The frenetic activity of war-time workers in an artificially lit Ministry of Defence underground bomb store is captured by Bomberg’s agitated expressionism. Their movements are, however, careful as heavy high explosive shells are stacked within the 90 foot deep disused gypsum mines near Stone Pit Hills, commandeered by RAF Fauld at Tutbury, near Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire. 

Bomberg’ s ambition to be acknowledged, in the present guise as a war artist, led to a two week commission from the War Artists’ Advisory Committee to work in these unusual settings. The ‘ Bomb Store’ series, ranging from painted canvases to drawings on grease proof paper, cohered with the artist’ s earlier interests in mechanistic forms, in human figures, in animated motion, and in walls of rock. Richard Cork remarks on these significant art historical documents, ‘Compared with many of the works commissioned so plentifully from other war artists, who often produced anodyne images testifying only to their own lassitude or detachment, Bomberg’s paintings are alive with a sinister, raging wildness. Even the much- admired young painter Graham Sutherland could not match the potency of Bomberg’s vision, when he was asked to tackle a similar subject in 1944.’ (Richard Cork, David Bomberg, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 1987, p. 238)

The Artist’s Family
Private Collection, U.K.

New York, Guillaume Gallozzi, The British War Artists: A Critical Perspective from the Trenches through The Blitz, 1989, no. 8