A reassessment of David Bomberg’s career prompts Charles Darwent to consider what prompted him to produce such radical works in insular, early-20thcentury Britain
Next to each other in this excellent exhibition are two paintings of the same subject made eight years apart: Woman Looking Through Window and its partner At the Window. Both, as you would expect, include a window and a woman, the latter gazing out of the former at a wider, unseen world. the earlier picture is the more traditional. It has the feel of Walter Sickert, which is reasonable enough as Bomberg had been studying with Sickert just before he made it.
The later picture is quite different. Now, the woman has been flattened into a hieroglyph, the grey-brown, Sickert-y palette replaced by a self-consciously artificial one of black and red. the picture’s composition has been cropped, its subject squeezed, claustrophobically, into the frame. Where Woman Looking Through Window asked us to imagine a world beyond the canvas, At the Window imprisons us within it.
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