Artwork
Interior
Interior is a drawing by David Bomberg. It dates from 1912 and is held in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
About this work
Bright red walls lean at odd angles, while yellow and green rectangles slice through the space.
This drawing shows a room split into sharp, slanted blocks of color. Bright red walls lean at odd angles, while yellow and green rectangles slice through the space. A set of stairs twists up the middle, but the lines don’t quite match real life. The background is a soft blue, with a faint green hill peeking through.
The artist played with perspective—walls and stairs don’t follow normal rules. This was made in 1912, when artists were experimenting with how things look.
Check out the Victoria and Albert Museum to see more works like this.
Overview
Created in 1912, *Interior* is a drawing by British artist David Bomberg. Executed during his formative years, the work exemplifies his early investigation of spatial organization and the tension between order and movement. The piece presents an interior scene rendered through intersecting planes of vivid colour, offering a glimpse into the artist’s developing visual language.
Subject & Meaning
The composition depicts a room broken into angular sections, with walls painted in striking red that tilt away from conventional alignment. Yellow and green rectangles intersect the space, while a spiralling staircase rises centrally, its geometry deliberately at odds with realistic perspective. A muted blue background and a distant green hill suggest an ambiguous depth beyond the interior, hinting at a dialogue between interiority and the external world.
Technique & Style
Bomberg employs a bold, flattened approach, using sharp, slanted blocks of colour to construct the scene. The drawing abandons traditional linear perspective, favoring a dynamic arrangement of planes that convey movement within the static medium. The palette—dominant reds, yellows, greens, and blues—creates a vivid contrast that reinforces the structural fragmentation characteristic of his early modernist experiments.
History & Provenance
Bomberg produced *Interior* while studying at the Slade School of Art, where he was contemporaneous with artists such as Mark Gertler and Stanley Spencer. His unconventional methods led to his expulsion from the Slade in 1913, marking a decisive break from academic norms. The drawing remains part of the artist’s early oeuvre, reflecting the period when he was establishing his reputation within the Whitechapel Boys circle.
Artist & collection
Artist
David Garshen Bomberg (5 December 1890 – 19 August 1957) was a British painter, and one of the Whitechapel Boys.
