Abstract

David Bomberg Exhibition at Tate Gallery, 17th February-8 May 1988 JONATHAN MILES VCH A LARGE EXHIBITION of David Bomberg's paintings affords the opportunity to observe how he peaks at certain moments, his better canvasses towering over the morass that comprises the bulk of his middle and later work. His energy is consistently at its most controlled and exciting in early career when, emerging from an East End, Jewish background he meets the cubist and futurist techniques of his European contemporaries head on. In Lyons Cafe of 1912 which captures that eerie sense of urban emptiness so prevalent in the work of a painter like William Drummond, one can see in the configuration of the dark door surrounds an inclination towards hard-edged abstraction. Likewise, the people in London Group (1913) are strikingly reduced to a rhythmically controlled queue of stone coffins that embody the stony urban landscape in which the title places them. In various figure studies made in the same year, however, Bomberg misses the rich opportunities afforded by abstracting from the human body. And while Bomberg can be at his most exciting with hard-edged abstraction (The Mud Bath, its various studies; the studies for Sappers at Work and