Despite the success of his Chenil Gallery exhibition Bomberg continued to be dogged by financial problems.
In 1915, he enlisted in the Royal Engineers, transferring in 1916 to the King's Royal Rifle Corps and in March of that year, shortly after marrying his first wife, being sent to the Western Front.

World War I was to bring a profound change to Bomberg's outlook.
His experiences of its mechanized slaughter and the death of his brother in the trenches — as well as those of his friend Isaac Rosenberg and his supporter T. E. Hulme — permanently destroyed his faith in the aesthetics of the machine age.
This can be seen most clearly in his commission for the Canadian War Memorials Fund, Sappers at Work (1918–1919): his first version of the painting was dismissed as a "futurist abortion" and was replaced by a second far more representational version.

The artist's book Russian Ballet, 1919, was the last work to use the pre-war vorticist idiom.
Bomberg self-published this work whilst waiting for the Canadian Government's verdict on Sappers At Work; the next few years was to see him 'experimenting with ways of making his stark pre-war style more rounded and organic'.

In radical opposition to the prevailing currents in avant-garde art, stimulated as these were by the enthusiasm for mechanization in Constructivism in Russia following the Revolution, Bomberg went to paint and draw in Palestine between 1923 and 1927, with the assistance of the Zionist Organization.
There he brought together the geometric energies of his pre-war work as an "English cubist" with the tradition of figurative observation of the English landscape school of Turner, Constable, Girtin and John Sell Cotman.
Despite the success of his Chenil Gallery exhibition Bomberg continued to be dogged by financial problems. In 1915, he enlisted in the Royal Engineers, transferring in 1916 to the King's Royal Rifle Corps and in March of that year, shortly after marrying his first wife, being sent to the Western Front.
World War I was to bring a profound change to Bomberg's outlook. His experiences of its mechanized slaughter and the death of his brother in the trenches — as well as those of his friend Isaac Rosenberg and his supporter T. E. Hulme — permanently destroyed his faith in the aesthetics of the machine age. This can be seen most clearly in his commission for the Canadian War Memorials Fund, Sappers at Work (1918–1919): his first version of the painting was dismissed as a "futurist abortion" and was replaced by a second far more representational version.
The artist's book Russian Ballet, 1919, was the last work to use the pre-war vorticist idiom. Bomberg self-published this work whilst waiting for the Canadian Government's verdict on Sappers At Work; the next few years was to see him 'experimenting with ways of making his stark pre-war style more rounded and organic'.
In radical opposition to the prevailing currents in avant-garde art, stimulated as these were by the enthusiasm for mechanization in Constructivism in Russia following the Revolution, Bomberg went to paint and draw in Palestine between 1923 and 1927, with the assistance of the Zionist Organization. There he brought together the geometric energies of his pre-war work as an "English cubist" with the tradition of figurative observation of the English landscape school of Turner, Constable, Girtin and John Sell Cotman.
David Bomberg