“Possibly a great artist,” a critic said of David Bomberg. It was an apt way of summing up the British painter’s wobbling reputation. Born in Birmingham in 1890 to Polish-Jewish immigrants, Bomberg was admitted to the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art in 1911, only to be expelled in 1913 for being too aesthetically radical. He developed a precise, muscular style of abstraction during the war years, only to scrap it after the Armistice of 1918. He befriended two pillars of modernism, Wyndham Lewis and Filippo Marinetti, only to lose both when they drifted toward Fascism. He died in 1957, flat broke and half forgotten. Today, he seems like a strong candidate for the greatest British painter between Turner and Bacon. READ ON

What aspect of contemporary life haven’t cars impacted? Industrial design and manufacturing. Fine art and popular culture. Mating and work habits. The ways we define our present and grapple with the future. The very pace and rootlessness of life as it has been lived by the three or four most mobile generations in human history. There are tire tracks everywhere. READ ON