DAVID BOMBERG (1890-1957)
Peca Vieja (2,617m)
Spain (Asturias)
In Sunrise in the mountains, Picos de Asturias, oil on canvas, 1935
The mountain
Peca Vieja (2,617m) is a mountain that is one of the Picos de Europa, also known as Picos de Aturias or Picos in Spain. The peaks of Europe (in Spanish: Picos de Europa, often called Los Picos), the highest massif of the Cordillera Cantabria, are located between the provinces of Asturias, Leûn and Cantabria, about thirty kilometers from the sea. They culminate in Torre de Cerredo, at 2,648 m.
The approximate dimensions of the massif are 40 km long (east - west) by 20 km wide (north - south) and an area of 502 km2. On May 30, 1995, the Picos de Europa National Park was created. For sailors coming from the west on the Atlantic Ocean who sailed by sight, Los Picos was the first land visible on the horizon, which explains the origin of the name. They are framed in the north by the Sierra de Cuera and the Sierra del Escudo, to the south by the Sierra de Alba and to the west by the Sierra de Ave.
The painter
David Garshen Bomberg was an English painter, and one of the Whitechapel Boys. Bomberg was one of the most audacious of the exceptional generation of artists who studied at the Slade School of Art under Henry Tonks, and which included Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer, C.R.W. Nevinson and Dora Carrington. Bomberg painted a series of complex geometric compositions combining the influences of cubism and futurism in the years immediately preceding World War I; typically using a limited number of striking colours, turning humans into simple, angular shapes, and sometimes overlaying the whole painting a strong grid-work colouring scheme. He was expelled from the Slade School of Art in 1913, with agreement between the senior teachers Tonks, Frederick Brown and Philip Wilson Steer, because of the audacity of his breach from the conventional approach of that time.
Whether because his faith in the machine age had been shattered by his experiences as a private soldier in the trenches or because of the pervasive retrogressive attitude towards modernism in Britain Bomberg moved to a more figurative style in the 1920s and his work became increasingly dominated by portraits and landscapes drawn from nature. Gradually developing a more expressionist technique, he travelled widely through the Middle East and Europe.
by Francis Rousseau
