Bomberg and Ecology: Landscapes Revisited

David Bomberg’s landscapes can be understood as more than representations of place; they are sustained investigations into the vitality of matter and form. From the rugged cliffs of Ronda to the rolling hills of Palestine, his brushstrokes grasped not just the visual contours of place but its energy, weight, and atmosphere. These paintings are rarely described in ecological terms. Yet, viewed through today’s lens of environmental concern, Bomberg’s landscapes, and those of his students, can open up conversations about how art engages with land, matter, and the fragile balance of the natural world.

Painting as Encounter with Place

Bomberg urged his students to “find the spirit in the mass,” a phrase that spoke not just to the structure of form but to a deeper sense of vitality within matter itself. In his landscapes, rock is never inert, and earth is never still. Hills swell, skies churn, rivers pulse with motion. This vision resonates with contemporary ecological thinking, which increasingly recognises the agency of landforms, rivers, and ecosystems as more than passive scenery for human activity. Bomberg’s landscapes remind us that the natural world has force, presence, and its own rhythms.

The Borough Group and the Material World

Bomberg’s students took this lesson into their own landscapes. Miles Richmond’s Spanish vistas, Dennis Creffield’s urban panoramas, and Dorothy Mead’s elemental compositions all return us to questions of how humans inhabit environments. Their works can be read as explorations of balance: between structure and flux, permanence and impermanence, human perception and natural process. These concerns echo in current debates around sustainability, where the challenge lies in recognising our entanglement with the natural world rather than standing apart from it.

Towards an Ecological Reading

Revisiting these works today allows us to consider them not only as art historical milestones but also as proto-ecological gestures. They resist the idea of the landscape as a postcard view and instead immerse us in the dynamism of earth and sky. In an age of climate change, this shift in perspective feels urgent. The Borough Road Collection offers a reminder that painting can attune us to the vitality of matter, the fragility of ecosystems, and the ethical questions of how we live within our environments.

The Archive as a Site of Reflection

As we look again at Bomberg and his circle, the collection and archive become more than a repository of mid-20th-century British painting. It is a place to think with these artists about landscape, ecology, and sustainability. Their brushstrokes invite us to ask: how might art help us to see the land not as backdrop, but as participant in our shared future?

Abstract Expressionism: New York’s Bold New Voice, 1940s–1960s

In the years following the Second World War, a group of artists working in New York City transformed the art world. Abstract Expressionism, as it came to be known, was the first major art movement to emerge from the United States, shifting the centre of the art world from Paris to New York and redefining what painting could be.

Breaking Boundaries

The movement produced works that were large, gestural, and abstract. Painters such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Clyfford Still, Adolph Gottlieb, Franz Kline, and Philip Guston abandoned traditional composition. Instead, they embraced dynamic marks, expansive canvases, and, in the case of Pollock, the physical act of dripping and pouring paint directly onto the floor.

Though often referred to as “Abstract Expressionism,” the style was deeply influenced by Surrealism. Many European Surrealist artists had fled to America during the war, bringing with them ideas about tapping into the subconscious and the importance of gesture. These ideas were amplified into something entirely new in the hands of the New York artists.

Critics were instrumental in shaping how this work was understood. Clement Greenberg focused on painting’s formal qualities, seeing it as the next step in the evolution of modern art. Harold Rosenberg, on the other hand, emphasised the drama of the creative act itself, describing these paintings as “an arena in which to act.” This debate—sometimes called “Green Mountain vs Red Mountain”—revealed the richness and controversy of this new movement.

A New Name and Global Impact

The term “Abstract Expressionism” had first been used to describe Wassily Kandinsky’s paintings after the First World War, but it was New Yorker art critic Robert Coates who applied it to these American painters in 1946. The artists themselves were sometimes called “The Irascibles”—a nod to their rejection of traditional exhibition policies—but the name never stuck.

Exhibitions such as A Problem for Critics (Peggy Guggenheim, 1945) and The New American Painting (1958–59) brought these works to wider audiences. The latter, in particular, introduced European viewers to this bold American style, cementing Abstract Expressionism’s status as a global force.

Abstract Expressionism and the Borough Group

During the years when David Bomberg and his students—later known as the Borough Group—were developing their own approaches to painting, Abstract Expressionism remained largely unknown in Britain. It wasn’t until The New American Painting toured Europe that artists and audiences here encountered these New York painters.

Yet, despite this separation, art historian Richard Cork notes an intriguing resonance: Bomberg’s mid-century work “parallels the Abstract Expressionists’ emphasis on bodily rhythms and gesture, especially in the work of Pollock and de Kooning. Although Bomberg would not have been aware of contemporaneous developments in American avant-garde painting…”

This parallel highlights how, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, artists were responding to the same post-war context—turning to the body, gesture, and a search for authenticity in painting. Abstract Expressionism may have redefined the art world on a global scale, but the Borough Group shared its commitment to painting as a vital, physical act.

The Independent Group: Challenging High Art, 1952–55

In the early 1950s, a group of artists, critics, and designers gathered at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London to discuss a question that would shape British art for decades to come: how should art respond to popular culture?

The Independent Group, as they became known, met regularly between 1952 and 1955. Its members included artists Richard Hamilton, Nigel Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi, and William Turnbull, alongside critics and thinkers such as Laurence Alloway, Peter Reyner Banham, and Toni del Renzio. United by curiosity rather than a single aesthetic approach, they were described by fellow artist John McHale as “a small, cohesive, quarrelsome, abrasive group”—and they liked it that way. As del Renzio recalled, “it was very hard for anybody else to get in even if they wanted to.”

The ICA itself, founded in 1948 under the presidency of Herbert Read and chaired by Roland Penrose, had already established itself as a hub for progressive debate and experimentation. The Independent Group thrived within this environment, holding lectures and discussions that rejected the division between “high art” and popular culture. They were fascinated by cinema, science fiction, comic books, and the rapid influx of American mass media, seeing in these sources a creative energy that traditional fine art often overlooked.

This embrace of popular culture was most clearly expressed in their exhibitions, notably Parallel of Life and Art (ICA, 1953) and the seminal This Is Tomorrow (Whitechapel, 1956). Paolozzi’s collages, made from magazine cuttings and mass media imagery, anticipated what would later become known as Pop Art, paving the way for Hamilton’s own iconic works of the 1960s.

The Independent Group and the Borough Group

Although the Independent Group and the Borough Group were contemporaries, their interests were very different. The Borough Group, led by David Bomberg and including artists such as Dorothy Mead and Cliff Holden, was rooted in painting as a fine art discipline. Bomberg’s emphasis on form, movement, and direct expression reflected a belief in the enduring value of painting as a medium of truth and vitality.

The Independent Group, by contrast, was as interested in images found in glossy magazines as in paintings hung on gallery walls. They questioned the very boundaries of art and culture, asking whether mass-produced media might be just as valid a source for creativity as oil paint or bronze.

Both groups, however, shared a spirit of experimentation and a desire to question the status quo. Where the Borough Group rethought painting for a post-war world, the Independent Group opened the door to a new visual language that embraced everyday life. Together, they form two distinct yet complementary strands of Britain’s rich post-war art history.

Tracing the Double Figure: Clémence Hémard-Hermitant’s Digital Encounter with Dorothy Mead By Theresa Kneppers, Curator

Clémence Hémard-Hermitant’s recent digital residency with A David Bomberg Legacy – The Sarah Rose Collection offered a deeply personal and radical engagement with the archive. Responding to the work of Dorothy Mead, an artist whose singular voice was shaped by post-war British modernism, Hémard-Hermitant has produced a body of digital drawings that explore the intersections of caregiving, motherhood, and feminist resistance.

For Hémard-Hermitant, this residency marked a shift. Known for her gestural work with oil pastels, chalk, and ink, the artist approached the archive under altered circumstances: the birth of her second child had changed both the constraints on her time and use of materials. Turning to digital tools, she asked whether the texture, movement, and embodied energy of traditional mark-making could be meaningfully translated through an iPad screen. The result is a series of quietly powerful images that echo Mead’s expressive figures and emotive palette while speaking to the rhythms and ruptures of maternal life.

What emerged from Hémard-Hermitant’s time in the archive was an unexpected kinship with Dorothy Mead, not only in visual language but in spirit. Mead’s refusal to conform, her uncompromising stance against gendered expectations (famously declining to take a course at the Slade, forfeiting her diploma in the process), resonated strongly with Hémard-Hermitant. “She challenged traditional roles,” the artist notes, “and as both an artist and a mother, I find that challenge still very real and relevant today.”

Drawing from works such as Standing Female Figure (1962), Reclining Nude, and Self Portrait (1963), Hémard-Hermitant began to reflect on the cyclical journey of the female body: solitude, pregnancy, birth, caregiving, return. Repetition became a compositional strategy, with many of her digital drawings featuring mirrored or doubled figures: motifs of care, interdependence, and transformation.

“I was particularly inspired by how Dorothy Mead often suggested figures in her paintings,” she reflects. “I’ve been thinking deeply about how the body becomes a vehicle for care—not only in motherhood but in how we attend to others, young and old.” This led Hémard-Hermitant to use her own body as subject, turning toward self-portraiture for the first time in her practice. In doing so, she connects with Mead’s own exploration of the self, layering contemporary experiences of maternal identity over modernist expressions of form and gesture.

Despite its unfamiliarity, the digital medium offered a compelling, if occasionally unsettling, way of working. “It replicates the medium well,” Hémard-Hermitant explains, “but you don’t get the same energy release as you would with paper.” This tension between the immediacy of digital tools and the emotional resonance of physical mark-making infuses the residency work with a particular kind of intimacy. The digital figure, rendered with delicacy and nuance, still carries the weight of lived experience.

This project sits within a growing movement of feminist digital practice, one that reclaims archives not only as sites of historical knowledge but as spaces for situated reflection and care. By engaging with Mead’s legacy through the lens of her own maternal experience, Hémard-Hermitant opens up new ways of thinking about female creativity, refusal, and endurance.

What does it mean to inhabit an archive? Not just to interpret its contents, but to live through them, shape them, and be changed by them? In this residency, Hémard-Hermitant offers one compelling answer: a practice rooted in attention, textured by care, and charged with the quiet persistence of the double figure.

You can see the full body of work here.

Neo-Romantics: Vision, Landscape, and the British Imagination

Between the mid-1930s and the mid-1950s, a group of British artists found themselves turning inward—toward the haunted countryside, ruins of war, and a tradition of visionary art rooted in British soil. They became known, not through any formal alliance, but through a shared sensibility that critics would later term Neo-Romanticism.

Coined by critic Raymond Mortimer in 1942, the label captured the emergence of a mood more than a movement—one shaped by the isolation of wartime, nostalgia for the pre-industrial past, and a resistance to the rationality of both realism and international abstraction.

Imagining a British Landscape

The core of the Neo-Romantic vision was the idea of the particular—a term championed by John Piper to describe the singular, the local, and the poetic. This stood in contrast to the universal claims of abstraction or the detachment of the Euston Road School's realism. Instead, artists like Piper, Graham Sutherland, and Paul Nash sought out emotionally charged landscapes, crumbling churches, twisted trees, and ancient paths steeped in memory.

Their inspirations came not from Paris or New York, but from Blake, Palmer, Turner, and Fuseli—nineteenth-century artists who had explored dream states, mythic terrains, and the darker folds of the imagination. Surrealism also lingered at the edges of Neo-Romantic work, evident in the sometimes uncanny, otherworldly quality of their forms.

War and a Wounded Land

The Second World War intensified this tendency. Bombed cities, darkened skies, and national uncertainty deepened the Neo-Romantic attachment to the idea of a threatened, fragile Britain. Artists like Piper and Sutherland were officially commissioned to document the home front, producing emotionally resonant images of ruin and resilience. Their works were not documentary so much as elegiac—imbued with atmosphere, absence, and a deep feeling for place.

From Reverie to Rejection

By the 1950s, however, the mood had shifted. The growing influence of American abstraction, the post-war push toward modernisation, and a younger generation’s desire to look outward meant that Neo-Romanticism fell swiftly out of fashion. Its poetic melancholy, its provincialism, even its visual lushness came to be seen by some as outdated or overly sentimental.

And yet, the best of Neo-Romantic work remains deeply affecting—attuned to memory, rooted in place, and rich with a kind of quiet defiance.

Neo-Romantics and the Borough Group: A Shared Terrain

Though David Bomberg and his students at the Borough Polytechnic were not associated with the Neo-Romantics, the two movements shared certain preoccupations—especially a sensitivity to place and a commitment to painting London in the aftermath of war. John Piper’s wartime images of ruined churches, broken masonry and spectral cityscapes resonate with the Borough Group’s own explorations of Blitzed London.

Bomberg himself had a complex relationship with Romanticism. While he rejected its mysticism, he believed passionately in the spiritual force of landscape and the expressive power of paint. Like Piper, he resisted the intellectualised detachment of abstraction and instead demanded from his students an emotional, embodied engagement with their subjects—what he called the spirit in the mass.

The Borough Group’s post-war paintings, like those of the Neo-Romantics, are also shaped by Britain’s broken terrain, but filtered through Bomberg’s intense, physical vision—a different kind of Romanticism, perhaps, forged not in reverie but in struggle.

Further Reading:

• John Piper, British Romantic Artists, 1942

• Exhibition: Romantic Moderns (Barbican, 2011)

• Neo-Romantic Art: British Art in the Forties (Tate archive)

The Festival of Britain, 1951: A National Showcase and an Artistic Snub

In the summer of 1951, just six years after the end of the Second World War, the Festival of Britain transformed the South Bank of the Thames into a dazzling celebration of national renewal. Billed as a “tonic for the nation” by its Director General, Sir Gerald Barry, the Festival was both a public morale-booster and a cultural showcase—marking the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and asserting a confident vision for modern Britain.

From May to September, millions visited the pavilions, sculptures, and design exhibitions, encountering everything from architectural models to futuristic fabrics, modernist furniture to cutting-edge art. Across the country, satellite exhibitions in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and via a travelling programme brought this optimistic vision to the nation at large.

Art and the Festival: A National Stage

At the heart of the Festival was a belief in culture as public good. The Arts Council was charged with commissioning new work from 12 sculptors and 60 painters to form the visual centrepiece of the arts programme. These artists—among them Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, John Piper, Graham Sutherland, and Jacob Epstein—were already central to the post-war art establishment.

The Arts Council stipulation was ambitious: works had to be no smaller than 45 x 60 inches, on a subject of the artist’s choosing. The results ranged from the expressive to the abstract, and the Festival’s art was displayed not only in London but across the UK, in a deliberate attempt to decentralise and democratise access to modern art.

Among those featured in the Arts Council’s 60 Paintings for ’51 were rising stars like Lucian Freud, William Gear, Patrick Heron, and Claude Rogers. Five paintings were ultimately acquired by the Arts Council—an endorsement of the era’s most establishment-approved artists.

The Borough Group and the Festival: A Telling Absence

And yet, conspicuously absent from this cultural celebration were David Bomberg and the students of the Borough Polytechnic—despite Bomberg's profound influence on a younger generation of British painters.

For Bomberg, who had once been lauded as a vanguard figure of modernism and was a founding member of the London Group, the Festival of Britain could have marked a powerful moment of national recognition. The opportunity to paint at scale, to reflect the spirit of post-war regeneration, and to contribute to a public conversation about art and society—these were ideals aligned closely with Bomberg’s own sensibilities.

But the omission speaks volumes. By 1951, Bomberg was largely overlooked by the cultural establishment. His anti-academic approach to teaching, his passionate belief in art as a spiritual and physical encounter, and his resistance to institutional norms had placed him outside the official narrative of British art. The Festival’s curators preferred the more palatable, marketable modernism of Moore, Hepworth, and Sutherland to the raw, vital work being produced in Bomberg’s Borough classroom.

A Legacy of Neglect, and a Reappraisal

In retrospect, the Festival’s exclusion of Bomberg and the Borough Group feels like a missed opportunity. While it succeeded in capturing the energy of some aspects of post-war creativity, it failed to acknowledge the deeper, slower revolutions taking place in classrooms and studios just a few miles away.

The Borough Road Archive preserves this overlooked legacy—a parallel narrative of post-war British art driven by intensity, experimentation, and commitment to truth in painting. Bomberg may not have been celebrated on the South Bank in 1951, but his influence would endure far beyond the bunting and fanfare of the Festival.

Today, as we revisit these national moments of celebration, it's equally important to consider who was left out—and why.

Further Exploration:

• 60 Paintings for '51 (Arts Council archives)

• Ten Decades: A Review of British Taste, ICA, 1951

• Masterpieces of Victorian Photography, Arts Council, 1951

The School of London

A Return to the Human Form

Key Artists: Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, R. B. Kitaj, Leon Kossoff
Related Artists: Gillian Ayres, Howard Hodgkin

The School of London was a loose association of artists dedicated to figurative painting at a time when abstraction dominated the art world. The term was coined by R. B. Kitaj in his 1987 British Council exhibition, referring to a group of painters who had upheld the importance of the human form, psychological depth, and materiality of paint.

Artists like Auerbach and Kossoff continued David Bomberg’s legacy, using thick impasto and dynamic brushwork to capture the essence of London’s shifting post-war landscape. Their approach contrasted sharply with Francis Bacon’s visceral, distorted figures and Lucian Freud’s intensely detailed, introspective portraits.

“It was through my contact with Bomberg that I felt I might actually function as a painter.” – Leon Kossoff

Contrasting with Contemporary Movements

At a time when conceptualism, performance art, and minimalism were gaining prominence, the School of London artists reaffirmed the importance of the painted surface and human experience. Their work was deeply personal, often depicting friends, lovers, and the urban environment with a raw emotional intensity.

Kitaj described the group as responding to the existential concerns of post-war Britain, exploring themes of alienation, identity, and mortality in a rapidly modernizing world.

"Francis Bacon was much concerned by the human condition, using derision to depict human figures always shown distorted to express anguish and solitude. Contrary to Bacon's nudity of the soul, Lucian Freud was fascinated by the nudity of bodies, proving to be a master in expressing sheer intimacy with no restrictions." – R. B. Kitaj