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Artist or Maker: David Bomberg (1890-1957)
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Provenance: Wilfred Roberts, Cumbria.
with James Kirkman, London, from whom purchased by the present owner in 1975.
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Notes: The present composition, traditionally known as Ghetto Theatre, relates closely to a well-known picture from 1920 with similar dimensions, (30 x 25 in.), also called Ghetto Theatre which is in the collection of the Ben Uri Gallery, London. Each work combines a rich palette with emphasis on bold reds with strong diagonal form.
Richard Cork discusses the Ben Uri Gallery's Ghetto Theatre, 'Ghetto Theatre proves that Bomberg's figures were unable to find real enjoyment even in their leisure hours. Exhibited at the 1920 London Group show, it marks a deliberate return to the East End Jewish subject-matter which inspired some of his finest pre-war work. But the mood has now changed as radically as the style. In earlier paintings like Ju-Jitsu and The Mud Bath, Bomberg depicted figures who were dehumanized and yet filled with muscular vitality. Their energy gave his work an extraordinary dynamism, implying that he wanted to celebrate the toughness and resilience of Whitechapel life. Ghetto Theatre, by contrast, is subdued. The people in the Pavilion Theatre's audience may be more 'human' than their counterparts in Bomberg's earlier work, but now they lack animation. Hunched and weary, they slump on the hard benches and seem incapable of responding to the play with any gusto. Seven years before, in Jewish Theatre, Bomberg had drawn an audience in the same auditorium reacting with great dramatic intensity to the performance on stage. Now, however, the spectators remain motionless and eerily becalmed. They seem hemmed in by their surroundings, and the railing which Bomberg has placed so prominently in front of them has the cruel force of bars in a prison cell. The figures exude a melancholy which surely reflected the artist's own feelings, as he contemplated his own frustrated position in a country which refused to provide the support he required. The Whitechapel area, where he had once felt so completely at home, is seen in Ghetto Theatre as a place of narrow confinement. Having escaped from the boundaries of a life which so richly stimulated his early work, Bomberg could never bring himself to settle in the East End again' (see R. Cork, David Bomberg, Yale, 1987, pp. 135-6).
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