Recognition of Bromberg’s talent came early with three
New Deal murals and the Whitney Museum exhibition
of Contemporary American Painting of 1940 – all before
the age of 24.
Two years later, he was appointed by the War Department to join a select group of outstanding artists to enter active duty and document World War II. Bromberg’s graphic accounts took him throughout the European Theater (England, France, and Germany) and he was part of Omaha Beach and the Invasion of Normandy.
After his decorated discharge from the Army, Bromberg was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Painting and in 1949 began teaching as Associate Professor of Design at North Carolina State College’s newly formed School of Design. It was here that Bromberg became a close associate of Buckminster Fuller and joined forces on the design and making of the Geodesic Dome.
Through the whole of his career, Bromberg has pushed beyond the flat surface of a canvas. In 1953, his interest in relief and scale broke loose in the inventiveness of an avant-garde plaster mural, culminating in 1968 with his monumental cliff sculptures. The unique fiberglass sculptures replicate the natural world in such fine detail that Peter Schjeldahl of The New York Times declared them to be “huge, astoundingly realistic.”
Bromberg’s cliff sculptures are in the permanent collections of Storm King Art Center, Hankone Sculpture Museum in Tokyo, Princeton University Art Museum, the State University of New York at New Paltz, and private collections.
Bromberg has exhibited his work in major galleries and museums all over the country and the world – London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and beyond – and lectured in nearly as many. He is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum; National WWII Museum; Brown University Military Museum Collection; the Memorial Museum, Caen, France; West Point Museum; Norman Rockwell Museum; the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum; Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center; General G.C. Marshall Library; FDR Library; and the U.S. Army Center of Military History. His work has been published in books, magazines and newspapers, including LIFE, Art News, the Guardian, and The New York Times.
ABOUT MANUEL BROMBERG
