The painter David Bomberg was one of the “Whitechapel Boys,” the cohort of British Jewish writers and painters who emerged from the immigrant quarter of East London in the early twentieth century. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1911 to 1913 but was expelled for the radicalism of his style, which was influenced by Italian futurism and cubism. After the war, his style changed, and he began to focus on landscapes. From 1923 to 1927, he painted and sketched in Mandate Palestine with the financial support of the Zionist movement. He is considered one of the great painters of twentieth-century Britain.
The blue and white abstract shapes in The Mud Bath evoke human figures in motion against a field of red. Are they meant to be people at a public bathhouse? Or are they interpreted that way because the…
Madame Butterfly [Impassively, her eyes narrowing]:Speak concerning marriage once more, you die! [She fans herself. Suzuki salaams and backs quickly toward the door. Madame Butterfly claps her hands…
Bruskin explored the intersection of his Jewish and Soviet identities in art that took the Soviet Union’s obsession with iconography and slogans in a different and subversive direction. In a series of…