14 facts about David Bomberg

David Garshen Bomberg (5 December 1890 – 19 August 1957) was a British painter, and one of the Whitechapel Boys.

Bomberg was one of the most valorous 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 mysterious geometric compositions combining the influences of cubism and futurism in the years sharply preceding World War I; typically using a limited number of striking colours, turning humans into simple, angular shapes, and sometimes overlaying the collect painting a mighty grid-work colouring scheme. He was expelled from the Slade School of Art in 1913, with accord between the senior teachers Tonks, Frederick Brown and Philip Wilson Steer, because of the audacity of his breach from the all right approach of that time.

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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 symbolic style in the 1920s and his play-act 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 scholastic at Borough Polytechnic (now London South Bank University) in London, where his pupils included Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Philip Holmes,Cliff Holden, Edna Mann, 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. He was married to landscape painter Lilian Holt.

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