.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
In February 1954 David and Lilian Bomberg left London for Ronda in Andalusia. They had not returned to Spain since 1935, when the oncoming Spanish Civil War had forced them to flee, and this return to Ronda was welcome to Bomberg. The couple first lived at Villa Paz, Palacio de Mondragon, from which Bomberg and his wife intended to run a School of Painting and English. The house was situated in the old quarter of the hill-top town, whose terrace looked out over the panoramic landscape. Lilian later wrote, 'The Villa Paz was part of an old palace, crumbling but beautiful' (see R. Cork, David Bomberg, New Haven and London, 1987, p. 300). The poor state of the building forced them to abandon their intentions of establishing a school, but this led to Bomberg returning to his work.
Richard Cork writes, 'Just as he had hoped, the return to the Spanish landscape rekindled the old intensity of response which he had first experienced in Toledo a quarter of a century before ... The failure of the Villa Paz enterprise was fortuitous in this respect, for his inability to teach gave him more time to resume his impassioned relationship with the locality around him' (ibid). Once again Bomberg and Lilian explored the mountainous terrain of Ronda on donkeys. At this time Bomberg produced wonderful expressive charcoal sketches, rendering the countryside through powerful tactile contours and heavily contrasting areas of light and shadow. This immediacy and expressive quality was converted into a small number of paintings from this period. The terracotta orange and ochre yellow pigments that he uses to depict the earth in Ronda Valley, Spain are in sharp contrast to the greens in the foreground, and they evoke a vivid sense of the heat of the place, with the vigorous brushstrokes conveying Bomberg's emotions in painting this landscape. Of a comparable painting, Rising Wind, Ronda, 1954 (private collection), Cork writes, 'The paint appears to take on the action of the wind itself, hitting the hillside with exclamatory force. This onrush of pigment, driving and swirling with a muscular momentum which reflects Bomberg's own exhilarated anticipation of the approaching tempest, threatens to overwhelm the rockface in a flurry of freewheeling brushmarks' (ibid, p. 302).
Richard Cork writes, 'Just as he had hoped, the return to the Spanish landscape rekindled the old intensity of response which he had first experienced in Toledo a quarter of a century before ... The failure of the Villa Paz enterprise was fortuitous in this respect, for his inability to teach gave him more time to resume his impassioned relationship with the locality around him' (ibid). Once again Bomberg and Lilian explored the mountainous terrain of Ronda on donkeys. At this time Bomberg produced wonderful expressive charcoal sketches, rendering the countryside through powerful tactile contours and heavily contrasting areas of light and shadow. This immediacy and expressive quality was converted into a small number of paintings from this period. The terracotta orange and ochre yellow pigments that he uses to depict the earth in Ronda Valley, Spain are in sharp contrast to the greens in the foreground, and they evoke a vivid sense of the heat of the place, with the vigorous brushstrokes conveying Bomberg's emotions in painting this landscape. Of a comparable painting, Rising Wind, Ronda, 1954 (private collection), Cork writes, 'The paint appears to take on the action of the wind itself, hitting the hillside with exclamatory force. This onrush of pigment, driving and swirling with a muscular momentum which reflects Bomberg's own exhilarated anticipation of the approaching tempest, threatens to overwhelm the rockface in a flurry of freewheeling brushmarks' (ibid, p. 302).