David Bomberg

Bomberg's career is a case study in neglect. The early popular canvases of this English painter buzzed with mechanistic imagery inspired by futurism. But after fighting on the front in World War I, he lost faith in the machine age. Living in Palestine in the 1920s, he forged a personal figurative style that culminated in such pictures as the remarkably panoramic and detailed Mount of Olives. In Toledo, where El Greco painted, Bomberg refined his expressive vision, an intensely physical response to the world. His menacing images of a WW II underground bomb silo swing between the abstract and representational. Naturalism won out in his Cornwall seascapes, pictures of Cyprus and St. Paul's Cathedral and in the semi-abstract late landscapes in which forces of day and night struggle for supremacy. Cork, a British art critic, has written the definitive monograph on an artist whose reputation has increased steadily since his death in 1957. (May)