In 1953, shortly after organising the Borough Bottega exhibition at the Berkeley Galleries in London, Metzger resigned from the group, leading Bomberg to break off relations in anger. For three years Metzger did not paint. Table is one of a series of approximately 15 oil paintings and a greater number of drawings, often in coloured chalks, made in 1956 while Metzger was living in Kings Lynn, Norfolk, which represent his return to art making. The series takes as its subject a three-legged occasional table he had bought at auction. As with all of his paintings after 1956, rather than using a brush, Metzger applied the paint with a palette knife and with his fingers, a departure from the work he produced under Bomberg.
Although at first seen as a simple still life, Table resembles the mushroom cloud resulting from the explosion of an atomic bomb, the series coinciding with the artist’s increasing involvement with the Kings Lynn Committee for Nuclear Disarmament, as well as his participation in the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War. During the period in which the Table was made, Metzger realised that his activities as an artist and as a revolutionary activist might intersect. He also came to understand that such a position could inform the development of his work, both aesthetically and ethically, in ways that remained true to the principles of socially engaged art that he had learnt from Bomberg.
