Editing David Bomberg (section)

==World War I and after==
[[File:Sappers at work - Canadian Tunnelling Company, R14, St Eloi Art.IWMART2708.jpg|thumb|''Sappers at Work: A Canadian Tunnelling Company, Hill 60, St Eloi'' by David Bomberg, which bears a reference to [[1st Canadian Tunnelling Company]].]]
[[File:David Bomberg.jpg|thumb|Photograph of David Bomberg, taken in [[Jerusalem]], 1924.]]
Despite the success of his Chenil Gallery exhibition Bomberg continued to be dogged by financial problems. In 1915, he enlisted in the [[Royal Engineers]], transferring in 1916 to the [[King's Royal Rifle Corps]] and in March of that year, shortly after marrying his first wife, being sent to the [[Western Front (World War I)|Western Front]].<ref name="dnb" />

[[World War I]] was to bring a profound change to Bomberg's outlook. His experiences of its mechanized slaughter and the death of his brother in the trenches – as well as those of his friend [[Isaac Rosenberg]] and his supporter [[T. E. Hulme]] – permanently destroyed his faith in the aesthetics of the machine age.<ref name="hubbard" /> This can be seen most clearly in his commission for the [[Canadian war memorials|Canadian War Memorials Fund]], ''Sappers at Work'' (1918–1919): his first version of the painting was dismissed as a "futurist abortion" and was replaced by a second far more representational version.<ref name="raynor"/>

The [[artist's book]] ''[[Russian Ballet (book)|Russian Ballet]]'', 1919, was the last work to use the pre-war vorticist idiom. Bomberg self-published this work whilst waiting for the Canadian Government's verdict on ''Sappers at Work''; the next few years was to see him 'experimenting with ways of making his stark pre-war style more rounded and organic'.<ref name="dnb" />

In radical opposition to the prevailing currents in avant-garde art, stimulated as these were by the enthusiasm for mechanization in [[Constructivism (art)|Constructivism]] in Russia following the [[Russian Revolution (1917)|Revolution]], Bomberg went to paint and draw in [[Mandatory Palestine|Palestine]] between 1923 and 1927, with the assistance of the Zionist Organization. There he brought together the geometric energies of his pre-war work as an "English cubist" with the tradition of figurative observation of the English landscape school of [[J. M. W. Turner|Turner]], [[John Constable|Constable]], [[Girtin]] and [[John Sell Cotman]].