David Bomberg

Acquired by the present owner's parents in the late 1950s at a Ben Uri Gallery Fundraiser

Catalogue colour comparison: The colours are slightly warmer than the illustration suggests. Structure: Original canvas. There are some minor spots of surface dirt and a small spot of paint loss to the right of the upper edge. There are also some scattered areas of minor paint separation throughout, visible in the catalogue illustraion, notably along the cliff top and in the bottom third of the composition. Otherwise the work is in good overall condition with some excellent passages of impasto throught. Ultraviolet light analysis: There appear to be no signs of retouching. Frame: Held in a painted wood frame.
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Executed in 1954, shortly after Bomberg and his wife Lilian had returned to live in Ronda, the precipitous Andalucian town straddled across a 400ft gorge that had inspired some of the artist's finest landscape paintings of the 1930s. While it is the majestic Puenta Nuevo bridge that had become one of Bomberg's most recognisable motif, the artist nevertheless felt himself ever more charged by the magnitude of the rocky landscape that surrounded the town on all sides. Even in the final year of his life, the impact of this immense natural landscape had still not palled:  '...  should I direct my sight to the mountains, I like Monet, feel humbled - that any artist gifted with genius should presume to solve - with the limited means at his disposal - the problem of the magnitude contained in the billions of tons of living rock' (The Bomberg Papers, 189)

Though difficult to pinpoint with any certainty, the viewpoint of the present work would appear to be situated on the far left bank of the gorge as seen in the photograph. The move away from topographical clarity is characteristic of Bomberg's Spanish subjects and also indicative of his total immersion in his subject.  As Richard Cork has explained, 'Far from retaining a safe distance from the motif and studying it with objective reticence he entered into a wholehearted engagement with a world riven by convulsive geological stress' (David Bomberg, Tate Gallery exhibition catalogue, 1988, p.101). By the early 1950s, Bomberg was approaching his motif with the benefit of a full life-time's experience. Here we see evidence of an artist in complete control of his materials, and testing their expressive potential to the full. Seeking to evoke the solidity and primordial immensity of his landscape, he makes full use of a now-familiar palette of ochres, greens and pinks, applying broad vertical brushstrokes of paint - its material substance vital to his purpose - to create a composition that is so much about the physicality of the rock that the sky is almost totally excluded. Paradoxically perhaps, for one so smitten by the spectacular viewpoint, the rendering becomes almost completely abstract. 

In the twilight of his years, the artist's encounter with Ronda, has reached its ultimate expression, with the result, as David Sylvester has noted, 'that the painter had gone beyond being in the landscape and become the landscape. Looking at his picture I scarcely know if I am facing the scene or facing outwards from it' ('The Discovery of a Structure', in David Bomberg: 1890-1957, Marlborough exhibition catalogue, London, March 1964, p.2). Though Bomberg's death three years later was to occur within the confines of St Thomas' Hospital, London, there can be little doubt as to where his soul remained.