David Bomberg

David Bomberg was one of the most renowned modern British painters of his generation. Born in Birmingham in 1890, Bomberg studied painting at the Westminster School of Art and later at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1911 to 1913. Bomberg's experience as a Royal Engineer in World War I had a profound impact on his later artistic output and permanently destroyed his faith in the aesthetics of the machine age. He worked on returning to his pre-war style, making it more organic and eventually incorporating the great English landscape tradition into his geometric aesthetic. After the war he travelled extensively across Palestine, Spain, Morocco, and the Greek islands. Throughout the 1930s, Bomberg's work became broader and more expressive as he sought to convey the essence of his response to landscapes in Spain and Austria. In the 1940s, Bomberg was commissioned by the War Artists Committee to produce a painting of an underground bomb store; he produced a large number of images, all showing his consciousness of the bombs' destructive purpose. His work can be found in the collections of major national institutions, including the Tate; the National Portrait Gallery; the Government Art Collection; the Hepworth Wakefield; National Galleries of Scotland; the Arts Council Collection; the Fitzwilliam Museum, and the National Museum of Wales.