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Publishers Weekly Review

Bomberg's career is a case study in neglect. The early popular canvases of this English painter buzzed with mechanistic imagery inspired by futurism. But after fighting on the front in World War I, he lost faith in the machine age. Living in Palestine in the 1920s, he forged a personal figurative style that culminated in such pictures as the remarkably panoramic and detailed Mount of Olives. In Toledo, where El Greco painted, Bomberg refined his expressive vision, an intensely physical response to the world. His menacing images of a WW II underground bomb silo swing between the abstract and representational. Naturalism won out in his Cornwall seascapes, pictures of Cyprus and St. Paul's Cathedral and in the semi-abstract late landscapes in which forces of day and night struggle for supremacy. Cork, a British art critic, has written the definitive monograph on an artist whose reputation has increased steadily since his death in 1957. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

This book is certain to become the definitive study of the life and art of David Bomberg. He ``can now be seen,'' Cork declares in the book's last line, ``as one of the most rewarding and prescient painters Britain has produced in the modern era.'' Cork explores Bomberg's contribution to modern art and the reasons why this contribution can be seen now but went largely unseen during the artist's lifetime. Meticulously researched, beautifully written, and generously illustrated, this volume provides a welcome glimpse into one artist's life, into the course of British and European modernism, and into the travails the creative person faces in modern society. Recommended for college and university libraries.-A.C. Birnholz, SUNY at Buffalo