turner , Constable , Girtin and Cottman . The return to order . From there followed Bomberg ' s great period of painting and drawing in landscape , in Spain at Toledo ( 1928 ) , Ronda ( 1934 – 35 and 1954 – 57 ) and Asturias ( 1935 ) , in Cyprus ( 1948 ) and intermittently in Britain , perhaps most powerfully in Cornwall . A six - month stay at Odessa in the Soviet Union in the second half of 1933 , following Hitler ' s seizure of power in Germany , led Bomberg on his return to London to immediate resignation from the Communist Party . During World War II , he painted " Evening in the City of London " ( 1944 ) , showing the blitzed city viewed rising up to a triumphant , surviving St Paul ' s on the horizon , since described as the " most moving of all paintings of wartime Britain " ( Martin Harrison ) ; a series of flower paintings saturated with turbulent feeling ; and his single commission as a war artist , a series of " Bomb Store " paintings ( 1942 ) expressing Bomberg ' s expanded first - hand sense of the destructive powers of modern technology in warfare . These " Bomb Store " paintings convey a premonitory sense of the massive explosion that destroyed the underground store two years later , killing 68 people , and bear comparison with Piranesi ' s " Carceri " etchings . Bomberg ' s superb draughtsmanship was expressed also in a lifelong series of portraits , from the early period of his Botticelli - like " Head of a Poet " ( 1913 ) , a pencil portrait of his friend the poet Isaac Rosenberg for which he won the Henry Tonks Prize at the Slade , to his " Last Self - Portrait " ( 1956 ) , painted at Ronda , a meditation also on Rembrandt . Unable to get a teaching position after World War II in any of the most prestigious London art schools , Bomberg became the most exemplary teacher of the immediate post - war period in Britain , working part - time in a bakery school at the Borough Polytechnic ( now London South Bank University ) in the working - class borough of Southwark . Though his students received no grant and were awarded no diploma , he attracted devoted and highly energetic pupils , with whom he exhibited on an equal basis in London , Oxford , and Cambridge in two important artists ' groupings in which he was the leading light , the Borough Group ( 1946 – 51 ) and the Borough Bottega ( 1953 – 55 ) . He developed a deeply considered philosophy of art , set out in several pieces of writing , which he summed up in the phrase , " The Spirit in the Mass " . Following a collapse in Ronda , Bomberg died in London in 1957 , his critical stock rising sharply thereafter . One of Bomberg ' s admirers , the painter Patrick Swift , unearthed and edited Bomberg ’ s pensées , and was later to publish them , along with images of Bomberg ' s work , as ' The Bomberg Papers ' in his ‘ X ’ magazine ( June 1960 ) . After his early success before the First World War , he was in his lifetime the most brutally excluded artist in Britain . Having lived for years on the earnings of his second wife Lilian Holt and remittances from his sister Kitty , he died in absolute poverty . Posthumous reception . Thirty years after his death , a major retrospective of Bomberg ' s work was held at the Tate Gallery , London , in 1988 . In 2006 , Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal ( Cumbria ) mounted the first major exhibition of Bomberg ' s paintings for nearly twenty years : " David Bomberg : Spirit in the Mass " ( 17 July – 28 October 2006 ) . Prior to that , the exhibition " David Bomberg en Ronda " at the Museo Joaquin Peinado in Ronda in Andalusia ( 1 – 30 October 2004 ) showed work by Bomberg in the city and environment which he had celebrated in paintings and drawings in 1934 - 35 and 1954 - 47 . Work from one of the best collections in private hands was shown on the fiftieth anniversary of his death in the exhibition " In celebration of David Bomberg 1890 - 1957 " at Daniel Katz Gallery , Old Bond Street , London ( 30 May – 13 July 2007 ) . London South Bank University , the site of Bomberg ' s teaching at the former Borough Polytechnic , received a gift of more than 150 paintings and drawings by Bomberg and his students in the Borough Group — principally Dorothy Mead , Cliff Holden , Miles Richmond , and Dennis Creffield — the David Bomberg Legacy . The gallery , formally launched on 14 June 2012 , to display the artworks donated to the university by Sarah Rose has been made possible by the Heritage Lottery Fund . The collection is the work of Sarah Rose , a friend of Cliff Holden of over 50 years . The London South Bank University Borough Road Gallery will hold two exhibitions a year drawn from the Sarah Rose collection . The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University held an exhibition entitled " The Vorticists : Rebel Artists in London and New York , 1914 - 18 " from 30 September 2010 through 2 January 2011 . Tate Britain held an exhibition entitled The " Vorticists : Manifesto for a Modern World " between 14 June and 4 September 2011 . In the 2011 BBC series , " British Masters " , Bomberg was singled out as being one of the greatest painters of the 20th Century . He is one of the six artists included in Dulwich Picture Gallery ' s 2013 summer exhibition , " Nash , Nevinson , Spencer , Gertler , Carrington , Bomberg : A Crisis of Brilliance , 1908 - 1922 " . References in fiction . In " Restless " , William Boyd ' s 2006 novel , there is a reference to a portrait by Bomberg of one of the book ' s major ( fictional ) characters . The painting is said to occupy a place in the National Portrait Gallery in London . In " A Palestine Affair " , a 2003 novel by Jonathan Wilson , the character " Mike Bloomberg " is loosely based on Bomberg ' s life , as acknowledged by the author : " Richard Cork ' s ' David Bomberg ' [ was ] . . . of inestimable value to me in constructing this fiction " . Glyn Hughes ' s novel , " Roth " ( Simon & Schuster , London , 1992 ) — its leading a character a London Jewish painter , its cover carrying a reproduction of one of Bomberg ' s Cyprus landscapes — is also loosely based on the author ' s reflections on Bomberg .