Bomberg and Art Education

Interesting workshop at the National Gallery looking at Bomberg’s art education and how in turn he educated other artists.

This day was to compliment the current exhibition “Bomberg and the Old Masters” and we opened the day with a talk by Richard Cork, the curator of the show, telling us about David  Bomberg’s early practice of studying and copying works in the National Gallery. This was followed by David Boyd Haycock looking at the training Bomberg would have got at the Slade under Henry Tonks and how he rebelled against this.

We then had two talks by Kate Aspinall and Leon Betsworth looking at Bomberg’s time as a teacher at the Borough Polytechnic, the artists he trained and the style of painting he inadvertently established. Most interesting was that the latter speaker’s office is on the room in which Bomberg taught and that the college, now South Bank University, have a collection of the artist’s work which it doesn’t have on show.

We ended the day with a talk on current art education by Michele Gregson, the General Secretary Elect of the National Society for Education in Art and Design, talking about the importance of continuing to teach art and craft and the problems it faces. I would have liked to hear a bit more about how art is taught today in art schools.