After the period dominated by enclosed, highly-pressurised flower studies, Bomberg turned to a more spacious and overt recognition of the conflict surrounding him in wartime London. He had long used charcoal when developing landscape compositions or portraits, but during 1944 he began using the medium for large-scale works in their own right, depicting the burnt city-scape of the capital. His charcoal drawings reflect with undiminished immediacy the almost heroic drama mixed with gritty, morbid reality represented by the charred architectural remains of London. The Round Church, Middle Temple depicts the historic Round Church of the Temple Church in central London, founded by the Knights Templar as their English headquarters in the twelfth century. The church was modelled on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem which Bomberg had visited and depicted while living in Palestine in the twenties. It was in Palestine that he first developed his skill in detailed architectural observation, and this experience from twenty years earlier is carried into this charcoal of The Round Church. With his characteristic vigour, the artist presents the building as a sturdy, commanding mass. This may reflect the fact that The Round Church itself remained unharmed while parts of Middle Temple were damaged during the height of the Blitz in May 1941. Surrounded by the Gothic arches of the damaged adjacent main church nave, Bomberg’s dynamic strokes are tempered by subtle tonal variation.

From autumn 1945, Bomberg took on a weekend teaching post at the Bartlett School of Architecture, having shown his charcoal drawings to Sir Charles Reilly. Reilly strongly endorsed Bomberg in a letter to the school, commenting on his ‘extraordinary powers of giving a sense of mass’, and noting how ‘it is on mass and volume a modern building so much relies’. The stark massing of works such as The Round Church, stripped of detail and rising voluminously, surely appealed to Reilly’s progressive modernist taste. As if dealing with rock rather than paper, Bomberg hammers away at the structure, paring it down from the space that surrounds it until only robust form remains. It was during this time that Bomberg began to develop what his student Richard Michelmore has called his ‘no holds barred, end justifies the mean’ approach to draughtsmanship. Michelmore remembered Bomberg emphasising how there is ‘an order peculiar to one’s own vision of a thing, and order which underlies the image’. This philosophy was disseminated by Bomberg through a number of part-time teaching posts, and was amply envisioned in works such as The Round Church. Part artwork, part teaching tool or textbook, it bears witness to the beginning of the anti-academic form of pedagogy for which Bomberg would grow notorious through the next decade, informing later work by Marr including Toledo and Self-Portrait.

The damage to Middle Temple’s main church would not be fully restored until the 1950s, and, in 1947, Bomberg returned to produce a charcoal closely related to his previous view. Now he solely focused on this damaged portion of the building. The architectural mass almost entirely fills the sheet, recalling Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s eighteenth-century etchings depicting imagined subterranean spaces. Incomplete walls and empty windows, undarkened by Bomberg’s furious shading, eliminate the solidity that defined his effort three years earlier. Now the walls of Middle Temple appear wavering and skeletal, more akin to scaffolding than centuries old stone. Bomberg invites contemplation of the monumental and deeply historic made fragile to deliver an unexpected poignancy only heighted by the brusque handling.

By this time, after turns at Dagenham Art School and the City Literary Institute where he met Cliff Holden and Dorothy Mead, Bomberg had settled into a more permanent post at the Borough Polytechnic. It was here and in work like Middle Temple that he at last codified the teaching he believed would be the ‘great driving force’ to raise the standard of art teaching and practice in Britain. His disregard for perspective – evident in both works here, and the cause of such fractious relationships with superiors and students previously – as well as his rejection of any concrete method of draughtsmanship, liberated his students who quickly began to constellate around him. As a young Frank Auerbach – who joined Bomberg’s classes in the year of Middle Temple’s production – later remarked, this approach was powered by ‘probably the most original, stubborn, radical intelligence that was to be found in art schools’ after the Second World War. Bomberg’s charcoals made from 1944 are rightly considered the seed from which Auerbach’s building site oils grow, but they can also be seen as a clear display of the working method Bomberg used to define all form. They provide a key to his later Ronda landscapes as well as an important point of departure for Marr’s approach to landscape.