Exhibition 'Bomberg' in Ben Uri Gallery and Museum
Works from major institutions including Arts Council England, Tate, The Fitzwilliam
Museum, Pallant House Gallery and The Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts will be on
show alongside works from important private collections and from Ben Uri’s extensive
collection of Bomberg’s works.
A new monograph, the first for 30 years, by Ben Uri and Bomberg curators Rachel Dickson and Sarah MacDougall is now available in hard and soft back.
More than 40 works representing each significant periods of Bomberg’s oeuvre make up the exhibition.
Key themes of the largely chronological exhibition include:
● Bomberg’s Jewish background and engagement with Yiddish culture
● His contribution to pre-war British modernism
● His role as a war artist in both world wars
● His work as a graphic artist and his exposure in contemporaneous “little magazines”
● His Jerusalem Landscapes
● His self-portraiture and portraiture of friends and family
● His mature achievements as a landscape painter in Spain, Cyprus and Britain.
David Bomberg (1890-1957) was born in Birmingham to Polish-Jewish immigrant parents. He spent his formative years in London’s East End among his fellow “Whitechapel Boys” which remains a principal focus of Ben Uri. The influence of his early evening-class tutor Walter Sickert is reflected in Bomberg’s Bedroom Picture (1911-12, private collection) which was later re-worked as the Vorticist-
influenced At the Window (1919, Ben Uri Collection). Both works are included in the
exhibition and are an example of a pairing or re-working that is one of its major themes.
David Bomberg and Ben Uri histories have been intertwined since the museum was the first public institution to recognise the importance of his radical oeuvre and purchased his
works initially in 1920 and regularly thereafter.