Composition

Details

David Bomberg (1890-1957)
Composition
oil on paper laid on panel
44¾ x 59 in. (113.6 x 150 cm.)
Painted circa 1919.

Provenance

with Fischer Fine Art, London.
with Gillian Jason Gallery, London, where purchased by the present owner.

Exhibited

Possibly, London, Fischer Fine Art, David Bomberg: Paintings, Drawings, Watercolours and Lithographs, March - April 1973, ex-catalogue.
Possibly, London, Fischer Fine Art, Bomberg: An Exhibition of Major Paintings and Drawings, March - April 1988, no. 2.

Special notice

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 15% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.

Lot Essay

The present work is closely related to Bomberg's imaginative compositions which he executed circa 1920-22. In these works, as in the present work, Bomberg has painted loosely figurative works in oil on paper. The compositions have lost the angular severity of the pre-war and some of his immediate post-war work (see lot 82). Richard Cork comments that the works in this series, 'are astonishingly loose and abstract, making many figurative references but insisting all the time on the artist's right to explore a more allusive and ambiguous world ... all the 'Imaginative Compositions' break away from the angular, geometrical draughtsmanship of his earlier period. Their forms are fluid, organic and broken, created by brushwork which investigates the expressive potential of marks placed with great assertion on paper' (David Bomberg, New Haven and London, 1987, p. 138).

See also lot 81.

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