Bomberg was one of the most audacious of the exceptional generation of artists who studied at the Slade School of Art under Henry Tonks, and which included Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer, C.R.W.

He was expelled from the Slade School of Art in 1913, with agreement between senior teachers Tonks, Frederick Brown and Philip Wilson Steer, because of the audacity of his breach from the conventional approach of that time.

[2] Whether because his faith in the machine age had been shattered by his experiences as a private soldier in the trenches or because of the pervasive retrogressive attitude towards modernism in Britain, Bomberg moved to a more figurative style in the 1920s and his work became increasingly dominated by portraits and landscapes drawn from nature.

Sickert's emphasis on the study of form and the representation of the "gross material facts" of urban life were an important early influence on Bomberg,[10] alongside Roger Fry's 1910 exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists, where he first saw the work of Paul Cézanne.

[8] Bomberg's artistic studies had involved considerable financial hardship but in 1911, with the help of John Singer Sargent and the Jewish Education Aid Society, he was able to attain a place at the Slade School of Art.

[13] Bomberg's response to this became clear in paintings such as Vision of Ezekiel (1912), in which he proved "he could absorb the most experimental European ideas, fuse these with Jewish influences and come up with a robust alternative of his own.

"[11] His dynamic, angular representations of the human form, combining the geometrical abstraction of cubism with the energy of the Futurists, established his reputation as a forceful member of the avant-garde and the most audacious of his contemporaries; bringing him to the attention of Wyndham Lewis (who visited him in 1912) and Filippo Marinetti.

In 1913, the year in which he was expelled from the Slade because of the radicalism of his approach, he travelled to France with Jacob Epstein, where among others he met Amedeo Modigliani, André Derain and Pablo Picasso.

His enthusiasm for the dynamism and aesthetics of the machine age gave him a natural affinity with Wyndham Lewis's emerging vorticist movement, and five of his works featured in the founding exhibition of the London Group in 1914.

[11] The exhibition featured several of Bomberg's early masterpieces, most notably The Mud Bath (1914), which was hung on an outside wall surrounded by Union Flags – causing "the horses drawing the 29 bus... to shy at it as they came round the corner of King's Road.

His experiences of its mechanized slaughter and the death of his brother in the trenches – as well as those of his friend Isaac Rosenberg and his supporter T. E. Hulme – permanently destroyed his faith in the aesthetics of the machine age.

[8] In radical opposition to the prevailing currents in avant-garde art, stimulated as these were by the enthusiasm for mechanization in Constructivism in Russia following the Revolution, Bomberg went to paint and draw in Palestine between 1923 and 1927, with the assistance of the Zionist Organization.

A six-month stay at Odessa in the Soviet Union in the second half of 1933, following Hitler's seizure of power in Germany, led Bomberg on his return to London to immediate resignation from the Communist Party.

Work from one of the best collections in private hands was shown on the fiftieth anniversary of his death in the exhibition In celebration of David Bomberg 1890-1957 at Daniel Katz Gallery, Old Bond Street, London (30 May – 13 July 2007).

[citation needed] The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University held an exhibition entitled The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914-18 from 30 September 2010 through 2 January 2011.