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Dimensions: 42 by 67cm., 16 1/2 by 26 1/2 in.
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Provenance: PROPERTY OF A PRIVATE COLLECTOR
Austen St. B. Harrison
The Warden and Fellows of Nuffield College, Oxford, by 1974
Sale, Sotheby's, London, 2nd May 1990, lot 59
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Exhibited: London, Alpine Gallery, Friday Club Exhibition, 1914, no.110;
London, Chenil Gallery, Works by David Bomberg, 1914, no.17;
Coventry, Herbert Art Gallery, David Bomberg, 1960, cat.no.101;
London, Tate Gallery and subsequent tour, David Bomberg 1890-1957, 1967, no.6;
London, Hayward Gallery, Vorticism and its Allies, Arts Council exhibition, 1974, no.28;
London, Tate Gallery, David Bomberg, 1988, no.16, illustrated in the exhibition catalogue.
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Literature: John Rodker, 'The New Movement in Art', Dial Monthly, May 1914, illustrated;
The Jewish Chronicle, 15th May 1914;
Richard Cork, David Bomberg, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1987, p.46
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Notes: The highly distinctive style which Bomberg developed in the 1912-14 period deserves to rank him at the forefront of the most avant-garde of British artists of those years and the major works of that period still challenge and astonish almost a century later.
The present work is, according to Richard Cork, the finest of the series of drawings produced on this theme, and demonstrates the rigorous application of formal experiments which Bomberg introduced to his work in his later student and immediate post-Slade years. He had begun to simplify and stylize his figures in his later student works, such as The Vision of Ezekiel (Coll.Tate Gallery) of 1912, where the figures have been reduced to a series of flat planes, and the directness of expression imbued into them by this reduction is very striking. Wyndham Lewis felt that Bomberg was drawing inspiration from Severini, and he would certainly have been able to see Severini's work in the first Futurist exhibition, held at the Sackville Gallery in March 1912.
The Racehorses series, like Bomberg's other explorations of themes, vary widely in their abstraction and stylization, but in the present work, the artist has achieved an almost complete move from literal representation, reducing the horses and figures to a limited vocabulary of tubular forms. By removing the more naturalistic elements, Bomberg has taken away the sense of a specific event and, although Rodker identifies the scene as the paddock of a racecourse, the drawing is much more about conveying an idea of movement and composition. In fact, it is unlikely that the image is of a paddock as all the horses are clearly moving in the same direction. The variety of poses among the jockeys and the bunching of the horses would be much more likely to point towards the nominal subject being the moments before the start of a race.
