Biography

David Bomberg was a British painter best known for his brash, angular avant-garde works. The artist was commonly associated with his machine-like depictions of the human figure, a motif prevalent in his early work, which appeared as though they were leaping off the pictorial plane. However, the artist was severely impacted by World War I and its aftermath, and in the interwar period he instead began working primarily on more traditional landscape paintings, reminiscent of Post-Impressionist painting. Born on December 5, 1890 in Birmingham, United Kingdom, he went on to study at the Slade School of Art with other artists like Stanley Spencer and Dora Carrington. He then became a member of the Whitechapel Boys, a group of London based Jewish artists and writers who were particularly interested in exploring political ideologies, including socialism. Bomberg died on August 19, 1957 in London, UK. On the 30th anniversary of his death, the Tate Gallery in London held a high-profile retrospective on the artist’s work, and after many museums around the world held similar exhibitions of his work. Currently, his works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, among others.