Bomberg suffered woeful neglect and under-appreciation from
the wider artworld during the 1930s, and the anguish this caused reached a
crescendo in 1942 on learning that he had been overlooked by the War Office for
a commission as a war artist. He wrote a bitter and impassioned letter to the
Artists Advisory Committee in charge of war commissions which found its way to
Kenneth Clark, who had never hidden his rather limited appreciation of
Bomberg’s work. Despite this, Bomberg was awarded a small commission to paint a
bomb store, a somewhat curious commission in terms of subject matter, but one
to which Bomberg was perhaps uniquely qualified after his remarkable depictions
of the subterranean sappers of World War One. He was sent to Burton-on Trent
(third class rail travel was provided) and left with extremely strict
instructions to leave any drawings on site, and once he returned to London, not
to show the works to anyone until the images had been approved by censors.
Richard Cork noted that at the store, “men were expected to assemble and stack
…. bombs, and their bodies stretch in strange diagonal posses as they roll
their deadly charges along makeshift rows on planks.” It is this scene that
Bomberg depicts in our oil on paper. Bomberg’s extraordinary economy of line
renders the figures almost spectral, with the pure colour highlighted against
the foreboding black of the surroundings. Bomberg brings the gravitas of his
experience, both of the trenches during WW1 and of his fierce loathing of
fascism (seen at first hand in Spain), to these drawings and paintings.
Although not among his most well-known subjects, the bomb store works rank
among his most powerfully emotionally charged works.