David Bomberg 1890-1957

Crane Kalman, London

Sir Leon Bagrit, purchased from the above, July 1962

The Lady Bagrit, by whom donated to the 'Royal Gala Auction' conducted by Sotheby's in aid of the Royal Opera House Developement Appeal Fund, Covent Garden, 1980, lot 80

Bomberg visited Cornwall just once, in 1947. Richard Cork has described this trip as ''the most successful painting exhibition [Bomberg] ever undertook in Britain'' (David Bomberg, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, p.271). Having spent a successful summer the year before in Devon, David and Lilian were delighted to again find time, in Cornwall, to paint without distraction, away from the term-time rigours of the Borough polytechnic classes. Bomberg was a dedicated teacher and consequently produced few paintings during the period he spent establishing the Borough school and Bottega. The years immediately surrounding the Second World War were a time of some of the blackest lows for the artist, when he was struggling for recognition at the same time as destruction fell about him in London. However, these years also witnessed what William Lipke has labelled "some of the most triumphantly creative periods of the artist’s career" (David Bomberg 1890-1957, exhibition catalogue, The Arts Council, 1967, p.34). It was the Devon and Cornwall summers of 1946 and 1947 that saw the creation of some of Bomberg’s finest landscapes.

David and Lilian camped at Tendrine Farm near Zennor, an activity that David at least took very seriously. On joining the party, his son-in-law, Leslie Marr, who had no doubt envisaged a bucolic artistic retreat, was less than enamoured of the prospect of wrestling a large Government surplus marquee into submission in the middle of a field. However, once set up, the camp proved an inspirational base, where Bomberg could combine his ever-present sense for an underlying structure of form with an overlay of vividly drawn atmospheric effects.

Bomberg made physical demands upon himself in the execution of his art. Indeed, as his strength weakened in Spain in the 1950s there is a diminishment in the later canvasses of the dynamism of his brushwork, as he was physically unable to deliver the broad strokes and decisive gestures as laid down here. Richard Cork comments that the Cornish landscapes "parallel in [their] frank declaration of mark-making the otherwise very different Abstract Expressionist handling developed by New York artists during the same period" (ibid., p.123). Bomberg nonetheless worked entirely alone. It was noticeable that when in Cornwall, despite having previously enjoyed a Swiss holiday with Ben Nicholson, he contacted not one of the well-known community of artists resident in St.Ives. Cork notes that Bomberg’s Cornish coast scenes bear closer relation to those of Kokoshka, who spent nine months there in 1939, rather than British compatriots such as William Scott or Barbara Hepworth. There is none of the cool restraint of the Modernists in Bomberg’s landscapes. His hot palette depicts sun and rain in concert – the saturated ochres, pinks and blues possess a richness that bleeds through into the Cyprus paintings of 1948. Although Lilian remembered the summer as sunny rather than hot, the sunsets were spectacular. Just as he found drama in the climate, so Bomberg’s depiction of Porthminster beach suggests a sweep of sand more vertiginous than that depicted by any other observer. The small town becomes a mass of dark, forbidding umber angles as the sweep of the harbour bay out to the Chapel on the hill is exaggerated in visual counterpoint to the foreground beach.

St. Ives is one of the last of the Cornish pictures apart from the ‘Turner’ – Sea, Sunshine and Rain – to remain in private hands. Tendrine in Sun, Cornwall (coll. Manchester City Art Gallery), Tendrine Cornwall (coll. Arts Council of Great Britain), Tregor and Tregoff, Cornwall (Tate Gallery) and Evening, Cornwall (coll. Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry) are all held in public collections.