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

This painting depicting an unidentified London building is thought to date from c. 1949–53 but could have been executed as early as 1946 when Metzger recalled drawing the exterior of St. Paul’s Cathedral and both the interior and exterior of Westminster Abbey with Bomberg, whose evening classes he was then attending. As the single most formative influence on Metzger’s early work, Bomberg identified the notion of ‘quality in form’ as constituting an exploration for ‘the spirit in the mass … the indefinable in the definable’.