Racehorses

In May 1914, David Bomberg exhibited this extraordinary chalk-and-wash drawing among his five exhibits in the ‘Jewish Section’ of the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s exhibition Twentieth Century Art: A Review of Modern Movements, which he co-curated with Jacob Epstein. Simultaneously, his friend John Rodker (a racing enthusiast) reproduced it as a frontispiece in The Dial Monthly, explaining that it was set in a paddock at a race meeting, that the two figures on the front right of the composition were bookies, those to their left spectators, and that the style was ‘cubist’.