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.
Before World War I, Bomberg depicted the East End of London, where he had grown up, as a site of immigrant vitality. After a harrowing experience in the trenches and difficulties after the war…
This is an age of progress; and, surrounded as we are to-day by every evidence of the astounding advance that the nineteenth century has carried with in its train, I feel that I am flinging down a…
This linen coat with silk-thread embroidery was worn by a Jewish boy in Bukhara (today in Uzbekistan) on the occasion of his bar mitzvah celebration. Jewish economic life in Bukhara was closely tied…