Henry Moore excepted, the English have always had an uncomfortable relationship with their modern artists. While they’re alive they try to ignore them, and after their deaths they discover them, often bestowing appreciation out of all proportion to their gifts. Of course, England isn’t alone in its hostility to its artists. But at the beginning of the modern movement, it was the only country to create an atmosphere so uncongenial that it actually drove some artists into exile. The most famous cases are Walter Sickert, who lived in France for seven years from 1896, and, thirty years later, David Bomberg.

Bomberg’s career (he was born in 1890 and died in 1957) was one of the strangest and most tragic in the history of British modernism. He made an auspicious beginning when, in his early twenties, he painted a number of ambitious pictures in a highly personal, Cubist-Futurist style. In the Hold (1913-14), a dockland scene, and The Mud Bath (1914), whose subject is a London health spa, are the most famous of these. He had met Wyndham Lewis shortly before and was to become loosely associated with the Vorticist movement, Lewis’s version of the Futurism of Marinetti and Boccioni. But after the war Bomberg all but disappeared from view, becoming so marginal a presence in the contemporary British art scene that in 1949 Lewis, by then an art critic for The Listener, was prompted to write: “What happened to Bomberg after 1920? . . . He ought to