Ghetto theatre; Behind the scenes

During 1919 Bomberg embarked on a series of pen and wash figurative studies executed on thin paper. Richard Cork comments, 'all the figures, regardless of how they are drawn, constantly assert a Bombergian sense of bulk. These studies are composed in an instinctively monumental way, and the gaunt settings they inhabit only accentuate their massive proportions. Although some of the locations refer directly to the stage ... the entire series is embued with a strong theatrical character ... The 'scenery' which Bomberg employs has a planar severity which recalls [Edward Gordon] Craig at his most minimal, and the figures who people the drawings often look like performers acting out a strange, vehemently stylized drama ... Bomberg is never savage enough to qualify as an Expressionist, and the London he inhabited was far removed from the Berlin of the Weimar Republic. But a number of these drawings do seem oppressed by a sense of danger, as if their protagonists were trapped in an alien environment where shadowy intruders might at any moment consign them to a Kafkaesque hell' (R. Cork, David Bomberg, New Haven and London, 1987, p. 128).