What is True and Needs to be Free:David Bomberg @ the National Gallery.

"Style is ephemeral - form is eternal" - David Bomberg.

David Bomberg - In the Hold (about 1913-14)

David Bomberg, we're informed was "one of Britian's most fervent advocates for abstract art", but to really test that assertion or the above quote or to get a more comprehensive, and rounder, purview of his art and career you're going to need a bigger show than The National Gallery's Young Bomberg and the Old Masters was.

Room 1 at The National Gallery is, as it says, just one room - and it's not a big one either - and the exhibition is both free and interesting so I'm not complaining. But I surely can't be the only one who left wanting more. My whistle had been whetted by the title alone and the six Bombergs (plus preparatory sketches and even an El Greco (well, his studio at least, might have been him) and a Botticelli were all delights to see but it seems there's a much larger story to be told here.

Perhaps the National Gallery are planning to tell that story and this is merely a taster. If not, another gallery should get on to it soon. Bomberg was born in Birmingham in 1890, and grew up as one of eleven children in the then very poor East End of London before studying at the Slade School of Fine Art. Following his first solo exhibition, at London's Chenil Gallery in 1914, he quickly became the rising star of the British art scene. 

Viewers were impressed by how radically his art was breaking with tradition at the time but, in this show, the emphasis is on showing how that's not quite the full story. Bomberg, we're invited to see, wasn't a talent out of nowhere but was inspired by artists as far back as the Renaissance. Bomberg's sister Kitty has recalled how, as a child, her brother would take her to The National Gallery to see Botticelli's Portrait of a Young Man.

Botticelli's tempera work was renowned for its bold and direct frontal pose which had broken with the polite tradition of having the sitter portrayed in profile. Bomberg told his sitter he wanted to draw himself based on the painting and even asked his father to design a shirt like the one depicted. Both of which happened (more or less) and it seems to me as if it was Bomberg's confident, bordering on arrogant, way of announcing that he was an artist worthy of consideration with the greats.

Sandro Botticelli - Portrait of a Young Man (about 1480-5)

David Bomberg - Self-Portrait (1913-4)

While at the same time giving himself an art education. Although it shows that Bomberg could copy the greats (more or less), it doesn't yet show if he could equal or transcend them. It's debatable that he could but he did go on to develop a style that was both very much his own but also in keeping with modern art developments elsewhere in Europe.

Bomberg's Vision of Ezekiel was, remarkably, painted before his self-portrait. It was his response to the devastation caused by the death of his mother, Rebecca, at just 48 years old to pneumonia. In the biblical book of Ezekiel, the prophet is taken to a valley 'full of bones' and, under instruction from God, orders those bones to live again. Near the centre of the painting a mother holds up her child and it is suggested this is Bomberg's way of saying that he was never in doubt that his mother loved him.

It's a work that, on first approach, appears to flirt with abstraction and it can seem, in some ways, too crowded (it's always reminded me of Gericault's Raft of the Medusa) yet to finally find out the story behind it has given it a meaning, and depth, that I'd not realised before. That's the thing with art. You don't just see something, decide you like it or don't like it and stay that way forever. It changes with time and experience. As we all do.

David Bomberg - Study for 'Vision of Ezekiel' (about 1912)

David Bomberg - Vision of Ezekiel (1912)

Ju-Jitsu is closer still to abstraction. Bomberg's brother Mo was a boxer who frequented The Judaeans gymnasium in the East End and there's something of that in Ju-Jitsu but, and its title makes this abundantly clear, there's also something of Japan about it too. When it was initially exhibited it was titled Ju-Jitsu:Japanese Play in the Integration of the Parts in the Mass.

It's unclear just how much knowledge of, or even interest in, Japanese culture Bomberg had or would even have had access to but, as with In the Hold that tops this blog, it's a great example of how Bomberg could mix modern and ancient styles, fuse ideas from the East and West, and create works that look, to my eyes, like forerunners of the op-art styles that Bridget Riley later became famous for.

David Bomberg - Ju-Jitsu (1913)

Bomberg's parents had emigrated from Poland to escape anti-semitism so In the Hold's (again, highly abstracted) imagery of immigrants being chaotically removed from a docked ship speaks to Bomberg's own lived experience and his own folk memories while, at the same time, finding a way to meld old world influences and progressive new methods of painting. It is, as the old cliche I'm unafraid of repeating goes, a riot of colour.

The most well known of Bomberg's works to me is The Mud Bath. That might be because it's pictured in one of the DK art guides that I've endlessly thumbed for research over the last decade or so but the curators at the National have galled it a 'major painting' so perhaps I've seen it elsewhere too. It was the first exhibit in that first ever show and was even hung outdoors so that it could "have every advantage of lighting and space".

Whitechapel's Schevzik's Vapour Baths where locals went to purify themselves were both an inspiration for the subject matter and an analogy as well. Bomberg wanted to strip his art of all irrelevant matter in order to simplify his vision. It could be a war painting in the vein of Paul Nash or CRW Nevinson or it could be seen, as could much of Bomberg's work, as a forebear of other Jewish emigre artists who would come to dominate British art of the second half of the twentieth century like Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach.

Each of these readings seem equal to me but to throw in a third contention, I can also see Bomberg, in his inexorable drive towards simplification, grids, and patterns as being a precursor to the Abstract Expressionists that came to dominate American art in later decades. Are these works signposting the way towards Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Arshile Gorky? While not wishing to discount the huge influence of artists like Kandinsky and Mondrian, I think a case can be made.

David Bomberg - The Mud Bath (1914)

David Bomberg - Study for 'Sappers at Work:A Canadian Tunnelling Company, Hill 60, St Eloi' (about 1918-19)

It'll be a larger show than this, and a larger brain than mine, that does so but the National's short exhibition certainly got me thinking not just about where Bomberg got his ideas from but what later artists did with those ideas. 

Sappers at Work:A Canadian Tunnelling Company, Hill 60, St Eloi is a monumental painting commissioned by the Canadian War Memorials Fund (the National have got a small first version) and in its composition, in its colour, and in its bold execution there is so much. The phantasmagorical colours of El Greco, the distorted landscapes and vivid storytelling of a Thomas Hart Benton, and a sense of how Arshile Gorky seems to capture the exact moment that a nightmare becomes a dream or vice versa.

At the same time it's a respectful memorial to the courage and energy of a team of Canadians who unleashed a devastating mine attack on a German observation post in France in WWI. Bomberg had just returned from his own military service and, as if to emphasise this, he places us viewers almost at the very heart of the image. He wants us to feel as if we are there. In that respect he's not dissimilar to the old masters this show has lumped him in with.

He wants to make us feel, he wants to instruct, and yet he wants us to admire his artistic skill at the same time as being a little confused by it. There's a great work from the Studio of El Greco, The Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, as we leave the exhibition that reminds us, once more - as if necessary, that no artist has ever worked colour in quite the same way as El Greco.

It is, of course, a reminder that Bomberg belongs in very exalted company and it's a reminder worth having as his name is not as well known in some art historical circles as perhaps it ought to be. But, what I want to see now is not just, as I've mentioned, a larger, more extensive Bomberg show but one that touches on the influence he had not just in Britain (a recent, and excellent, Tate Britain show included him as an early great and influential figure in British figurative painting) but in America, France, and, who knows, further afield still.

I came thinking I knew a little about Bomberg. I left realising just how little that was.

Studio of El Greco - The Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane (1590s)