Bomberg sets the Tate on fire ARTS
FRANCIS HOYLAND
I find it hard to write about a man who was as badly treated by the art world as David Bomberg was, without losing my temper and swiping out at all and sundry. And the fact that I have an unstinted admiration for his paintings (now in an Arts Council retrospective at the Tate) doesn't make my job any easier, for I could end up with nothing but the writ- ten equivalent of a few appreciative noises. Faced with this dilemma all I can do is to put down what I feel to be true as simply as possible.
In the first place the 'Bomberg Issue' isn't dead, for if his later pictures are as great as I believe them to be it bursts the central tenet of the international 'modern art' racket wide open; namely that art has been moving steadily towards abstraction which represents its ultimate goal. However, Bomberg's work represents a challenge to our time on a deeper level than this—by his sheer commitment to the act of painting. Such commitment pre- supposes faith: faith in his materials, faith in the matter of nature that these materials evoke, and faith in the worthwhileness of man himself. Such a faith can only result from some re- ligious impulse, however overlaid or hidden it may be, and it comes as no surprise to discover that some of Bomberg's latest paint- ings have religious titles. Nothing could be further from the 'cool,' dispassionate approach of much contemporary painting; he was a thoroughly committed man.
In the first part of the exhibition there are a number of highly abstracted charcoal draw- ings that culminate in two magnificent com- positions: The Mud Bath and In the Hold. There is also a smaller figure painting entitled Ju-../it.su, which has a large preparatory draw- ing hung beside it. Ju-Jitsu itself is very abstract indeed, but one can find some quite recognisable figures in the drawing. The limbs of these figures have been simplified into tubular forms, and the angles between their limbs are abrupt and jerky. In this, and in similar draw- ings such as the moving Family Bereavement, Bomberg seems to have been concerned with establishing a space by means of clear divisions of the whole area of the paper. He con- structs the dimensions of near and far within the strict confines of a limited space, noticing as he does so how particular divisions of the picture surface evoke particular recessions. Not content with the degree of abstraction which he achieved in the drawing for .1u-litsu. Bomberg ruled a grid of superimposed squares and diagonals right across it. The painting takes this grid as its point of departure and allows the forms it covers to play against it. The whole effect is of a sort of serious spacial game. I found similar relationships in The Mud Bath and In the Hold.
The flatly painted forms of The Mud Bath dive away from each other, and project out- wards, with an almost illusionistic intensity: Bornberg seems to have been trying to find out just how much space can be made through flat areas of paint. The Mud Bath has no obviously imposed grid, but In the Hold has; and a tendency in many of the earlier works is made explicit in this painting. That is, that shafts or beams of space are constructed within it which evoke accelerations and recessions. These beams are even clearer in Sappers at Work, painted as a Canadian war memorial. The space they evoke is essentially similar to that in Bomberg's earlier masterpieces, but peopled with the 'realistic' figures that the Canadian authorities insisted on.
In the period immediately following the First World War, Bomberg seems to have begun to find the effects of his abstractions sterilising, but he did not yet have the vision that later enabled him to commit himself in another direction. The first sign that he was doing so comes in Jerusalem, looking to Mount Scopas, which has the grid-like struc- ture of In the Hold, but this time the grid is seen as though from a viewpoint low down over a corner. Bomberg has already made the discovery that he can experience all the 'abstract' relationships he was capable of in- venting, and more, 'out there' in nature in front of him. However, in this picture, as in the landscapes he made at Petra, Bomberg was still working in terms of flat shapes arranged within the picture space. It seems to me that the real turning point of his life came when he started to paint in a way that was more directly parallel to his visual and tactile ex- perience. This happened while he was working in Spain, and the fresh and open responses from which these pictures are built show that he was trusting his total experience of the subject before him, and setting each mark within the pictorial symbol of this total ex- perience, i.e., his rectangular canvas: he acts 'all over his picture at once': high and low, near and far, and from side to side. And here the disciplined knowledge of the properties of a rectangle that he acquired as a young man stood him in good stead.
Bomberg's later works go from strength to strength, and not the least of their qualities is the radiant nature of his paint itself. I was re- minded of Teilhard de Chardin's phrase 'the spiritual power of matter' for which Bomberg's own equivalent was 'the spirit of the mass.' And since I have no more space to discuss his work I should like to end by saying that I am glad to have had this opportunity to pay homage to the greatest English painter of our century.
I sometimes amuse myself by identifying my favourite contemporary painters with certain old masters. And in this spirit I find myself giving Bomberg the role of Titian: who, then, shall Francis Bacon be? It must be an artist with a quicker rhythmic pulse, a more meta- physical outlook and a less substantial style— El Greco, obviously. Indeed, there is something in the emotional climate of Bacon's work that does recall El Greco. But one difference between them is that El Greco did not have Bacon's passionate interest in re-creating the experience by means of which we comprehend form.
Some of the portraits in his latest exhibition at the Marlborough New London Gallery are arranged in threes: right profile; full face; left profile, and besides this clue to his interest in presenting us with the fullest possible experi- ence of a head, the forms within the individuai heads themselves are presented from different points of view—like a Picasso. But whereas Picasso tends to be more conceptual and to con- fine himself to 'putting lines round thinks,' Bacon presents us with a fully plastic series of forms that immediately involve us in a tactile and visual response. I have thought for some time that Bacon has been more concerned with painting, and less with making a sort of horri- fied gasp at an empty universe, than has gener- ally been allowed, and the sheer beauty and serenity of some of these pictures—I am think- ing particularly of the series of portraits of Mrs Rawsthorne—confirms me in this view; I enjoyed this exhibition very much.
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