David Bomberg 1890-1957

The highly distinctive style which Bomberg developed in the 1912-1914 period deserves to rank him at the forefront of the most avant-garde of British artists of those years and his major works of that period still challenge and astonish almost a century later.

The present work belongs to a remarkable group of drawings which demonstrate the rigorous application of formal experiments that Bomberg introduced to his work in his later student and immediate post-Slade years. Of exactly the same sheet size as Racehorses (Coll.Ben Uri Gallery, London), the present work amply demonstrates how Bomberg had begun to simplify and stylise his figures, such as in The Vision of Ezekiel (Collection Tate) of 1912, where the figures have been reduced to a series of flat planes, and the directness of expression imbued into them by this reduction is very striking. Wyndham Lewis felt that Bomberg was drawing inspiration from Severini, and he would certainly have been able to see Severini’s work in the first Futurist exhibition, held at the Sackville Gallery in March 1912.

Figure Composition appears to show a group of ten figures, clearly of different generations, gathered around an eleventh recumbent figure, and thus may relate to the Jewish tradition of mourning. However, there are a number of elements which diverge from the established protocol of such occasions and it seems that Bomberg may be presenting a more generalized image of Jewish mourning. The inclusion of what appear to be Torah scrolls held by the figure in the right foreground, and on which Bomberg has proudly inscribed his signature, clearly give an unmistakeable Jewish identity to the occasion and thus the present drawing may relate to the much more representational Family Bereavement (Coll. Tate) of 1913. Here Bomberg develops a theme that appears to have been inspired by the death of his own mother in October 1912. However the stylisation of the figures, and their reduction to a strictly limited vocabulary of tubular forms, gives a monumentality to Figure Composition that allows the viewer to focus their attention on the evident emotion of the occasion and the contact between the figure groups. The interaction between the figures and the artist’s rendering of the complexities involved in creating a multi-layered pictorial space are handled with supreme confidence, and thus this drawing, apparently previously unpublished and unexhibited, must rank as a major addition to the corpus of Bomberg’s pre-WWI oeuvre.

The original owner of this drawing was Richard Kaufmann, the German-Jewish architect who had emigrated to Israel in 1920, and was responsible for the designing of much of the expansion and development of the suburbs of Jerusalem throughout that decade, including Beit Hakerem, Talpiot, Rehavia, Kiryat Moshe and Bayit Vegan.