Page 43 - Studio International - March 1967

Men, which he did while he was still a student at the and his mountains to cardboard. A way had to be found
Slade; now this was drawn not from sleeping men but of welding together in one moment of time both the
from a row of pillows. During the process of drawing the close-up and the long shot and yet to avoid the effects of
elements that have hitherto been identified as pillows montage, or, for instance, the double face of post-cubism.
reassemble and are invested with a new identity; for how You can see the results of this struggle in his landscapes
the painter assesses a form shouldn't depend on the from that period onwards, which are like wide-angled
descriptive data he's got, of sleeping men or pillows . . . panoramas. In the 1924 paintings of Petra he had found
a change of scale, a shift of emphasis in the lines, and the that if he advanced upon the rock face only the stones
pillows turn into mountains. remained, and if he withdrew he got only a vague
From describing Bomberg's teaching I've almost in- silhouette. On the other hand in the large paintings of
evitably come to speak of his own work. Unlike many Cyprus of 1948 reality was sensed physically in the way
modern painters Bomberg didn't embellish his work with that gravity is sensed. And like the Greeks in the
forms lifted from other civilizations. Like Chardin, he Parthenon and the builders of Stonehenge he began to
Facing page was content with the things around him. His subjects practise many refinements to defeat the illusion of the
La Inglesia Espiritu Santo-and
El Barrio San Francisco- were simple . . . his wife, his children, the eternal self- eye. If perspective had to be used, he used it not with one
Ronda 1954 portraits, architecture, mountains, landscape and flowers. single focal point but with four or five, he employed even
Charcoal, 19 x 24 1/2 in. It was back in 1923 when he was painting in Palestine the inverted perspectives of Uccello, which had come
Marlborough Fine Art Ltd
and Petra that Bomberg first became aware of the about in the contradiction between the idea, as distinct
Below problems inherent in the contradictions of detail and from the sensation, of perspective. Finally he rejected
Ronda 1954 mass. After having rejected Cubism he tried for a time to perspective altogether as a mere pedantry. Distant objects
Charcoal,
18 3/4 x 24 in. work in a representational way from nature. But this were given the importance of the foreground and those
Marlborough Fine Art Ltd recording method reduced his architecture to doll's houses which had been a smudge of paint on the horizon had