Shocking his tutors, Bomberg was a blazing radical, influenced by Italian Futurists and by the Cubist experiments of artists he met in Paris on a trip with Jacob Epstein in 1913, including Picasso and Modigliani. Declining Wyndham Lewis’s invitation to join the Vorticist movement, Bomberg set off on his own. But it’s a shock, in the gloom of Room 1 of “Young Bomberg and the Old Masters,” to confront the sharp angles and singing colors of Bomberg’s canvases of the 1910s, and the great figures found in Sappers at Work, of 1918–1919. What are they doing here? They belong in the Tate, and this exhibition is a good collaboration between sister galleries, but still, their presence in Room 1 jolts our expectations. It’s at once exciting and sad: all these early works, in different ways, have undertones of pain and passion, and it’s poignant to think that Bomberg never knew they would be on show here, in the National Gallery he loved.
