Bomberg Study Session

Despite scandalous critical neglect within his own lifetime, David Bomberg is now recognized as one of the 20th century’s leading British artists. This major reassessment of his life and career is the first full Bomberg exhibition for more than a decade, and marks the 60th anniversary of the artist’s death.

The exhibition examines all the major phases of Bomberg’s career, including his audacious early contribution to pre-war British modernism, his unhappy role as a commissioned war artist in both world wars, his masterly landscapes in Jerusalem and Spain in the 1920s and 30s, his penetrating self-portraiture and portraiture of friends and family and his astonishing mature achievements as a landscape painter.

Students will tour the exhibition with the Laing’s Keeper of Art, Sarah Richardson, make sketches and gather primary evidence from first-hand observation and through philosophical enquiry techniques. They will also use a framework technique used by Bomberg to produce their own unique modernist response to the exhibition.

This session will aim to support learning outcomes including:

• Studying of Primary source material from a Gallery
• Developing a working vocabulary and knowledge of specialist terms relevant to their chosen area of study.
• Developing knowledge, understanding and skills of how images, artefacts and products relate to social, historical, vocational and cultural contexts
• How ideas, feelings and meanings can be conveyed and interpreted in images, artefacts and products
• How knowledge and understanding of the work of others can develop and extend thinking and inform their own work