El Barrio San Francisco, Ronda

Bomberg’s arrival in Spain marked a critical turning point in the artist’s career, the unfettered beauty and wildness of its landscape inspiring his most expressive and uninhibited works. Bomberg moved to the Andalusian city, Ronda, in 1934. Sitting 750 metres above sea level and split by a deep gorge, the city offered dramatic images of plunging rock-faces and fragile houses perched atop the ravine’s treacherous ridges. Guided by the site’s verticality and geological distress, Bomberg’s brushwork loosened, revealing the emergence of an expressive style that ventured away from perfecting the illusion of distance, and instead explored what Bomberg called 'the expanding mass'. The diagonal lines of green, red and ochre pigment across the lower half of the painting describe the gloriously untamed terrain that gave rise to Bomberg’s newly dynamic and liberated style.

El Barrio San Francisco, Ronda, was painted nearly twenty years after Bomberg first arrived in the city. Bomberg and his partner Lilian were forced to flee Ronda in 1935 due to the oncoming Spanish Civil War, but the artist’s deep connection to the city endured. His relationship with the site was rekindled in 1954, when he returned with the intention of establishing a school of painting and language. For the site of this endeavour, the couple rented Villa Paz, ‘part of an old palace, crumbling but beautiful’, which offered panoramic views of the gorge and the mountains far beyond. Despite its awe-inspiring location, the structure’s poor conditions led to the school’s failure. This, however, recentred Bomberg who returned to painting the landscape that had stirred him decades before. The artist’s uninhibited strokes in both his charcoal sketches and paintings from 1954, testify to the artistic freedom the land granted him.