Date: 13-03-2005
Owning Institution: The Ben Uri Gallery
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”    
Subject: 20th Century      

More by accident than by design, today’s picture, a drawing of racehorses chosen because this is the Sunday before the Cheltenham Festival, turns out to be a sort of pendant to last week’s Self-Portrait of 1906-7 by Wyndham Lewis. It was created by Lewis’s close friend, David Bomberg, in 1911 – and like Lewis’s work of the time was carried out in a self-consciously avant-garde style, designed to shock and stimulate in equal measure. The drawing was owned by Nuffield College, Oxford, until December of last year, when it was purchased at Sotheby’s by the Ben Uri Gallery, the London Jewish Museum of Art, with assistance from the Art Fund, the Heritage Lottery Fund, and a number of other donors. I understand that it will be going on display there soon.

Bomberg was only twenty-two years old when he drew Racehorses, a work which shows the strong influence of Cubism and Futurism, both in its fractured, highly abstracted forms and its sense of hectic movement. Bomberg shared the Italian Futurists’ enthusiasm for “dynamism”, the term by which they signalled their ambition to galvanise painting and drawing, to disturb the traditional stasis of the visual arts. In this picture, with its multiplied images of schematic horses, seeming almost to stutter across the page in a staccato rhythm, he has employed a method which the Futurists termed “simultaneity”, by representing successive phases of movement in a single image.

Racehorses appears to portray a group of horses and their riders gathered at the start of a race, just before the off. The elevated vantage-point is not that of a spectator – there being no grandstands placed at the start, on English racecourses – but presumably that of the starter himself, up on his podium, preparing to lift the tapes so that the race may begin. A number of tubular racegoers, wearing comically geometricised trilbies, have gathered to witness the spectacle. They may be intended to be trainers or owners, who are usually among the few to make the long trek to the start. In the background, in the upper righthand corner of the picture, Bomberg has included a number of even more abstracted horses and riders. Abbreviated to little more than flying chevrons hurtling past a running rail, their presence suggests that the artist intended to capture more than one instant of time in his drawing, namely the race itself, as well as the milling of horses at the start. George Stubbs had used this technique in some of his depictions of eighteenth-century horseracing, in which he had painted, for example, both the “rubbing down” of the winner and the race itself on the same canvas. It is an archaic device, frequently encountered in medieval and early Renaissance art, but rarely later. Yet given Bomberg’s interest in breaking with the unity of time, it is a perfectly logical technique for him to have used.

Bomberg may also have been influenced by the work of certain photographers who had sought to capture the essentials of animal and human movement in successive still frames. He was probably aware of Etienne-Jules Marey’s work in that vein, and certainly knew the nineteenth-century photographer Edweard Muybridge’s famous study of Animals in Motion (which among other things proved for the first time that all four of a horse’s hooves leave the ground simultaneously in the act of galloping). Muybridge would also, incidentally, prove to be a strong influence on Francis Bacon in the 1950s and 1960s, inspiring Bacon to remark that “one thing which which has never really been worked out is how photography has completely altered figurative painting.” That comment, still a challenge to art historians today, could be made the basis for a fascinating exhibition: the artist’s dialogue with the photograph, from Manet and Degas to Bacon, Warhol, Hockney and beyond. Bomberg’s early work should certainly be included in such a show, were it ever to take place.

It is not known whether Bomberg was himself a keen racing man. Nor is it known whether the drawing reproduced here was inspired by a particular race on a particular course. It seems probable that Bomberg did go racing from time to time, because his friend and fellow “Whitechapel Boy” John Rodker wrote a short passage about Racehorses implying Bomberg’s familiarity with the bookies’ ring. A love of horses certainly seems to have run in his family. He was the fifth child of Polish immigrants. Back in Poland, his mother’s family had kept an inn and reared horses, while in London she occasionally took her children to Rotten Row in Hyde Park to observe “good horsemanship”. Epsom has been suggested as a possible setting for Bomberg’s Racehorses, on the basis partly of its proximity to London, in the East End of which city the artist lived and worked, and also because it had been much in the news when he created his picture. In 1913, the date of this drawing’s completion – a fact indicated by Bomberg, next to his signature, in its bottom right-hand corner – the suffragette Emily Davison had been killed when she threw herself under the King’s horse during the Epsom Derby. There do not appear to be any fences or hurdles on his course, only running rails, which would be consistent with the Epsom Derby course. But such is the abstract nature of Bomberg’s style that the location of his race can only really be guessed at.

Bomberg himself deliberately suppressed such details, which he considered extraneous to his true purposes. “I APPEAL to a sense of form,” he wrote in a text published in 1914. “In some of the work I show… I completely abandon Naturalism and Tradition. I am searching for an intenser expression… My object is the construction of Pure Form.” Not everyone appreciated the embodiments of such an aesthetic. When Racehorses was first exhibited, in the “Jewish Section” of the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s exhibition “Twentieth-Century Art: A Review of Modern Movements”, the art critic for The Jewish Chronicle acknowledged Bomberg’s attempt to “convey in his work the energy and movement of a century of machinery and wireless telegraphy” but found his methods “opposed to all that is rational in art”. In Racehorses, the critic concluded caustically, the artist “had only succeeded in painting…horses that could never possibly win races.” Personally I don’t agree. I think Bomberg’s horses look like they could go a bit. At the right price, I’d have a punt each-way.