One of these students was Dorothy Mead, who was especially dedicated to Bomberg’s methods and was forced to leave the Slade art school because of her allegiance to the British Modernist artist. Bomberg’s influence on Mead is evident in her paintings, particularly her depictions of bodies, figures and landscapes: stylistically, Mead’s work is reminiscent of Bomberg’s post-war paintings, using thick expressive brush strokes and dark colours to portray a sense of the subject and its essence, an idea that was integral to Bomberg’s philosophy. It is difficult to delineate precisely how far Mead was able to capture the Spirit of her subjects, since we cannot know in detail her relationship with what and who she painted, nor how far she allowed her subjectivity to distort her reality. One can assume with some confidence however that she aimed to exact the Spirit of her subjects through her use of colour and the presentation of form in her works. In her 1955 work Portrait[iii] (left), she uses bold yellow and blue brush strokes over a dark red and brown background to create the suggestion of an anonymous sitter. Compared to her undated self-portrait titled Self-Portrait[iv](right), it is clear she perceived herself quite differently to her sitter in Portrait. The use of duller colours and more succinct brush strokes in Self-Portrait might suggest she had a less-than passionate view of herself, while the vibrant, even violent feel to Portrait implies a potentially tumultuous or impassioned view of her unnamed sitter. This short comparison highlights how Mead attempted to portray her perception of her subjects and thus how she interpreted Bomberg’s philosophy of the Spirit in the Mass; the different stylistic techniques in her depiction of herself compared to that of her subject is evidence of an attempt to capture the essence and phenomenology of the individual.
[i][i] Roy Oxlade, Bomberg Papers: The Spirit in the Mass, a commentary, together with transcriptions of various previously unpublished notes, p. XIV (introduction), Royal College of Art, 1980
[ii] Cliff Holden, Bomberg’s Teaching – Some Misconceptions, p.3, 2004, Cliff Holden
[iii] Dorothy Mead, Portrait, 1955, Borough Road Gallery Archive
[iv] Dorothy Mead, Self-Portrait, (undated), Borough Road Gallery Archive