Becoming Gustav Metzger: Uncovering The Early Years, 1945-59

Bomberg remarked, ‘There is no fixed way in which a line goes, but there is a relationship between lines’. This is one of a series of drawings of the Inns of Court that he completed in the mid- to late forties during the period when he began his career as a highly influential teacher. Towards the end of the war he took over a post as drawing master at the Bartlett School of Architecture prior to his appointment at the Borough Polytechnic (1946–53) where he taught Gustav Metzger, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff among many others. Bomberg’s teaching also strengthened and informed his own work. Here he uses strong, fluid charcoal strokes to trace the outline of the building to evoke a sense of mass – an important concept in both his practice and his teaching.