Edward Burra’s tour of the 20th century

The English painter’s relish for subcultures took him across genres and continents.

*John Deth (Hommage a Conrad Aiken)* by Edward Burra, 1931

The art of Edward Burra is also the art of popping up in unlikely places. He was in the audience in Paris when Josephine Baker made her debut at La Revue Nègre in 1925 and in New York during the Harlem Renaissance; he visited Mexico with Malcolm Lowry and was in Spain as tensions bubbled towards the Civil War; he lived in coastal England during the Second World War witnessing troops departing – and sometimes returning – from the continent and captured the incursion of A-roads and pylons into the ancient landscapes of Cornwall and Wales in the early 1970s.

If Burra was Zelig with a paintbrush he was also part of a strand of eccentric English art that, had its origins in William Blake and ran through Richard Dadd, Aubrey Beardsley, Percy Wyndham Lewis and Stanley Spencer. He may have joined Unit One, Paul Nash’s short-lived avant-garde gathering of British artists, sculptors and architects, and exhibited alongside Picasso, Miró and Magritte at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936, but he stood outside stylistic groupings. As he told one questioner: “I didn’t like being told what to think, dearie.”

That hint of bloody-mindedness was also perhaps the result of lifelong ill health. Burra suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and anaemia and as a boy contracted both pneumonia and rheumatic fever: “The only time I don’t feel any pain,” he later wrote, “is when I am working. I become completely unaware.” Physical discomfort was why he chose watercolour over oil paint for most of his work – bending over a sheet on a table was easier than standing at an easel.

Burra was nevertheless a social creature; his friends included Anthony Powell and the choreographer Frederick Ashton as well as innumerable artists and flâneurs. He travelled widely in company, diving into both the glitter and the demi-monde of Paris, the cafés, sailor-filled dockside bars and clubs of Marseille and the dancehalls and striptease joints of Harlem, but lived and worked for most of his life at the well-appointed family home in Rye. There, as he painted, he would play the newest jazz bands from his capacious record collection. It was this mixture of circumstances and experience that resulted in some of the most distinctive art of the British 20th century.

Burra’s hard-to-categorise career is the subject of an immaculate and revealing new exhibition at Tate Britain. It shows a man whose art reflected a rare sense of engagement with his times, especially its queer fringes. The works of the 1920s and 1930s treat his experiences in France and New York and verge on both satire and caricature. Burra used watercolour almost as oil paint and built up layers to give unusual depth of colour and subtle gradations.

It was a technique he employed in teeming images: tight-suited sailors at a bar (“Everyone was sailor mad,” said Ashton), burlesque reviews on stage and riotous Harlem ballrooms. Burra moved in a gay milieu and in such places he found a liberating sense of sexual freedom and cross-class slumming. The pictures are peopled with “types”, from heavy-on-the-make-up women and lascivious and sinister men to simple beefcakes and beauties. Some are white-eyed, as if the headiness of the bars and clubs were acting as a narcotic. It is as if Bruegel or Jan Steen had wandered from the Low Countries into seedier and more cacophonous climes.

In these paintings he is the English equivalent of Otto Dix and George Grosz but without the bitter edge. If the Germans showed the inequality of the postwar years – fat and seedy plutocrats made rich by profiteering contrasted with mutilated army veterans – Burra was more interested in communities, whether dancers, musicians or trufflers after sex – licit or illicit.

Burra’s style and subject matter changed with the onset of the Spanish Civil War. He travelled to Spain in 1933 in search of an Iberian version of Harlem, a place of music and dance and, while he found flamenco and colour, he also found burgeoning violence. Unlike so many other British artists and writers, however, he was no Republican sympathiser. His own politics were ambiguous at best, and in 1942 he told John Rothenstein, director of the Tate Gallery, that he was pro-Franco, although this may have been mere provocation. In fact, he seems to have disliked both fascists and communists equally.

The paintings he started to make were larger – multiple sheets glued together – and stuffed with rippling and bulbous figures, cloaked and faceless figures among ruins. These were characters of some indeterminate medieval past rather than modern-day combatants, with the sinister mood of Goya’s Los Caprichos etchings and the atrocities depicted in his Disasters of War prints transposed into a present that was nevertheless timeless. Indeed the melons-in-a-sack nature of his figures, where shoulders, buttocks and calves bulge alarmingly, are more akin to the Mannerist frescoes of Giulio Romano for the Palazzo del Te in Mantua from the 1530s than anything Burra’s contemporaries were producing.

*The Estate Of Edward Burra, Courtesy Lefevre Fine Art, London / Bridgeman Images*

What war in Spain and then across Europe awoke in him was a generalised disgust at violence and destruction. Witnessing the soldiers massing at Rye to fight across the Channel unnerved him. Even as they climb into a troop lorry in Soldiers’ Backs (1942) there is malignity in their movement, and when he painted Soldiers at Rye (1941), showing a troop dozing, he gave them beaked plague masks that make the men both theatrical and menacing.

In 1945 he described to a friend (in prose that was as idiosyncratic as his pictures) the feelings the times released in him: “The very sight of peoples faces sickens me I’ve got no pity it really is terrible sometimes ime quite frightened at myself I think such awful things I get in such paroxysms of impotent venom I feel it must poison the atmosphere.” The cartoonist and author Osbert Lancaster astutely observed that, “What Burra is trying to do… is not to select and record some single aspect of the modern tragedy… but to digest it whole and transform it into something of permanent aesthetic significance”.

Nevertheless, Burra’s impotent venom stayed with him. Sometimes he found release from it in designing costumes and theatre sets for Carmen and Don Quixote for the Royal Opera House and Sadler’s Wells, but it remained lurking. From the late 1930s into the 1970s Burra also painted rural scenes, spurred by a new interest in gardening and by the car trips he took around Britain. Some are pure landscapes, such as a bewitching view of clouded hilltops, Near Whitby, Yorkshire (1972), and some introduce folklore into real views, such as Landscape with Birdman Piper and Fisherwoman (1946). In others, however, he took aim at the encroachment of modernity: a man at a petrol station is enveloped in the coils of his fuel pipe that has turned into a snake, a stream of cars and lorries invades the countryside like an army, and in Skeleton Party (1952-54) a cluster of ghouls, fresh from Mexico’s Día de los Muertos, make merry in an industrial landscape.

Burra once responded to a question about his art by stating: “I never tell anyone anything… I don’t see that it matters.” He didn’t need to: it seems clear that that joyous Harlem jazz had turned into a danse macabre.

Edward Burra
Tate Britain, London SW1
Until 19 October