Bowie owned several paintings by the questing, formally radical British artist David Bomberg. “I’ve always been a huge David Bomberg fan,” he revealed to the New York Times in 1998. “I love that particular school. There’s something very parochial English about it. But I don’t care.” Among the Bomberg works in Bowie’s collection sold at Sotheby’s after his death were Sunrise in the Mountains, Picos de Asturias and Moorish Ronda, Andalucia—landscapes painted in Spain in the mid-1930s that represent Bomberg’s search for what he called the “spirit in the mass,” a means of uniting form and feeling.
Bomberg, the fifth of eleven children, was born in Birmingham, England, in 1890 to a Polish-Jewish immigrant leatherworker and his wife. When he was five the family moved to Whitechapel in East London. As a child, Bomberg showed huge artistic promise but there was no money for him to go to art school. Between 1908 and 1910, however, he attended evening classes given by Walter Sickert at Westminster School of Art. Thanks to a loan from the Jewish Education Aid Society he went on to the Slade School of Fine Art in 1911, where he studied under the famous drawing teacher Henry Tonks alongside Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, Dora Carrington, and Mark Gertler—a starry bunch hailed by Tonks as the school’s last “crisis of brilliance.”
Of them all it was Bomberg who rebelled most fiercely against the Victorian stiffness of Tonks’s teaching, experimenting wildly and absorbing influences from postimpressionism, futurism, vorticism (see p. 244) and cubism. The intricate geometric scaffolding and use of color in paintings such as In the Hold (1913–14) baffled most contemporary critics.
After the Second World War Bomberg taught at the Borough Polytechnic Institute in London where his students included other Bowie favorites Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach. But his painting career floundered. Richard Cork notes with barely suppressed fury that most of his life’s work was locked away in a storeroom. In 1951 the influential critic Herbert Read omitted him from his survey Contemporary British Art. Two years later, when the polymathic arts patron Edward Marsh left his collection to the nation, the Contemporary Arts Society rejected his two Bomberg paintings. By the time Bomberg died in August 1957 he was destitute and forgotten. Says Cork: “Nobody, outside his immediate family and a few friends, had any notion of the size or complexity of Bomberg’s achievement.”
But then a funny thing happened. Almost immediately, the critical establishment went into paroxysms of guilt. Superstar art critic David Sylvester (see p. 113) berated himself and everyone else for having waited until Bomberg died before they acknowledged his importance. The retrospective exhibition Bomberg had needed so badly was staged by the Arts Council in 1958. In 1987 Cork published this major monograph and by the following year, when he curated the Tate’s first solo exhibition of Bomberg’s work, the rehabilitation was complete. If there’s a moral to be drawn from Bomberg’s career, it’s that what one generation considers heretical, the next will hail as genius. Let the Tin Machine reappraisal commence!