Try This at Home: Drawing with Bomberg

Bomberg was deeply suspicious of the idea that art could be taught through a fixed method, so a “how to draw like Bomberg” guide would probably have horrified him. He wrote that art cannot be taught, though draughtsmanship can be taught to those with a natural gift. Elsewhere he argued that artists should find methods that suit them and that drawing must be taught freely. Yet his students remembered very specific things he asked them to do.

The exercises below are adapted from those recollections. Some translate documented studio practices into activities you can try at home. Others are our own experiments with the ideas those recollections suggest, and we’ve flagged which is which. Each “Try it” is our modern version, not a Bomberg instruction.

The room

From 1945 Bomberg taught in a repurposed engineering room at the Borough Polytechnic, at first two days a week and from 1947 just one. Frank Auerbach, who joined the class in 1947, later remembered its towering ceilings, tiled walls, and a door that kept swinging like a saloon door long after you’d come in. In some ways it was a conventional life room: students worked in paint or charcoal at easels and desks arranged around a live model. What was unusual was the teaching. Bomberg didn’t open with demonstrations; he went round giving each student close, individual feedback. Occasionally he drew or painted directly onto a student’s work to make a point.

Here at the Borough Road Gallery we care for A David Bomberg Legacy – The Sarah Rose Collection, which brings together work by Bomberg and by artists shaped by his teaching. Looking through it, you don’t see a single Bomberg style. You see many different answers to the questions he asked.

You don’t need a model to try these exercises. A person reading, a chair with a coat over it, a few objects on a table, or the view from a window will all do. What you need is time, and a willingness to make bad drawings.

You’ll need: willow or compressed charcoal, a putty rubber or eraser, cheap paper such as newsprint or lining paper (lots of it), and a subject that stays reasonably still. Each exercise takes 10–20 minutes.

1. Turn it upside down

Documented: Janina Baranowska’s recollection

Janina Baranowska, whose story we told in our last post, remembered that one of the first exercises in Bomberg’s studio was to copy an illustration turned upside down. When she showed him the result, he praised it and handed her another inverted image to copy.

Try it (10 minutes): Take a photograph or a reproduction of a drawing and turn it upside down. Copy it without turning it back until you’ve finished. Because the image is harder to recognise at a glance, you’re more likely to draw the shapes in front of you than what you think a nose or a hand looks like. Baranowska remembered it as an exercise that freed an inexperienced eye from convention.

2. Use a bigger lump of charcoal

Documented: Cliff Holden’s recollection

Cliff Holden recalled what Bomberg did when a student’s drawing was too fluent and elegant. He handed them a great lump of charcoal and cited Modigliani and Augustus John as artists who would tie the drawing tool to their big toe to escape the domination of a facile hand. Whether either of them actually did this is another matter. It’s how Bomberg made his point, as Holden remembered it.

Try it (15 minutes): If your lines come out neat, take the thickest piece of charcoal you have and draw the same subject again. You could also try our own addition: tape a stick of charcoal to the end of a ruler and hold the far end. You may find detail harder to control. That’s the point: it shifts your attention to the big shapes and to where the weight sits.

3. Stay where you are

Documented: a contrast drawn by Kate Aspinall from the class’s practice

At the Slade, where Bomberg had trained, students built up an understanding of the body by drawing the model from different points around the room. Bomberg encouraged his students to do the opposite: stay in one place and make drawing after drawing, paying attention to how the body sat in the space around it and how looking at it affected them.

Try it (50 minutes): Set yourself up in one spot and make five drawings of the same subject, around ten minutes each, without moving your chair. The subject stays the same while your approach changes: start somewhere else each time, leave more out, press harder. By the fifth drawing you’ll probably be looking at relationships between masses rather than at things.

4. Look for the mass

Our interpretation of a teaching principle

The best-known shorthand for Bomberg’s approach is “the spirit in the mass.” He refused to define it, and his students each found their own meaning for it in their work. Aspinall summarises his “approach to mass” as treating composition as masses arranged on a flat surface rather than as an illusion of perspective.

Try it (15 minutes): Don’t start with an outline. Look for where the weight of your subject seems to gather, and start there if it helps. Work outwards in tone, using the side of the charcoal or your fingers. Let edges stay soft or disappear. Ask yourself where the form presses down and what holds it up.

5. Watch the light change

Documented: Cliff Holden’s recollection

Holden remembered that Bomberg paid close attention to the pose and to the way light changed the relationships between forms. Rather than relying on elaborate lighting, he asked students to notice the differences between soft morning light, midday brightness, the flattening effect of passing cloud, and electric lamps.

Try it (three sessions of 10 minutes): Draw the same view or object at three different times of day, or once in daylight and once by lamplight. Put the drawings side by side. The subject hasn’t changed, but the masses have.

6. Find what it’s like

Documented anecdotes, adapted into our own exercise

Bomberg’s feedback was often oblique. Roy Oxlade remembered him looking repeatedly between Oxlade’s drawing and the model, then lightly sketching two dome shapes and saying that the dome of St Paul’s looks like one and not the other. He was talking about a human body. Dennis Creffield recalled Bomberg pushing him to pay closer attention to light by quoting a line of poetry or a phrase of music.

Try it (15 minutes): Before you draw, find an analogy for your subject: a shoulder might be a hillside, a back a wall, a head a dome. Draw with that analogy in mind. If you want to go further, try a second drawing while listening to a piece of music, and let it set the pressure and pace of your marks.

7. Rub it back

Documented practice, with a historical interpretation

Rubbing an eraser over built-up layers of charcoal, creating smears and voids, became a crucial technique for many of Bomberg’s students. Bomberg himself rarely used it until around 1954–6. Kate Aspinall cautiously suggests he may have taken it up after watching his students put his ideas into practice, while acknowledging this is hard to prove. Our own Ronda-el-Castillo (1956) is a good test for the eye. At first glance it looks rubbed back, but on close inspection Bomberg has instead carefully protected areas of the paper while layering tone.

Try it (two drawings of 15 minutes): Make two drawings of the same subject. In the first, only add charcoal: build up tone layer by layer and protect the areas you want to stay light. For the second, cover the whole sheet in an even layer of charcoal first, then use the eraser to recover the light areas, drawing by taking away as much as by adding. Compare them. Which one feels heavier?

8. Throw yourself in

Documented: Miles Peter Richmond’s recollection

Miles Peter Richmond remembered “throw yourself in” as one of Bomberg’s constant phrases. He meant putting more energy into the work, because what mattered was an active exchange of energy between the model and the student.

Try it (20 minutes): Set a timer for two minutes and make a quick drawing using your whole arm, standing up if you can. Then do another, and another. These are quick experiments, not finished works, so don’t judge any of them until you’ve done ten.

A word of warning

Bomberg’s students also knew the risks of devotion. Leslie Marr remembered a batch of students’ drawings getting muddled together, and Bomberg cheerfully comparing it to the old apprentice system, in which all the apprentices’ drawings look the same. Marr found the remark unsettling. None of these exercises is meant to make your drawings look like Bomberg’s. Leon Kossoff said that what Bomberg gave him mattered far more than any technique: Bomberg made him feel he could do it. That might be the best reason to try them.

Have a go yourself. Choose one exercise, give yourself some time, and see what changes when you approach a familiar subject differently. We’d love to see what you discover.

Sources consulted: Kate Aspinall, “Artist Versus Teacher: The Problem of David Bomberg’s Pedagogical Legacy,” Tate Papers no. 33 (2020); Leon Betsworth, “David Bomberg and the Borough: A Different Class,” The British Art Journal 17, no. 2 (2016); Cliff Holden, “David Bomberg: An Artist as Teacher,” Studio International 173, no. 887 (1967); Roy Oxlade, “Bomberg and the Borough: An Approach to Drawing,” MA thesis, Royal College of Art (1976); Borough: David Bomberg and his Students at Borough Polytechnic (Waterhouse & Dodd, 2015); Jarosław Koźmiński, “Janina Baranowska (1925–2022),” Tydzień Polski / MyPolska.UK (2022).

What’s in a Name? Finding Artists Who Changed Theirs

Archives are organised around names. Catalogues, indexes, card files and search boxes all assume that a person can be identified by a single, stable label. People’s lives are rarely so tidy. Over the past few months, several of the artists we’ve written about have turned out to be hiding in our records, and in other people’s, under names we weren’t searching for.

This post brings those cases together and suggests some ways of searching around the problem. It follows on from the questions we raised in “Is This an Archive?” about who decides what a record contains. A name on an index card is one of those decisions. Someone chose what to call a person, and that choice now decides whether we can find them.

Married names

Marriage is one way a woman becomes hard to find in the archive. Dorothy Missen, whom we discussed in “Women of the Borough Group,” was born Dorothy Bergan. She met her husband, Len Missen, in Bomberg’s class, one of several relationships that began there. Records made at different points in her life may use different surnames.

Janina Baranowska’s case shows how quickly this can happen. She studied under Bomberg from 1947 to 1950. By her own account, given to the journalist Anna Maria Grabania, she married the architect Maksymilian Baranowski on 21 December 1947, a few months into her studies. She was born Janina Zbaraszewska, so any record from her first months at the Borough could carry either name.

Sometimes the same person used different names in different parts of their life. Bomberg’s wife exhibited throughout this period as Lilian Holt, while taking Bomberg’s name in her personal life. Even a single scholarly article can cite her own writings as both “Lilian Holt” and “Lilian Bomberg née Holt.” Her daughter, Dinora Mendelson, belonged to the Borough circle under her maiden name. Her 2005 letter to the Tate Archive, among Leslie Marr’s papers, and her oral history interview at the British Library are both recorded under her married name, Davies-Rees. A search under either name alone finds only half of her.

Grammar

Some names change as they move between languages. Polish surnames commonly have gendered forms: a man in the family would be Zbaraszewski, a woman Zbaraszewska. English-language records don’t always keep the distinction, whether through a cataloguing convention, a transcription slip or a misunderstanding, so a woman can end up recorded under the masculine form. Diacritics and punctuation create further variants: Nałęcz may be entered as Nalecz, and Bohusz-Szyszko may lose its hyphen. Each variant is another route into the records, and another way to miss them.

Transliteration

Names and places that cross writing systems pick up several spellings. Baranowska reached the Anders Army’s headquarters near Tashkent, in present-day Uzbekistan. English-language accounts call it Yangiyul, and Polish ones Jangi-Jul or Jungi-Jul. The same problem affects names transliterated from Cyrillic, Hebrew or Yiddish, each with its own history of conventions. For a collection rooted in Bomberg’s East End, where migration and many languages are central to the story, searching under only one spelling can hide important connections.

Simple misspellings

Errors creep in everywhere, including careful scholarship. In one footnote of Kate Aspinall’s peer-reviewed article on Bomberg’s teaching, which we’ve relied on and admire, the historian Leon Betsworth appears as “Betchworth.” On an art student’s blog, Dennis Creffield becomes “Cressfield.” Once an error has been published or copied into another catalogue, it becomes a search term in its own right. That’s why it’s worth recording misspellings as well as correcting them, so future researchers can trace where an error came from.

The labels change too

It isn’t only names. Betsworth found that on the Borough Polytechnic’s registration cards between 1946 and 1953, students including Auerbach, Holden, Mead, Oxlade and Richmond entered their occupation as “student” when they first enrolled. After a year or two with Bomberg, they were describing themselves as “Artist” or “Painter.” These are small changes, but they show how people came to see themselves, and how the institution recorded them. A search by category can miss someone just as easily as a search by name.

How to search around the problem

These are the habits we’ve found most useful:

• List every variant before you start. Include the birth name, married names, masculine and feminine forms, spellings with and without diacritics, and likely misspellings.

• Use wildcards, but check the rules. Searching Zbarasz* can catch several endings at once, but catalogues handle wildcards differently, and some don’t support them at all.

• Search through other people. Husbands, teachers, classmates and dealers are often better indexed than the person you’re looking for. Baranowska, for example, can be traced through Bohusz-Szyszko’s circle and the records of Group 49.

• Search by date and place rather than name. An exhibition list for a particular year and venue may contain the person under a name you didn’t expect.

• Check how women were listed at the time. Some mid-century catalogues and membership lists recorded married women under their husbands’ names.

• Keep a log of your searches. Note the terms you tried, the catalogues you searched and what turned up. This makes your research repeatable, and helps you tell a genuine alternative name apart from a catalogue error.

• Record what you find, and label it. When cataloguing, add every known variant to the record, but distinguish a documented alternative name from a spelling error. They aren’t the same thing, and the next researcher needs to know which is which.

A call to archives

We’re sure these aren’t the only cases in our records. If you know a Borough student or Bomberg associate who worked or exhibited under another name, or if you’ve found one of our artists under a spelling we haven’t listed, please get in touch. We’ll add verified variants to our records and update this post as the list grows.

Finding someone in an archive isn’t always a matter of looking harder. Sometimes it means learning to search differently.

Sources consulted: Kate Aspinall, “Artist Versus Teacher: The Problem of David Bomberg’s Pedagogical Legacy,” Tate Papers no. 33 (2020), notes 15, 17, 38 and 39; Leon Betsworth, “David Bomberg and the Borough: A Different Class,” The British Art Journal 17, no. 2 (2016): 52–57; Anna Maria Grabania, “Kobieta w czerwonej sukni,” Nowy Czas (2009); Jarosław Koźmiński, “Janina Baranowska (1925–2022),” Tydzień Polski / MyPolska.UK (2022); Tate Archive, Marr Papers, TGA 20057/1/8.

Janina Baranowska at the Borough

"He taught me form": Janina Baranowska at the Borough

In our recent piece on the women of the Borough Group, Janina Baranowska came up as a different kind of gap. She wasn't forgotten. She had a long, visible career that was recorded almost entirely in a different archive from ours. This post is a first attempt to bring the two records together.

From Grodno to Nazareth

Baranowska was born in Grodno on 28 October 1925, and some of the most vivid material about her life comes from her own account, recorded by the writer Jarosław Koźmiński and published in the Polish émigré press after her death. One of her earliest drawings, made at primary school, showed a military parade in the town, and it was so good that her teacher summoned her father to discuss it. He was an army officer, transferred to Warsaw in spring 1939, and the family were waiting to join him when war broke out. tydzien

What followed is a familiar story to many Polish families in Britain, but it is worth setting out in full. After the Soviet arrival, an NKVD officer ordered her mother out of their Grodno home. Their attempts to reach her father in Warsaw ended in arrest, imprisonment, and deportation to Kazakhstan. After the amnesty that followed the Sikorski–Maisky agreement, she reached Yangiyul in Uzbekistan, headquarters of General Anders's army, where her father's fellow officers took care of her and her sister. She travelled with the army to the Middle East, finished secondary school in Nazareth, took a signals course in Egypt, and was then sent to Scotland. She was still a teenager when she started drawing seriously: in Nazareth she took drawing lessons from the Czech-born painter Vlastimil Hofman. tydzientydzien

At the Borough

She arrived in London in 1946 and won a scholarship to study painting at the Borough Polytechnic, where she found herself in Bomberg's class. The exact dates vary between sources. Art UK gives 1946–49, while the POSK Gallery's biography gives 1947–50. Either way, she was there for roughly three years during the Borough Group's most active period. Janina Baranowska (1925-2022) +2

Her memory of Bomberg's teaching is unusually precise. One of the first exercises in his studio was to draw an illustration turned upside down. When she showed him the finished sketch, he praised it and immediately set her another inverted image. She described it as a simple exercise that was remarkably effective at freeing an untrained eye from convention. The Ben Uri records her as Bomberg's youngest pupil and, by her own claim, his favourite, and credits him with teaching her that form and composition should underpin all drawing and painting. tydzienbenuri

She was also clear about what she didn't get from him. She said that Bomberg never really taught her how to handle colour, but that he taught her form. tydzien

Learning colour elsewhere

She learned colour instead from Marian Bohusz-Szyszko, in his easel painting studio. Looking back, she remembered students at English art schools in the late 1940s and early 1950s working with a narrow palette, producing paintings in muddy browns and greys that did not interest her. Bohusz-Szyszko, by contrast, built his paintings out of colour. Polish sources date this study to 1951–54, at the Polish University Abroad, after her marriage to the architect Maksymilian Baranowski and the birth of her son, followed by a year at Putney School of Art from 1955. tydzienWikipedia

Her remark about the palette is striking next to Edna Mann's story. Mann's husband described her early work as her "mud plum" period, and Mann too moved towards vivid colour and abstraction in later decades. Two women from the same classroom, working in separate worlds, both seem to have found colour by stepping away from the Borough.

The Ben Uri's painting Actaeon Devoured by his Hounds (1968–9) shows both inheritances at once. Its deep palette and heavy impasto echo the expressionism of both Bomberg and Bohusz-Szyszko. It was also the first work by a Polish refugee artist who came to Britain with the Anders Army to enter the Ben Uri Collection. artsy

The Drian connection

Another thread links her to Mann. Baranowska's first solo exhibition was at the Drian Gallery in 1958, one of the first shows at Halima Nałęcz's newly opened gallery, where she exhibited geometric abstraction. Seven years later, Mann held her own first solo show at the same gallery. Nałęcz's Drian, run by an émigré, was one of the few places that showed both of these Bomberg-trained women. tydzien

Her work kept changing. She moved from geometric forms to large, expressive abstractions, applying paint with a palette knife and mixing it with sand or concrete for texture. Then, at one of her own Drian exhibitions, she noticed geometric forms from outside reflected in a window while she could also see what was happening inside. She sketched it straight away, and from 1974 she worked in a style she called "Reflections". From the 1970s her earlier expressionism gave way to lighter tones and tighter formats, often built on a strict geometric grid. That grid has its own Borough echo. The concern with underlying structure that Bomberg drilled into his students never left her work, even as everything else changed. tydzienbenuri

Building institutions

Alongside painting, Baranowska spent decades building the institutions of Polish art in Britain. She was founding secretary of the Association of Polish Artists in Great Britain and its president from 1981 to 1991, and directed the POSK Gallery from 1965 to 2007. By her own account, the POSK Gallery was created for the Association's members, with a guarantee of two free exhibitions a year. benuriapauk

She also designed stained glass. At St Andrew Bobola in Shepherd's Bush, the north transept window commemorating Polish airmen in the Battle of Britain is her design, the result of a 1979 competition run by the Union of Polish Airmen. She designed windows for Holy Trinity Church in Wolverhampton as well. Over her career she took part in some 30 solo and 60 group exhibitions, and her work is held in public and private collections across Britain, Poland, Europe, the United States and the Vatican. She died in London on 1 October 2022. Church of St. Andrew Bobola, Shepherd’s Bush +3

Two records, one classroom

Baranowska's case doesn't fit the usual story of a lost woman artist. Within Polish-émigré art history she is a central, well-documented figure: a teacher's favourite, an exhibiting painter for over half a century, and the director of a gallery for four decades. Within the English-language history of the Borough Group, she barely appears.

This matters for how we read our own archive. The Borough Group's standard cast was largely set by the people who wrote its history, and they wrote from inside a London art world that the Polish community mostly organised itself apart from. Baranowska's story suggests that some of Bomberg's students didn't disappear. They went on to build their careers somewhere our records weren't looking.

One practical lead follows from this. She was born Janina Zbaraszewska, and it isn't yet clear when she married. If any Borough Polytechnic enrolment records or group exhibition lists from the late 1940s survive, she may appear under her maiden name. That is the same problem Dorothy Missen's maiden name, Bergan, poses for our research. Wikipedia

A call to archives

As with the earlier piece, this is an open thread. We would particularly like to hear from anyone who knew Janina Baranowska, from her family, or from colleagues at POSK or the Association of Polish Artists. Above all, we'd like to find any drawings or paintings from her Borough years. Work from Bomberg's classroom by a student who went on to such a different career would be a remarkable thing to see.

Sources consulted: Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, artist overview for Janina Baranowska and catalogue record forActaeon Devoured by his Hounds (1968–9); Art UK artist record; Jarosław Koźmiński, "Janina Baranowska (1925–2022)," Tydzień Polski / MyPolska.UK, 10 November 2022; POSK Gallery and Association of Polish Artists in Great Britain biographies; ArtWay, "Church of St. Andrew Bobola, Shepherd's Bush"; Polish Wikipedia entry for Janina Baranowska; Mirosław Adam Supruniuk, "'Permanence and Liquidity.' Polish Art in Great Britain in the 20th Century," Archiwum Emigracji, vol. 3 (33) 2023.

St Ives vs. Borough Group: Two Ways of Making Landscape Modern

Both Bomberg and the St Ives artists spent time painting Cornwall. They did not see the same Cornwall. Working within a few years of each other, in the same small corner of West Cornwall and sometimes only a few miles apart, they started from a similar problem: how to make modern landscape painting do more than describe a view. They answered it in very different ways.

The St Ives Background

St Ives had been a working artists' colony since the late nineteenth century, with its own societies, studios and exhibitions. The St Ives Society of Artists was founded in 1927. What changed its artistic character was the arrival of a group of internationally minded modernists just as war broke out. In August 1939 Ben Nicholson and his wife, the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, left London for St Ives. Within weeks the Russian Constructivist Naum Gabo and his wife Miriam had settled in nearby Carbis Bay.

All three were already committed abstract artists. During the 1930s Nicholson and Hepworth had built close ties with the international avant-garde, mainly through Nicholson's visits to Paris and their shared engagement with artists including Picasso, Brâncuși and Mondrian. Mondrian had lived near them in Hampstead since 1938. When they moved to Cornwall he stayed in London despite their efforts to persuade him to come, and after the Blitz began he left for New York in 1940. Gabo left Cornwall in 1946, but Nicholson and Hepworth stayed. During and immediately after the war, a wider circle of younger artists grew up around this modernist community, including Peter Lanyon, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Patrick Heron, Terry Frost and Bryan Wynter.

But "St Ives" was never really one thing, and scholarship on the colony has become more careful about saying so. The art historian Chris Stephens, writing in Art History in 2012, argues that the real story is a shift between generations rather than a single shared style. In his account, Nicholson's circle carried a pre-war modernist ideal largely intact into post-war reconstruction. Lanyon, the only one of the younger modernists actually born in Cornwall, broke with that inheritance decisively. Other scholarship goes further. David Crouch and Mark Toogood, writing on Lanyon's sense of Cornwall's geology, history and people, and on his gliding, argue that his abstraction was not a retreat from landscape into pure form at all. Instead it was a different way of knowing a place: an attempt to register embodied, lived experience of the land rather than dissolve it into composition for its own sake.

The Borough Group's Landscapes

The Borough Group's relationship to landscape grew out of a very different classroom, but land, stone and place mattered to them too, as our earlier piece on Bomberg and ecology touched on. Bomberg's own Cornwall trip makes the comparison concrete. In August 1947 he spent about six weeks at Trendrine Farm near Zennor in West Penwith, only a few miles from the St Ives community, though he kept somewhat apart from it. The paintings he made there, among them St Ives, Cornwall and Evening in Cornwall, look nothing like the modernism taking shape down the coast. They are thick, structural and physically wrought. They can look closer in spirit to the structural intensity of his Spanish landscapes than to the dominant modernist language developing around St Ives.

The same concern runs through his students' work. Miles Richmond's later Spanish paintings, made after he followed Bomberg to Ronda in the 1950s, wrestle in charcoal and thick paint with the vertiginous scale of the Andalusian gorge country. Dennis Creffield's cathedral drawings bring the same grappling energy to Gothic stone rather than open land. Bomberg's own landscapes range from the Ronda charcoals of the 1930s and the wartime views of bomb-damaged London to the Cornwall paintings. Across all of them he treats place less as a subject to be described than as a problem of mass, structure and force.

The Point of Contrast and Its Limits

St Ives developed increasingly varied forms of abstraction rooted in the experience of the Cornish landscape. The Borough artists kept a more insistently structural and material engagement with place, tethered to Bomberg's idea of "the spirit in the mass." Some St Ives painters made changing light, colour and perception central to their response to place. Bomberg and several of his pupils put more weight on mass, structure, material resistance and the underlying forces of a form.

But Lanyon in particular makes the clean version of this contrast hard to sustain. His abstraction was not a departure from landscape but a way of registering embodied experience of it: its history, its people and its physical dangers, his own gliding among them. If that is right, then neither group was simply choosing between representation and abstraction. Both were trying to get past a description of a landscape's surface toward something they felt was truer underneath it. They disagreed, sometimes sharply, about what that truer thing was. For the St Ives artists at their most serious, it lay closer to perception, memory and lived experience of place. For Bomberg and his students, it was mass, structure and the physical forces holding a form together. These are tendencies rather than opposing camps: two different grammars for the same instinct to get beyond what the eye simply reports.

The Point of Connection

The two communities also developed partly outside London's dominant art-world structures, though in very different ways. St Ives was an established provincial artists' colony whose modernist character was transformed by Nicholson, Hepworth and Gabo. It grew through a dense network of artists, studios, societies and informal exchanges, with Nicholson and Hepworth as an important modernist point of reference. The Borough was a London art-school community built around Bomberg's unusually intensive teaching. Former students described it as closer to an apprenticeship with a master than an ordinary art-school course. That classroom's wider community was the social and teaching environment from which the Borough Group later emerged.

Their later reputations diverged sharply. St Ives became one of the canonical narratives of post-war British modernism. Bomberg and the Borough Group remained comparatively marginal to that account, their story told separately and on a smaller scale. That imbalance is worth sitting with. One group now has a well-established place in accounts of post-war British art, while the other remains much less visible outside specialist scholarship.

Set side by side, St Ives and the Borough Group look like two answers to the same post-war question: what can British landscape painting still do once modernism has already happened elsewhere? Neither simply swapped representation for abstraction. Both were trying to get beyond describing what a place looks like, and they disagreed about what lay on the other side of that description. For one it was light, memory and felt experience of a specific coastline. For the other it was mass, structure and the underlying organisation of a form. They were two serious, sustained attempts to build a post-war British modernism through engagement with local ground, and they reached very different conclusions about what that ground was for.

Sources consulted: Chris Stephens, "'The morrow we left behind': Landscape and the Rethinking of Modernism, 1939–53," Art History 35, no. 2 (2012); David Crouch and Mark Toogood, "Everyday abstraction: geographical knowledge in the art of Peter Lanyon," Ecumene 6, no. 1 (1999); Leon G. Betsworth, "David Bomberg (1890–1957) and the Borough: A different class," The British Art Journal 17, no. 2 (2016): 52–57; Kate Aspinall, A Mark of the Times: Charcoal and the Borough Group (Borough Road Gallery, 2016); Tate and Art UK biographical entries for Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Piet Mondrian; Messums gallery records on Miles Richmond.

Women of the Borough Group: An Open Question

How many names have we lost?

The recent piece on Edna Mann's studio work prompted a question we haven't been able to shake since: if one woman's serious, sustained practice could nearly vanish from the record, recovered only through a family's own archive, rather than through any institutional account, how many others passed through Bomberg's classes at the Borough Polytechnic and, later, the City Literary Institute, and simply never resurfaced at all?

This piece isn't a settled history. It's closer to a working note, an attempt to lay out what we do and don't know, and an invitation to anyone who might help fill the gaps.

What's Documented

Standard accounts of the Borough Group settle on a small, stable cast: Bomberg himself, then Cliff Holden, Miles Richmond, Dennis Creffield, Dorothy Mead. Mead's name usually survives the retelling, in part because she went on to a visible public career. Edna Mann appears far more rarely.

But the record, once you go looking, is wider than the standard cast suggests, and it points to at least four different kinds of gap , not one.

Dorothy Missen is the clearest case of a name genuinely thinned out by the historical record. Cork's 1987 Bomberg biography and later scholarship confirm she was a founding-era member of the group, and a 2020 Tate Papers essay by Kate Aspinall adds a detail that opens the door to further research: her maiden name was Bergan, before she married a fellow Borough student, Len Missen. Cliff Holden's own account of the Group's history adds one further, pointed detail: she was left out of the Group's third annual exhibition in 1949 on the stated grounds that her recent work hadn't met the required standard, a judgment made by the same small, self-selecting circle that decided everything else about who counted as a serious member. Beyond her name, her marriage, that exclusion, and her presence in group exhibition listings through the late 1940s, we currently have almost nothing, no surviving account in her own words, no clear record of what happened to her practice afterward. This is exactly the kind of gap a family archive could close.

Susanna Richmond (born Eleanor) is a different kind of case again: not erased, but folded almost entirely into someone else's biography. A fellow Bomberg student and full member of the Borough Group, she married Miles (then Peter) Richmond, and the couple left England together in 1952, first for Aix-en-Provence and then for Ronda, Spain, where Miles rejoined Bomberg. Decades later, in 1993, the two held a joint exhibition at London South Bank University, meaning she did keep painting and exhibiting into later life, but almost every trace of her that survives in the public record appears as a clause inside her husband's story rather than as an entry in her own right.

Lilian Holt (who exhibited under her maiden name though she took Bomberg's name personally, having married him) and her daughter Dinora Mendelson (later Dinora Davies-Rees) were both present from the earliest days of the classroom, not as occasional visitors but as working members of the group , Holt was one of the four artists who first proposed the exhibition that led to the Borough Group's founding, alongside Edna Mann and Dorothy Mead. Mendelson, meanwhile, is credited with recruiting several other students into the class, including Leslie Marr and Len Missen. Both left first-hand written accounts held in the Tate Archive (via the Marr Papers), which makes them better documented than most of the group's women, and a reminder that "founding member" status did not, on its own, guarantee lasting visibility. Holt in particular is on record as resenting how much of Bomberg's time and energy his students absorbed, a tension that adds a sharper edge to her own position inside the community she helped found.

Janina Baranowska turns out to be the most striking case: not a forgotten figure at all, but one whose full, prominent public career has simply stayed almost invisible within English-language Bomberg and Borough Group scholarship. Born in Grodno, Poland, in 1925, she was arrested and deported to Russia in 1940, later joining the Polish Armed Forces and reaching Britain via the Middle East. She arrived in London in 1946 and studied under Bomberg at the Borough Polytechnic from 1947 to 1950, by some accounts his youngest pupil, and by her own account his favourite, crediting his teaching, including the practice of turning a drawing upside down to break its dependence on literal appearance, with shaping her lifelong emphasis on form over surface likeness. Within the separate, extensively documented world of Polish-émigré art in Britain, she was a genuinely major figure: a member of the Royal Academy of Arts' exhibiting circle, the London Group, and the National Society of Artists; a founding figure of the artist collective Group 49 in the late 1940s; founding secretary and, from 1980, chairman of the Association of Polish Artists in Great Britain; editor of the 1983 survey volume Contemporary Polish Artists in Great Britain; and director of the POSK Gallery in London for over four decades. Her work is held in the Ben Uri Collection, the National Museum in Warsaw, and the Museum of Art in Łódź. A 2023 scholarly survey of Polish art in Britain singles her out, by name, as one of the significant Polish visual artists whose entire artistic output has gone unmentioned in mainstream British-cultural histories of "Polish London", including academic monographs that otherwise run to hundreds of pages. She died in London in 2022.

Baranowska's case suggests the gap isn't only about women's work vanishing outright. It's also about which communities get treated as the canonical record. A full, prominent career, extensively documented within Polish-émigré art institutions, can still be almost entirely absent from the standard English-language accounts of the very classroom she trained in — and, as the 2023 survey argues, this is not unique to her: it is a structural blind spot affecting the study of Polish artists in Britain generally. That raises an uncomfortable question for an archive like this one: how many other students passed through the Borough on similar terms — prominent in someone else's record, invisible in ours?

A Structural Problem, Not Just an Archival One

The Mann research suggested a further reason names thin out closer to home, and it's worth stating plainly. The Borough Group's own culture, shaped heavily by Bomberg's convictions, seems to have carried an assumption that a serious studio practice and a domestic, family-centred life were difficult to hold together, particularly for women. If that assumption shaped how contemporaries spoke about, exhibited, or remembered particular women's work, it would help explain why some names, like Missen's, thin out precisely at the point where a woman's life moved outside the group's immediate view.

This is a pattern documented elsewhere in twentieth-century British art history. There's no reason to assume the Borough Group was an exception, and taken together these cases are a reminder that the same period could produce more than one kind of gap at once, women written out (Missen), women recorded but under-credited within their own founding group (Holt, Mendelson), women written fully into a different history altogether (Baranowska), and women preserved only as a footnote to a husband's career (Richmond).

A Call to Archives

This is where we'd like to ask for help.

If you're a descendant, relative, or estate holder connected to Dorothy Missen (née Bergan), or to anyone else who studied under Bomberg whose name doesn't appear in the standard accounts, we would very much like to hear from you. The Mann piece exists only because a family came forward with material that had never been shown publicly. We suspect hers is not the only such archive sitting quietly in someone's home.

We're not looking for finished, polished stories. Partial material, a handful of works, a name half-remembered, a family anecdote, is exactly the kind of thing that lets us start asking better questions.

An Open Project

We're publishing this now, in an unfinished state, because we think the gaps are worth naming publicly rather than waiting until we have a complete answer. Consider this the first entry in an ongoing thread rather than a conclusion. As more material comes in, we'll return to update this piece, or write new ones alongside it.

If you have something to share, or simply a lead worth following, please get in touch.

Sources consulted: Richard Cork, David Bomberg (Yale University Press, 1987); Cliff Holden, "The History of the Borough Group" (2004, cliffholden.co.uk); Kate Aspinall, "Artist Versus Teacher: The Problem of David Bomberg's Pedagogical Legacy," Tate Papers, no.33 (2020); Kate Aspinall, "Mark of the Times: Charcoal and the Borough Group" (Borough Road Gallery, 2016); Dominika Buchowska, "Teaching Art in Post-War Britain: The Case of the Borough Group 1945–1953" (Adam Mickiewicz University); Mirosław Adam Supruniuk, "'Permanence and Liquidity.' Polish Art in Great Britain in the 20th Century — Introduction to a Description," Archiwum Emigracji, vol. 3 (33) 2023; Ben Uri Collection and Art UK artist records for Janina Baranowska; Art UK and Messums gallery records for Miles and Susanna Richmond.

The Radical Classroom: Bomberg's Teaching Methods in Context

What does it mean to teach someone not how to paint, but how to see?

David Bomberg never thought of himself primarily as a teacher. He arrived at the Borough Polytechnic in 1945 as a working artist whose reputation had been shaped by decades of struggle, first as a member of the pre-war avant-garde, then as a war artist, and later as a painter whose mature style resisted easy classification. Yet it was in the classroom, perhaps more than on the canvas, that Bomberg's influence proved most enduring. The students who passed through his life drawing classes: Dorothy Mead, Edna Mann, Cliff Holden, Miles Richmond, Dennis Creffield among them, went on to form the Borough Group, carrying his ideas forward long after his own reputation had faded from institutional view.

Bomberg's pedagogy centred on a single, often-repeated instruction: find the "spirit in the mass." Students were pushed to abandon academic conventions of outline and description, and instead to feel their way toward the underlying structure and weight of a form: its mass, its rhythm, its presence in space. Drawing, in this method, was not a matter of recording appearances but of registering a bodily, almost physical encounter with the subject. Sessions could be gruelling and confrontational; Bomberg was known to tear up work he considered dishonest or merely decorative. For some students this was liberating. For others, as later accounts make clear, his authority could be difficult, even punishing, a tension worth holding alongside any celebration of his method.

Bomberg was not alone in rejecting the academy during these years. Across the Atlantic, and in different corners of Europe, a handful of educators were arriving at strikingly similar conclusions: that traditional art instruction had exhausted itself, and that something more experiential was needed.

Black Mountain College

At Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Josef Albers, a former Bauhaus master who had fled Germany in the 1930s, built a teaching practice around direct, sustained observation of colour and material. Rather than lecturing on theory, Albers had students spend weeks working with simple materials, learning through trial and error how colours behave in relation to one another. Black Mountain's wider ethos went further still: it dissolved the boundary between disciplines entirely, bringing together painters, poets, dancers, and composers under one educational roof. John Cage and Merce Cunningham both passed through its orbit, and the college became known less for producing a single house style than for cultivating a particular way of working, improvisatory, collaborative, resistant to hierarchy.

Where Bomberg sought a single, near-mystical truth beneath appearances, Albers's method was more systematic, closer to a science of perception. Both, however, shared a conviction that seeing had to be relearned from first principles, and that this could not be taught through demonstration or copying alone.

Camberwell and William Johnstone

Closer to home, William Johnstone's tenure as Principal of Camberwell School of Art offers a useful comparison. Johnstone championed a similarly anti-academic, exploratory approach to art education, and like Bomberg, placed enormous weight on the teacher's own conviction as a guiding force in the studio. The two men's paths crossed London's post-war art school landscape at a moment when institutions were quietly experimenting with just how far pedagogy could depart from Victorian drawing-room conventions.

What the Comparison Reveals

Set alongside Albers and Johnstone, Bomberg's teaching looks less like an isolated eccentricity and more like part of a wider, largely uncoordinated mid-century movement, one in which a generation of artist-teachers, often themselves displaced or marginalised by the war, sought to build something more honest than what they had inherited. What distinguishes these pedagogies from one another is not simply method but structure: Black Mountain diffused authority across an entire community of practice, while Bomberg's classroom remained organised, often uncomfortably, around a single dominant vision.

That structure had consequences. The same intensity of belief that made Bomberg's teaching so formative for painters like Mead and Mann also shaped, and at times constrained, what kind of artistic life the group considered possible, a tension the recent research into Edna Mann's career makes visible. Radical pedagogy, in other words, does not only open doors. It also decides which doors remain closed.

To look again at Bomberg's classroom alongside Albers's studio or Johnstone's Camberwell is not to diminish his legacy, but to place it within a fuller history, one in which teaching itself, as much as painting, became a site of experiment, risk, and occasionally recognising limiting factors. The Borough Group's paintings are the visible result of that classroom. The archive's task is to hold onto the fuller, more complicated story behind them.

Borough Road Gallery and Young Poets Network

What happens when a collection of paintings becomes an invitation to write?

Earlier this year, Borough Road Gallery partnered with The Poetry Society's Young Poets Network and poet and visual artist Sophie Herxheimer to launch The Colour Challenge, inviting young writers to respond to colour through poetry. Inspired by A David Bomberg Legacy: The Sarah Rose Collection at London South Bank University, the challenge encouraged participants to look closely at the world around them, to consider colour not simply as description but as sensation, memory, atmosphere and emotion.

The response exceeded all expectations.

We received 762 poems from 492 young poets, with entries arriving from across the UK and around the world. Young writers submitted work from more than 50 countries, including Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Singapore, South Africa, Ukraine, the United States and Zimbabwe.

The challenge drew inspiration from the artists represented in the Sarah Rose Collection, particularly David Bomberg's belief in the "spirit in the mass" — a commitment to direct observation, sensory experience and creative integrity. Participants were invited to explore colour through close looking, ekphrastic writing, and reflections on their own creative processes.

The resulting poems demonstrated remarkable originality and range. Some transformed colour into intimate meditations on family relationships; others used vivid palettes to explore memory, migration, landscape and identity. Across the entries, colour became a way of understanding the world anew.

The winning poems responded to six artworks from the collection:

• The Cochineal Blonde Prize — Peroxide (My Mother's Heart) by Zelda Cahill-Patten

• The Purple Waltz Prize — Purple Flowers by Nisha Patel

• The Scarlet Tree Prize — Burning Branches by Mya Shafi

• The Copper Antenna Prize — Diary of a Peacock Butterfly by Andrea Domingo

• The Fluorescent Blue Prize — I've been thinking about how I used to swim at night by Alyna Shae Lim

• The Orange Paper Prize — The Way Light Passes Through by Lauren Chung

Together, these poems reveal the continuing vitality of the collection and the many ways contemporary audiences can engage with art. They show that the works in the Sarah Rose Collection are not fixed historical objects but living prompts for imagination, reflection and creative exchange.

We are enormously grateful to The Poetry Society's Young Poets Network and Sophie Herxheimer for their collaboration, and to every young poet who shared their work with us. The extraordinary number of submissions reminds us that colour remains one of the most immediate and universal ways we experience the world—and that poetry continues to offer powerful new ways of seeing.

ypn.poetrysociety.org.uk

Edna Mann: Drawing in the Studio of David Bomberg

Recently, Borough Road Gallery was contacted by Sally Baldwin, whose husband, the artist Mark Baldwin, is the son of the painter Edna Mann. Sally generously shared photographs of paintings, drawings, and two surviving portfolios dating from Mann’s time in David Bomberg’s life drawing classes at the Borough Polytechnic during the late 1940s. Preserved within the family estate, these works offer a rare and intimate glimpse into the practice of an artist whose contribution to post-war British art is only now beginning to receive renewed attention.

Born in East London in 1926, Mann was described by her siblings as a “brave”, “vivacious” “lifeforce”. Educated first at Romford County High School for Girls, she later studied at the South-East Essex Technical College and Dagenham School of Art, where she encountered David Bomberg. Like fellow student Dorothy Mead, Mann was at first uncertain about Bomberg’s teaching methods, but quickly became committed to his radical approach to drawing and structure. In 1944 she followed Bomberg to the City Literary Institute and later, in 1946, to the Borough Polytechnic, now London South Bank University.

Works produced during this period include powerful charcoal drawings of Westminster Abbey, the interior of St Paul’s Cathedral, and a striking cityscape likely drawn from the roof of the Borough Road building itself. These drawings demonstrate Mann’s engagement with Bomberg’s belief that drawing should move beyond description to capture the deeper rhythms and energies of lived experience.

United by their admiration for Bomberg, Mann, Dorothy Mead, Cliff Holden and Miles Richmond formed the Borough Group in 1946, an exhibiting society that remained active until 1951. Before the group’s formation, Mann had accepted a scholarship to the Royal College of Art to study book illustration, but left after only a year due to what she experienced as entrenched opposition to Bomberg’s ideas within the institution. Her loyalty to Bomberg’s vision came at a personal cost. After becoming pregnant, she was reportedly encouraged to leave the Borough Group, as Bomberg did not believe it possible to sustain both motherhood and serious artistic practice.

Yet Mann continued to work throughout her life, combining motherhood, teaching, writing and painting. Raising three children with her husband Don Baldwin, she developed a practice that evolved significantly over time. Moving through Forest Hill, Romford, Leytonstone and Woodford, Mann taught art first at Lucton County Secondary Modern School in Debden near Loughton before later teaching at Burnt Mill School in Harlow between 1962 and 1978.

According to Don Baldwin, Mann gradually transitioned out of what he referred to as her “mud plum” period during the late 1940s and 1950s, increasingly embracing vivid colour and abstraction during the following decades. This shift is visible in works such as Bones and Roses, shared by the Baldwin family, in which structural discipline gives way to a more expressive and intuitive handling of colour and form.

1965 proved a particularly important year for Mann. Her work was included in the Harlow Arts Festival, she held her first solo exhibition of paintings, drawings and prints at the Drian Gallery in London — founded by the Lithuanian émigré Halima Nalecz — and she also achieved success as a writer. Having experimented with imaginative and observational writing since the late 1950s, Mann co-wrote the play The Leavers with Frank Hitchcock, Nigel Graham and Anthony Hall, which was broadcast by the BBC in February that year.

Today Mann remains well represented within the Sarah Rose Collection, yet opportunities to encounter her work publicly remain rare. The portfolios recently shared by Sally and Mark Baldwin therefore offer an important reminder of how much of this history survives within family collections and personal archives. They reveal not only the depth of Mann’s artistic achievement, but also the wider histories of women artists whose practices persisted despite institutional resistance, domestic expectations and historical neglect.

Borough Road Gallery would like to thank Sally Baldwin and Mark Baldwin for generously sharing these materials and photographs.

For further information regarding Edna Mann’s work, Sally Baldwin can be contacted at: sallyabentley@gmail.com or on 07875 104 637.