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.