Bomb Store was produced in response to a commission from the War Artists Advisory Committee (WAAC). Though he wrote to the committee offering his services when it was first established in 1939, it was not until 23 February 1942 that Bomberg was formally invited by the WAAC to paint the munitions dump at RAF Fauld, near Burton-on-Trent in Staffordshire. The commission was worth 25 guineas and he was offered third class travel expenses to get there. He was instructed not to show his work to anyone upon its completion, so as to allow for censorship – a stipulation that Bomberg followed with alacrity. Such were the Air Ministry’s security precautions that he was even asked to leave his work at the depot each night.

Bomberg left London by train for Burton-on-Trent on 8 April. Located in a disused gypsum mine, the bomb store was later the site of a military accident in 1944 when the munitions combusted, causing the largest non-nuclear explosion of all time. In spite of the danger, the project spurred Bomberg to new creative efforts after a period of artistic paralysis which had started in 1938. He was free to roam around the vast subterranean site, observing the RAF personnel at work and making drawings. Bombs were transported into the store using a miniature railway that spread throughout the labyrinth of tunnels. Once they were deposited underground, it was left for military personnel to handle the five-hundred- and one-thousand-pound bombs into large heaps, sometimes stacking them against the walls of the mine seven bombs high.

Instead of producing a single work as the commission required, over a period of two weeks in Staffordshire Bomberg made several oil on paper studies and a small number of paintings in oil on canvas which were finished back in his London studio. This work is an example of an oil on paper work from the cycle, which is in strong contrast to the relative lightness of canvas paintings such as that in the Tate collection. He quickly worked through his supply of canvases during his visit to Fauld, subsequently reverting to the use of paper supports or even the grease-proof paper which he brought along to wrap up his paintings. Bomb Store was likely started while Bomberg was still on site in Staffordshire. As he explained in a letter to the WAAC secretary upon his return, ‘the Paintings on the spot, owing to the difficulties of lighting – had to be left incomplete – and on the completing of these Paintings with the help of the Drawings I have been engaged since my return’. Bomb Store was perhaps one of those paintings begun in the mine and subsequently worked on by Bomberg back in his studio, as is suggested by the heavily wrought surface of the paint.

Bomberg’s wife Lilian later recalled his intimate acquaintance with the munitions store. 'I was a bit fearful when I learned David not only got lost among the bombs, but I knew how curiously he climbed, slithered and slid among and over the piles to get the angle and form of interest'. As Lilian hinted, though Bomb Store grew from the artist’s close observations of the subject, the painting is nevertheless characterised by a lucid rectilinear formalism. The rhetorical effect of painterly brushstrokes is underpinned by a self-imposed rule, with the salient elements of the painting all executed using a loaded brush applied in long, straight lines.

These brushstrokes in Bomb Store have structural purpose, allowing Bomberg to create a sense of confined space in his painting. This work in particular uses an elevated angle of perspective, looking down on a sequence of arch-like struts – perhaps an indication of how the tunnels in the mine were supported. Set against a pitch-black ground, the streaks of mauve, yellow and orange-red carry a suppressed hint to the bombs’ destructive potential.

One of Bomberg’s students from later in the 1940s, Frank Auerbach, recalled that he kept a volume of Carceri etchings by the acclaimed eighteenth-century antiquarian print-maker Giovanni Battista Piranesi. These prints depict fathomless architectural caverns – an obvious art historical lineage for Bomberg’s bomb store paintings. As the scholar Richard Cork has pointed out, however, Bomberg went beyond Piranesi: ‘the Bomb Store paintings make that space even more ambiguous and perplexing, fusing the mine, the workers and the bombs they handled in images so densely impacted that we are sometimes unable to identify them with complete confidence.’ In Cork’s estimation, the bomb store paintings are some of the finest achievements from later in the artist’s career, possessing painterly vitality and an understanding of violent conflict which distinguishes them as some of the greatest artworks made during the Second World War.