David Bomberg

(British, 1890-1957)

The Great Rock, Ronda, Spain 46.4 x 57.2 cm. (18 1/4 x 22 1/2 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
Lilian Bomberg
With Anthony d'Offay, London, 6 May 1981, where acquired by the family of the present owners
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
Edinburgh, Fruit Market Gallery, David Bomberg: The Later Years, 5 January-2 February 1980
London, Anthony d'Offay, David Bomberg, 1890-1957, Works from the Collection of Lilian Bomberg, 25 February-4 April 1981, cat.no.30
London, Tate Gallery, David Bomberg, 17 February-8 May 1988, cat.no.120; this exhibition travelled to Seville, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, June-July and Newhaven, Yale Centre for British Art, September-October

'...how alive Bomberg was to the precipitous nature of the town. The strains in his own personality led him to suffer from bouts of intense depressions in later life, when his spirits would suddenly plummet to depths as gloomy as the lowest recesses of the gorge itself. So it is scarcely surprising that Bomberg's Ronda paintings often thrive on the tensions between the defensive fastness of the buildings and their proximity to the fissure running through their midst. Sometimes he saw Ronda as a paradigm of strength, an invulnerable structure carved out of the austere rocky bluff which support it...But in the most complex of his pictures, Ronda's resolute sturdiness is welded so vigorously to the threat of impermanence that we can no longer be sure where stability ends and vertigo begins. Both extremes are locked in a prodigious balance, as if resolving – for the moment, at least – a similar conflict within Bomberg's own attitude to life.'

(Richard Cork, David Bomberg, Yale University Press,New Haven and London, 1987, p.209)