David Bomberg

David Garshen Bomberg Born to Polish-Jewish immigrants and raised in the East End, Bomberg studied at Westminster School of Art (1908-10) under Walter Sickert and the Slade School of Art (1911-13) with the support of Sargent and the Jewish Educational Aid Society. In 1913, he met Picasso and Modigliani in Paris. Brancusi, Duchamp-Villon and Marinetti visited his first exhibition in London in 1914, where he made his name as a radical innovator. In his self-portraits of the 1920s and 30s, he abandoned his mechanistic style for expressive naturalism, paint and colour. His paintings Mud-Bath and In The Hold are Vorticist masterpieces. Bomberg later taught at Borough Polytechnic (1945-53). Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff were his pupils.

Text © National Portrait Gallery, London