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Lot Essay
San Miguel, Toledo, Afternoon (1929) stands among the finest surviving statements of the journey that transformed the course of David Bomberg’s celebrated career. Painted from a rooftop above the Spanish city, it belongs to a small, important group of Toledo pictures in which Bomberg’s handling of paint became suddenly expressive—thick, urgent, built in confident passages rather than description—as he abandoned the analytical structures of his Cubist-influenced years for a direct, physical response to landscape. Bomberg would later tell a friend, that he had ‘seen a bit of landscape in an El Greco’ and that this alone had sent him to Toledo (quoted in R. Cork, David Bomberg, New Haven and London, 1987, p. 180).
The journey to Toledo followed closely on the heels of considerable critical attention: Bomberg’s exhibition of Palestinian views at the Leicester Galleries the previous year had drawn strong notices from the London press. Paul Konody, writing in The Observer, called him a ‘matured artist, free from affectation and eccentricity’, whose youthful experiments in Cubism were ‘sensibly applied to the structural emphasis of representational work’ (‘Art and Artists’, The Observer, 12 February 1928, quoted in W. Lipke, David Bomberg: A Critical Study of his Life and Work, London, 1967, p. 65). Yet it was not this acclaim that decided Bomberg’s next move, but a single picture by El Greco.
With funds from his patron Sir Ronald Storrs, Bomberg set out that September on a tour that would eventually encompass Morocco and the Greek Islands, but a limited budget and a growing fascination with Toledo kept him there for the whole winter. He found lodgings on a rooftop directly opposite the Alcazar. It was from platforms like this, high above the city, that he painted the series of views for which the trip is now remembered. Lilian, his wife, later recalled climbing up to join him on the tower: ‘it was very, very cold’ she remembered, ‘with the wind whistling through the open walls’. Still, Bomberg painted with total absorption, indifferent to the Castilian chill. Toledo itself, he wrote to her that autumn, was a difficult subject in one respect: it lacked ‘gay colour’, and its palette was heavy in ‘purplish greys and blacks.’ His solution was not to soften the city, but to meet its severity with an equally uncompromising method, thickening his paint into ochres, russets and deep blue-greens applied with—in Richard Cork's phrase—‘a muscular directness’ that puts the viewer in mind of the artist's own hand and arm at work (op. cit., pp. 181-82).
The present canvas is among the most accomplished of Bomberg's Toledo views. Its subject is the church and convent of San Miguel, seen from across the ravine that separates the old city from the surrounding hills. A related view in the Tate collection, long mistitled San Justo and Toledo Hills (1929), was only correctly identified as the same building after a modern photograph confirmed the winding road and hillside behind it. Bomberg’s brush does not so much describe this landscape as excavate it: paint is dragged and pressed into ridges and furrows that read, on close examination, almost as geological strata, before resolving, at a distance, into the tower, the huddled roofs, and the wide valley beyond. It is a technique that transforms observation into something closer to physical labour. A generation later, this same instinct would draw his former pupil Frank Auerbach—who studied under Bomberg in evening classes at the Borough Polytechnic—towards his own thickly worked, obsessively revisited views of Primrose Hill in London. El Greco’s View of Toledo (circa 1596-1599), offers a similar sense of drama: the same steep, tumbling hills; the same restless movement between high towers and low roofs; and the same city caught beneath a heavy, almost stormy sky.
As David Sylvester has observed, ‘the painting is not a painting of a structure, but a painting of the discovering of a structure’. Only gradually does the eye disentangle the interlocking planes of wall, roof and hillside; the picture’s weight and mass settle into place as the composition comes finally into focus. San Miguel, Toledo, Afternoon asks exactly this of its viewer—inviting the same kind of discovery Sylvester describes Bomberg making himself, ‘feeling his way over [the landscape] with hands and feet and knees’—and rewards it with a picture that stands among the most physically direct and fully achieved statements of what Toledo, in that one difficult winter, gave back to Bomberg’s painting (David Bomberg 1890-1957, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1967).
The journey to Toledo followed closely on the heels of considerable critical attention: Bomberg’s exhibition of Palestinian views at the Leicester Galleries the previous year had drawn strong notices from the London press. Paul Konody, writing in The Observer, called him a ‘matured artist, free from affectation and eccentricity’, whose youthful experiments in Cubism were ‘sensibly applied to the structural emphasis of representational work’ (‘Art and Artists’, The Observer, 12 February 1928, quoted in W. Lipke, David Bomberg: A Critical Study of his Life and Work, London, 1967, p. 65). Yet it was not this acclaim that decided Bomberg’s next move, but a single picture by El Greco.
With funds from his patron Sir Ronald Storrs, Bomberg set out that September on a tour that would eventually encompass Morocco and the Greek Islands, but a limited budget and a growing fascination with Toledo kept him there for the whole winter. He found lodgings on a rooftop directly opposite the Alcazar. It was from platforms like this, high above the city, that he painted the series of views for which the trip is now remembered. Lilian, his wife, later recalled climbing up to join him on the tower: ‘it was very, very cold’ she remembered, ‘with the wind whistling through the open walls’. Still, Bomberg painted with total absorption, indifferent to the Castilian chill. Toledo itself, he wrote to her that autumn, was a difficult subject in one respect: it lacked ‘gay colour’, and its palette was heavy in ‘purplish greys and blacks.’ His solution was not to soften the city, but to meet its severity with an equally uncompromising method, thickening his paint into ochres, russets and deep blue-greens applied with—in Richard Cork's phrase—‘a muscular directness’ that puts the viewer in mind of the artist's own hand and arm at work (op. cit., pp. 181-82).
The present canvas is among the most accomplished of Bomberg's Toledo views. Its subject is the church and convent of San Miguel, seen from across the ravine that separates the old city from the surrounding hills. A related view in the Tate collection, long mistitled San Justo and Toledo Hills (1929), was only correctly identified as the same building after a modern photograph confirmed the winding road and hillside behind it. Bomberg’s brush does not so much describe this landscape as excavate it: paint is dragged and pressed into ridges and furrows that read, on close examination, almost as geological strata, before resolving, at a distance, into the tower, the huddled roofs, and the wide valley beyond. It is a technique that transforms observation into something closer to physical labour. A generation later, this same instinct would draw his former pupil Frank Auerbach—who studied under Bomberg in evening classes at the Borough Polytechnic—towards his own thickly worked, obsessively revisited views of Primrose Hill in London. El Greco’s View of Toledo (circa 1596-1599), offers a similar sense of drama: the same steep, tumbling hills; the same restless movement between high towers and low roofs; and the same city caught beneath a heavy, almost stormy sky.
As David Sylvester has observed, ‘the painting is not a painting of a structure, but a painting of the discovering of a structure’. Only gradually does the eye disentangle the interlocking planes of wall, roof and hillside; the picture’s weight and mass settle into place as the composition comes finally into focus. San Miguel, Toledo, Afternoon asks exactly this of its viewer—inviting the same kind of discovery Sylvester describes Bomberg making himself, ‘feeling his way over [the landscape] with hands and feet and knees’—and rewards it with a picture that stands among the most physically direct and fully achieved statements of what Toledo, in that one difficult winter, gave back to Bomberg’s painting (David Bomberg 1890-1957, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1967).