Brief Lives #6 - David Bomberg

David Bomberg was born to Polish-Jewish parents in Birmingham, England, in 1890. The family moved to Whitechapel in 1895, where he later became prominent among the ‘Whitechapel Boys’ and made an important contribution to British Modernism. Initially apprenticed as a chromolithographer, and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, where he was seen as a ‘disturbing influence’. Bomberg’s harrowing service in the trenches during the First World War was compounded by a disastrous experience as a commissioned war artist, explored in a series of related drawings.