Editing David Bomberg (section)

==The return to order==

[[File:Bomberg, Tregor and Tregoff, Cornwall.jpg|thumb|right|''Tregor and Tregoff, Cornwall'', 1947, [[Tate Gallery]]]]
From there followed Bomberg's great period of painting and drawing in landscape, in Spain at [[Toledo, Spain|Toledo]] (1928), [[Ronda]] (1934–35 and 1954–57) and [[Asturias]] (1935), in [[Cyprus]] (1948) and intermittently in Britain, perhaps most powerfully in Cornwall. A six-month stay at [[Odessa]] in the [[Soviet Union]] in the second half of 1933, following [[Adolf Hitler|Hitler's]] seizure of power in Germany, led Bomberg on his return to London to immediate resignation from the [[Communist Party of Great Britain|Communist Party]]. During [[World War II]], he painted ''Evening in the City of London'' (1944), showing the blitzed city viewed rising up to a triumphant, surviving [[St Paul's Cathedral]] on the horizon, since described as the "most moving of all paintings of wartime Britain" ([[Martin Harrison (curator)|Martin Harrison]]); a series of flower paintings saturated with turbulent feeling; and his single commission as a war artist, a series of "Bomb Store" paintings (1942) expressing Bomberg's expanded first-hand sense of the destructive powers of modern technology in warfare. These "Bomb Store" paintings convey a premonitory sense of the [[RAF Fauld explosion|massive explosion]] that destroyed the underground store two years later, killing around 70 people, and bear comparison with [[Giovanni Battista Piranesi|Piranesi]]'s ''Carceri'' etchings.

Bomberg's superb draughtsmanship was expressed also in a lifelong series of portraits, from the early period of his Botticelli-like "Head of a Poet" (1913), a pencil portrait of his friend the poet [[Isaac Rosenberg]] for which he won the Henry Tonks Prize at the [[Slade School of Fine Art|Slade]], to his "Last Self-Portrait" (1956), painted at Ronda, a meditation also on [[Rembrandt]].

Unable to get a teaching position after World War II in any of the most prestigious London art schools, Bomberg became the most exemplary teacher of the immediate post-war period in Britain, working part-time in a [[National Bakery School|bakery school]] at the [[Borough Polytechnic]] (now [[London South Bank University]]) in the working-class borough of Southwark. Though his students received no grant and were awarded no diploma, he attracted devoted and highly energetic pupils, with whom he exhibited on an equal basis in London, Oxford, and Cambridge in two important artists' groupings in which he was the leading light, the [[Borough Group]] (1946–51) and the [[Borough Bottega]] (1953–55). He developed a deeply considered philosophy of art, set out in several pieces of writing, which he summed up in the phrase, "The Spirit in the Mass".

Following a collapse in [[Ronda]], Bomberg died in London in 1957, his critical stock rising sharply thereafter. One of Bomberg's admirers, the painter [[Patrick Swift]], unearthed and edited Bomberg's pensées, and was later to publish them, along with images of Bomberg's work, as 'The Bomberg Papers' in his [[X (magazine)|‘'''X'''’ magazine]] (June 1960).<ref>David Bomberg, 'The Bomberg papers', ''X'', Vol. I, No. 3 (June 1960); ''An Anthology from X'', Oxford University Press (1988)</ref> After his early success before the First World War, he was in his lifetime the most brutally excluded artist in Britain. Having lived for years on the earnings of his second wife, fellow artist [[Lilian Holt]] and remittances from his sister Kitty, he died in absolute poverty.