Tag: Andrew Graham-Dixon

Turner Monet Twombly: To be beautiful

Turner Monet Twombly: To be beautiful

In my appreciation of Robert Hughes the other day, I quoted Hughes as maintaining that the purpose of art is:

To be beautiful. To manifest beauty. People need beauty.  There’s a hunger for it.

Well, there’s plenty of beauty on show at Tate Liverpool’s exhibition Turner Monet Twombly: Later Paintings, and, judging by the throngs filing through the rooms, a great deal of hunger for it, too.

This is a truly impressive show, awash with brilliant Turners and featuring a selection of Monets that will probably not be seen again together in the UK for many a year (there are five of his water lily paintings, two of which haven’t been in this country before).  Indeed, as someone remarked (I can’t remember where I read it), it’s like a very good Monet exhibition constantly interrupted by Turners and Twomblys. I’m not sure I agree – I think Turner gives Monet a pretty good run for his money here.  But Twombly?  I admit that before this exhibition I knew next to nothing about Twombly, so the title had a kind of falling to bathetic sound, especially having seen Turner Whistler Monet at Tate Britain in 2005 which had a decidedly more convincing ring to it.

I’ll admit, too, that my reaction at first on seeing the first Twombly of the exhibition – Untitled 1992, a canvas splattered with dabs, doodles, and lines scrawled in a childish hand – was probably akin to the hostile scepticism  that greeted many of the Monets present here when they were first exhibited, with expletives added.

But, though I still didn’t leave the exhibition wholly convinced about Twombly – at least up against Turner and Monet – I did begin to have an understanding of his technique and his intentions – and of the thinking behind the show.  The Tate describes the exhibition as a centuries long conversation between the three painters, ‘questioning and challenging each other as though each were present in the same room at the same time’ and demonstrating that these artists, for different, often very personal reasons, continually returned to the same themes and techniques:

Through the juxtaposition of their work, the exhibition also aims to underline the modernity and undiminished relevance of Turner’s and Monet’s work while simultaneously revealing the strong classical traits in Twombly’s paintings and sculptures.

The hanging is austere: there are no information panels. If you want to understand the exhibition’s logic you will need to read the gallery guide or pick up an audio guide. Otherwise you will be faced with a succession of startling visual juxtapositions, for the arrangement is not chronological, but thematic.

The exhibition begins on the ground floor with a room devoted to the first of seven organising ideas.  In ‘Beauty, Power, Space’ the aim is to show how each of these three artists have expressed the sublime. Edmund Burke defined the sublime as anything that excites ideas of terror, pain or peril in the mind of a person who is safe in the knowledge that they are not in fact subjected to danger, while Ruskin declared the sublime to be ‘the effect of greatness upon feelings… whether of matter, space, power, virtue or beauty’.  So here, on one wall, is Turner’s The Parting of Hero and Leander, while  displayed directly opposite is Twombly’s painting of the same name. In the myth, Leander drowns as he swims across the Hellespont to visit his lover, Hero, and the paintings in this room are an expression of awe or terror when faced with the sublime power and beauty of the sea.

There’s another strand of the conversation at work here, too.  This pairing reveals that both Turner and Twombly  engaged with history and mythology. The epic themes addressed by Turner include the stories of Dido and Ulysses, whilst Twombly’s works include allusions to the myths of Bacchus and Orpheus.  And, just as Twombly adds handwritten words on his canvases to complement the visual references, so Turner also incorporated text in the form of verse which he exhibited alongside some of his paintings.

Jeremy Lewison, the curator of the exhibition, explained the concept in the Tate magazine:

Quoting the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, Twombly inscribes Untitled 1992 with the words ‘outside, an Amazing Space on the other Side of AIR’, suggesting the vastness of the universe beyond the air that we breathe. This large-scale painting, in which a highly inflected surface of white and grey with touches of red and blue evokes sky and sea, seems to take up where Turner left off in a painting such as Rockets and Blue Lights (close at Hand) to warn Steam-Boats of Shoal-Water, where the evident power of nature is pitted against a foundering sailing boat. Both artists suggest the immensity of nature and the inconsequence of man before it. At the top of Twombly’s painting is an inscription from Charles Baudelaire’s Journaux intimes, ‘I have felt the wings of the wind of madness,’ which, in the original source, follows hard on a passage where Baudelaire discusses his fear of the void.

The next theme to be examined is ‘Atmosphere’: Turner once said, ‘Atmosphere is my style and indistinctness is my fault’.  When Turner died in 1851 he left several unfinished paintings in his studio. With the hindsight gained from Impressionism, these paintings have come to be appreciated as highly as his finished works – appreciated, indeed, as if they are finished works.

In The Thames above Waterloo Bridge c.1830–5, Turner shrouds the river in a blanket of pollution, with chimneys belching out smoke. In their late works, both Turner and Monet played with simultaneously obscuring and revealing the image. In Turner’s unfinished view of Venice with the Salute 1840–5, the city can barely be distinguished as it emerges from the delicate shimmer of a morning mist.

Similarly, Waterloo Bridge, Monet’s painting of 1902, depicts the bridge as hardly visible in the dense London fog, a splash of pink late afternoon sunlight illuminating the Thames before it.  Monet painted London in the winter specifically to capture the visual effects of the city’s polluted air. Waterloo Bridge Pink Effect is as pure a study of the fall of light on cloud, stone and water as you will ever encounter.

Challengingly, these works are displayed alongside Twombly’s Orpheus (1979), the exhibition guide noting that ‘the mist obscures the name of the eponymous hero who, in the Orphic myth, travelled to the underworld to retrieve his wife Eurydice, who is perhaps also alluded to here by the small letters ‘eu’.

Twombly’s Paesaggio 1986 (below) is positioned with Monet’s Morning on the Seine, Giverny 1897 (top), encouraging us to see how both contrast woodland and water and explore effects of light.

The ‘Fire and Water’ section gathers paintings – several of sunrise and sunset – that reflect the artists’ attempts to capture the mood evoked by a particular quality of light.  In Houses of Parliament, Sun Breaking Through Fog, 1904, Monet reveals the how sunlight reflected on the surface of the Thames is refracted by the morning mist. He’s reacting to Turner’s own similar attempts and later Twombly (who included a Monet exhibition catalogue amongst his prized possession) continues the experiment.

Monet is known to have seen Turner’s paintings in the London galleries with Camille Pissarro during their stay in 1871, and then on subsequent visits over the following decades.  Monet shared Turner’s fascination with light and the effects of the elements, though his interest was motivated less by drama and romanticism than a desire to capture nature as he experienced it. He observed and recorded his subject matter systematically and objectively, often returning to the same motif again and again to paint it in different atmospheric conditions (for example, the façade of Rouen cathedral – a couple of studies of which are in this exhibition).

The drama and romanticism of Turner’s approach is revealed in the crashing surf, burst of white rockets and glow of blue lights in Rockets and Blue Lights, which, like so many of Turner’s late paintings – such as Rough Sea painted in the early 1840s – represents the elemental forces of nature.

Breakers on a Flat Beach (below) derives from the late 1820s, the period when Turner made regular visits to the then-fashionable resort of Margate.  There, he particularly prized the coastal light, claiming that the skies over the Isle of Thanet were the most beautiful in Europe.

Similarly, Monet had an intense and long-lasting relationship with the Normandy coast.  The canvases he
painted at Fécamp, Pourville, Varengeville and Etretat between 1881 and 1886 came to form a major part of his output. In these locations, he positioned himself as the solitary explorer, face to face with the elements, his canvases increasingly preoccupied with the fleeting effects of weather and atmosphere. Many of his visits were out of season enabling him to record more hostile weather conditions and rougher seas.  The Sea at Fécamp places the viewer close to an overhanging rock face where the sea pounds the cliff. Curving brushstrokes of blue, green and white build to form the lines of waves moving towards the cliff. The spray is a flurry of lighter, more tangled marks as the water breaks over the more densely painted rock.

Opposite, is a wall on which are displayed five small oil paintings by Turner from the 1840s.  These paintings, as delicate and ethereal as watercolours, are exquisite.   Their titles, when listed, read like lines of a poem:

sea and sky
ship in a storm
red sky over a beach
shore with breaking waves
calm sea with distant grey clouds

In the section entitled ‘Naught so Sweet as Melancholy’, the curators have brought together some of Turner’s late Venetian paintings, executed after his final trip to Venice in 1840, with Monet’s paintings of the same city, begun on a trip with his second wife Alice in 1908.  Many of Monet’s canvases were only finished after the death of Alice in 1911, when Monet returned to them as a way to come to terms with his loss.

The centrepiece of ‘The Seasons’ is Twombly’s Quattro Stagioni, painted 1993–5.  These four panels were where I began to appreciate Twombly. I liked these paintings with their echoes of Chinese landscapes, and their colours reflecting emotion.  In this sequence Twombly mourns the passing of time and youth, but celebrates life.  Like many poets and painters before him Twombly links the progress of the year with the life cycle, each season representing a different stage in life.

Here the seasons are hung in a different order, beginning with Autumn (above) to reflect the cyclical nature of life; this was a suggestion, the exhibition guide notes, that Twombly welcomed in discussions with the curator shortly before his death last year.  Autunno (Autumn), ‘drenched in the colours of harvested grapes, marks the moment of panic, when winter begins to draw in and mortality rears its head’. The reds and burgundies of Autumno, deep and saturated, suggest the season of ripeness and maturity.

Primavera (Spring) ‘conjures the energy of plants springing into life and is full of vigour’. Fiery Estate (Summer, above) is tinged with the knowledge that – in lines from George Seferis embedded in the paint – ‘youth is infinite and yet so brief’. Inverno (Winter) is sparse and cold, like evergreens in snow with ‘ forms and words dissolving in silvery tones’.  Twombly incorporates into these panels lines from Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegy, while in Estate, lines from George Seferis’s ‘Three Secret Poems’ have been altered by Twombly, with the words inked on the canvas in Twombly’s inimitable, childish scrawl:

the shard of white . . .
trembling with white light
with white flat sea
distant in memory
between the deluge of life
our dearest, our white youth
our white, our snow white youth
that is infinity . . .

Monet also recorded seasonal changes in his series of poplars in the 1890s, paintings imbued with a strong sense of time.

The final section, ‘A Floating World’, is dominated by Monet’s late paintings of the water lily pond in his garden at Giverny.The exhibition guide comments:

Painted during the First World War and after a period of intense mourning, a sense of human mortality pervades them by contrast with the everlasting endurance of nature. Time appears to stand still in these paintings although glints of sunlight reflected on the surface of the pond imply the time of day. Surrounded by paintings in his studio, Monet created his own consoling world, to heal the psychic pain of bereavement.

Here, too, are Turner’s studies for the commission by Lord Egremont, owner of Petworth House in Sussex.

They make little distinction between water and sky, as all dissolves in the diminishing glow of the sun. Trees and shrubs collapse into patches of paint and the whole becomes a liquefied mass. The Petworth paintings were begun either shortly before or shortly after his father’s death. Their emphasis on the setting sun may also express intimations of mortality. The final paintings have a certain air of despondency. These images remind the viewer once again of finality and provide another link to Twombly’s Quattro Stagioni, and its classical reference to death: ‘Et in Arcadia ego.’

Alongside these masterpieces we find Twombly’s monumental painting Untitled 2007, that appears to depict peonies, although Twombly apparently disclaimed the idea. The guide notes:

The peony is associated with Japanese Edo-period screen paintings and, like such a screen, Twombly’s painting is split into panels. The red paint trickles down the canvas, like blood or tears. Transience and regret are central themes in this work, but it is also a hymn to sunlight, sexuality, and regeneration. A Japanese haiku on the right evokes the erotic and the morbid, exuberance and joy.

On the panel, Twombly quotes Takarai Kikaku, whose haiku was inspired by the 14-century samurai Kusunoki Masashige:

Ah! The peonies
For which
Kusonoki
Took off his armour

Presumably the beauty of nature, epitomized here by the wild peony, inspired a momentary pacifism in the warrior.

Jonathan Jones, in an article in The Guardian, commented on the dangers of positioning Twombly’s work within range of Monet’s:

The curator has hung some splashy, multicoloured splurges next to ravishing Monet garden scenes. Never work with children, animals, or Claude Monet. The quiet Frenchman is a great upstager. […]  Near Twombly’s Four Seasons hangs an utterly scintillating flower painting by Monet. It seems to have more colours in one spot of its surface than Twombly can muster across an entire epic. You do not need the Hellespont to drown in: Monet’s pond is deep enough.

Absolutely.  Having said that, I did leave with a higher appreciation of Twombly’s work.  I just don’t think it measures up to the other two, though.

Here’s a slideshow of the paintings I enjoyed most in the exhibition

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See also

TateShots: Three Champions For Turner Monet Twombly

This film explores the parallels in their style and subject matter with Mike Leigh, who describes Turner as the world’s first modern painter, and who is in the process of developing a feature film on the artist; Fiona Rae, a painter herself, who reveals how astonishing Monet’s works were for their time; and Tate director Nicholas Serota, who considers why certain artists, on reaching the twilight of their careers, develop a new-found sense of freedom in their work.

There’s also a video on the Liverpool Daily Post website where Tate’s Assistant Curator, Eleanor Clayton, discusses the exhibition.

Edward Burra: an utterly unique vision

Edward Burra: an utterly unique vision

Back in January I wrote an appreciation of the work of Edward Burra, inspired partly by Andrew Graham-Dixon’s excellent film on the artist broadcast in the autumn and partly by regret at not being able to get to the  first major retrospective of Burra’s work for 25 years at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester.

However, last weekend as luck would have it,  I had to travel to Derbyshire and so took the opportunity to catch the exhibition, now on tour, at the Djanogly Art Gallery on the Nottingham University campus.  Burra is an artist whose work I have loved since I first encountered his paintings of Harlem night life.  This extensive exhibition does him proud, with representative work from all stages of his career, including the less well-known British landscapes of the post-war decades.  It was a joy to come face to face with works such as The Straw Man from 1963 which, though remarkable in reproduction, is truly electrifying in the flesh.  The late landscapes are a revelation, too – including paintings such as English Countryside, 1965–7 (above).

Burra was a white Englishman, the son of a rich lawyer who never needed to earn his living.  Born in 1905, he had a dull, comfortable upbringing in the ‘quintessentially English’ town of Rye.  There he had led a particularly closeted life, being  crippled by a rare form of acute rheumatoid  arthritis from an early age, as well as suffering from pernicious anemia.  The combination of fatigue and muscular pain made it too difficult for him to stand for any length of time and explains why virtually all of his paintings are watercolours. But what extraordinary watercolours!   In 1969 the critic Pierre Rouve observed of Burra’s work: ‘The power of his larger compositions is unique and uniquely disconcerting in the eyes of those convinced that watercolours can only water down all colours. To ask them to convey emotional intensity and cerebral strength would seem absurd… And yet this miracle occurs time and time again in Burra’s work’.

For his entire life Burra’s home was the handsome and substantial family mansion set in rolling Sussex countryside, attended by eight servants and with eleven acres of garden perched on a hill overlooking Rye.   Cabbages, Springfield, Rye painted around 1937 (below) depicts the view from the Burra family house.

The opening section of the exhibition, ‘High Art, Low Culture’, concentrates on the paintings of street life in New York, Paris and the south of France with which his name is most commonly associated.  Reading about his upbringing in the book published to accompany the exhibition – Edward Burra by Simon Martin – makes these vibrant paintings seem even more remarkable. As Jane Stevenson writes in one of the essays:

Burra was born into what surely must have been one of the most secure milieux ever to exist: the English upper middle class before the First World War.  His father … was the descendent of three generations of successful bankers. … The infant Edward was automatically entered for Eton; the family outlook was profoundly right-wing and class-conscious.  His grandmother, whom he loved, was a member of the anti-socialist British Empire Union.

Yet this young artist, raised in an exclusive rural setting, produced paintings in the 1920s and 1930s that revelled in the vitality of modern city life – paintings that are now some of the most memorable images of the Jazz Age.  Burra was fascinated by low-life, loved jazz and films, and, on his travels, frequented nightclubs and bars in New York, Paris and Marseilles in the early 1930s – from where he drew the inspiration for his paintings in that period.  His affectionate and celebratory depictions of black street culture in Harlem in the 1930s, and the nightlife of Boston in the early 1950s, led him to be described by his friend the American poet Conrad Aiken as the ‘best painter of the American Scene’.

Hop Pickers Who’ve Lost Their Mothers, 1924

Two early paintings in the exhibition show Burra’s characteristic style already fully developed by the early 1920s.  Hop Pickers Who’ve Lost Their Mothers 1924 (above) and Market Day, 1926 (below) were painted when Burra was just 19 and 21 years old respectively. The caption to the former work offers no explanation as to its strange title but its subject matter would probably have been familiar to Burra: each September whole families would go from the East End of London down to Kent to live in hoppers’ huts for most of September (Orwell observed the conditions they worked under in one of his essays).  What is interesting is that Burra portrays this group of hop-pickers as being from diverse ethnic backgrounds.  The art historian Andrew Causey wrote of Burra’s works demonstrating a ‘Whimanesque brotherhood of races and types’.

Market Day, 1926

Burra was a student at the Chelsea School of Art and Royal College of Art between 1921 and 1925, so Market Day is one of the first works painted after completing his studies.  This busy scene presents a multicultural view of a Mediterranean port – but the inspiration must have been drawn from films and novels since it was not until September 1927 that Burra made the first of several trips to the south of France, visiting the ports of Cassis, Marseilles and Toulon.

Market Day is full of detail, with two black sailors on shore leave carrying their ditty bags and being accosted by hip-jutting prostitutes. Simon Martin writes

It is hard to believe that such works were executed in watercolour, for Burra’s handling of the medium was so tight and the intensity of colour more akin to temura painting than the fluidity normally associated with watercolour.

Edward Burra in Toulon, 1931

Marriage à la Mode (1928–29) was loosely based on William Hogarth’s formal Baroque marriage portrait The Wedding of Stephen Beckingham and Mary Cox (1729). Burra’s modern take on the subject is full of humorous details and visual double-entendres. For example, the putti holding a cornucopia of flowers in Hogarth’s painting are replaced by wingless flying children who water the bride and groom’s floral headpieces with an atomiser and a watering can.

Edward Burra: Marriage-a-la-mode, 1928

Another early work inspired by a metropolitan setting is, unusually, an oil painting.  In The Snack Bar (1930) a woman whose thoughts are elsewhere is frozen in the act of placing a sandwich between her brightly painted lips, while the man behind the counter suggestively slices an enlarged salami while  glancing in her direction.

The scene is set in the Continental Snack Bar in Shaftesbury Avenue in London, and the woman is probably a prostitute. According to Burra’s friend Clover de Pertinez, ‘Soho tarts were mostly French around 1930 and dressed and made up just like that’.  There is a suggestion of sexual violence as the barman slices a ham, his eyes on her rather than on the task in hand, but she is clearly off duty, caught in a moment of reflection and far from eroticised.

The Snack Bar, 1930

In Three Sailors at the Bar (1930), the trompe l’oeil painted frame suggests that this bar scene is a reflection in a mirror. The perspective of the tiled floor in the bar falls away vertiginously and the table in the foreground appears to be floating.  Two of the sailors have their backs to the viewer, giving the picture a voyeuristic feel that relates to the visual strategies of early cinema.

The cinema remained a great love and source of inspiration throughout Burra’s life.  As Graham-Dixon pointed out in his TV documentary, Burra’s sense of composition – with extreme close-ups, plunging, vertiginous perspectives, close cropping and heavily made-up faces with exaggerated expressions – was derived from the old silent movies.  Burra’s biographer, Jane Stevenson, suggests that rather like the novelist Christopher Isherwood, Burra was a ‘camera’ – a spectator with an extraordinary memory for vivid detail.

Harlem, 1934

Burra’s paintings of Harlem fall into two groups – street scenes and scenes of night-time entertainment. Harlem (1934) depicts the area’s daytime street life. Several men and women are shown in front of a row of brownstone tenements, with New York’s elevated railway visible in the background. On the street people linger at their doorsteps to smoke, talk and read newspapers.Burra painted his Harlem scenes after returning from New York, but he remembered details such as clothing and window signs with great clarity.

Burra visited New York, staying with the photographer Olivia Wyndham and her partner the black actress Edna Thomas on Seventh Avenue in Harlem from October to December 1933, and again in January 1934.  He wrote enthusiastic letters to friends about the exuberant jazz clubs he visited at night, while his images of Harlem street life during the day capture a quieter sense of nonchalance and friendly community. Burra wrote to his friend Barbara Ker-Seymer:

New York would drive you into a fit. Harlem is like Walham green gone crazy we do a little shopping on 116th St every morning there are about 10 Woolworths of all sorts also 40 cinemas & Apollo burlesk featuring Paris in Harlem which I am plotting to go to It must be seen to be believed…The food is delish 40000000 tons of hot dogs and hamburgers must be consumed in N.Y. daily.[sic]

In the next section, ‘The Danse Macabre’, the exhibition explores Burra’s fascination with the macabre and supernatural. He enjoyed watching horror movies and reading science-fiction novels by cult authors such as HP Lovecraft, and admired the ghoulish work of artists such as Francisco Goya and Hieronymus Bosch. In the 1930s Burra visited Spain and witnessed the Spanish Civil War first-hand, an experience which informed the violence of some of his paintings – for example, Beelzebub (c.1937–38).

Beelzebub, c.1937

In Spain in 1935, Burra had witnessed a church being burned down in the months before the Spanish Civil War. In this enormous watercolour (very powerful when seen in the gallery), a marauding throng with bloody weapons clashes violently in the ruins of a church. The devilish monster that goads them on is Beelzebub (literally ‘Lord of the Flies’), one of the seven princes of Hell.  The elongated figures influenced by Mannerist and Baroque art serve to heighten the drama of the scene.

This section also includes some works painted during the Second World War.  Burra did not address the conflict directly; instead, he painted images of soldier’s backs and ghoulish monsters to represent the terror of war.  A remarkable painting when encountered in the flesh is Blue Baby, Blitz over Britain (1941) in which the German air attack is represented as a monstrous blue bird-woman dominating the skies as figures cower or run for shelter.

Blue Baby, Blitz Over Britain, 1941

In September 1940 the Battle of Britain raged in the skies above Burra’s home in Rye.  He wrote to Paul Nash:

Oh theres bombs here messershmidts there and I dont know what all!!  The other evening I observed a parachute descending gracefully down. The whole place is an armed camp with crashing tanks roaring up & down the rd – so if anything’s a military objective all they have to do is throw a bomb & hit one of the Irish Fusileers [sic].

Two more fine wartime paintings on show are Ropes and Lorries (1942-43) and Soldiers’ Backs (1942–3).

Soldiers’ Backs, 1942 (detail)

During the Second World War large numbers of troops were stationed at Rye. Burra told Paul Nash of how: ‘Ive [sic] got some very turgid work, delightful sketches of the troops’.  Soldiers’ Backs, an image of soldiers climbing into the back of a lorry, dehumanizes the soldiers, who are seen from behind as they clamber into an army lorry. Their buttocks, shoulders and calves are emphasized, almost like medieval armour.  Another small wartime painting is Seaman Ashore, Greenock, 1944 (below).

The exhibition features a group of landscapes that Burra painted in the 1930s and 1940s. These include Landscape with Red Wheels (1937-9), Blasted Oak (1942), Landscape near Rye (c.1943–45), The Harbour, Hastings (1947), Cabbages, Springfield, Rye (c.1937) and The Cabbage Harvest (c.1943–45).

Landscape near Rye, 1943
The Harbour, Hastings, 1947
Cabbages, Springfield, Rye, c.1937

Cabbages, Springfield, Rye is a composition structured by ranks of trees, with the foreground depicting the cabbage patch in the family garden at Springfield.  Cabbage Harvest is a darker, wilder image with human figures stacking sacks of cabbages under a lowering sky.  Most of the cabbages are harvested, the colours are autumnal and there’s a sense of impending storm.

Cabbage Harvest, 1943-45

In another room are paintings made in the post-war period, including tow of the most striking that Burra created.  Silver Dollar Bar (c.1953)  was inspired by a visit to the eponymous bar in Boston – a locale he had painted before in Izzy Ort’s (1937).  Silver Dollar Bar was painted after another visit to the bar by Burra while he was staying with the American poet Conrad Aiken. According to Aiken’s wife Mary, Burra painted the scene from memory after he had returned home to England:

Oddly, though typical, Ed didn’t do the Silver Dollar Bar etc paintings until after he returned to England. What a memory – photographic – they couldn’t have been more ‘like’! Especially of the essence, which only Burra could do.  We’re lucky they exist since the bars themselves are gone forever.  I shall always miss them, and thus be more than grateful for the paintings, a lost juicy slice of life as it will never be lived again.

Silver Dollar Bar, 1953

Reviewing the exhibition  in The Observer when it was on at Pallant House, Rachel Cooke suggested that to understand Burra a good place to start is with  later painting,  The Straw Man (1963).  It’s a wonderful, dynamic composition, all intersecting diagonals, given a wall to itself at Nottingham.  Reproductions simply can’t compare to the experience of seeing the large original up close: it grabs you by the throat.  This is what Rachel Cooke had to say about it:

The Straw Man is purest essence of Burra: mysterious, antic, wild. Five flat-capped men – or is it six? – appear at first to be dancing, their calves bulging and stockinged, as if they had come from the ballet. Then you understand: these high steps are not celebratory. They are kicking some kind of mannequin. In the right-hand corner of the painting (right-hand corners are important with Burra; the novelist Anthony Powell recalled that this was where the artist began a painting, sweeping diagonally leftwards), a mother pushes a small boy away from the scene, her gesture confirmation, if it were needed, that this is a tale of violence, not joy.

The Straw Man, 1963

This remarkable watercolour relates to a painting by Francisco de Goya called The Straw Manikin (1791–2) in which four women toss a masked straw figure into the air with a blanket.  However, the dark menace of Burra’s large watercolour (created with two sheets of paper) is far removed from the Goya.  Burra has re-imagined Goya’s decorative scene in an urban wasteland where a group of flat-capped working-class men violently kick a straw dummy on an urban wasteland. Though the violence of the scene is metaphorical, the air of brooding menace is emphasised by details such as the train hurtling past on the bridge, and the indifferent figures standing alongside.

Francisco de Goya: TheStraw Manikin, 1791

In another room are displayed examples of Burra’s late landscapes.  In the last decade of his life Edward Burra travelled around the British Isles with his sister Anne to places such as Yorkshire, Dartmoor, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. On his return to his studio he would make preliminary drawings on sketchpads using pencil, crayons and felt-tip pens before commencing his enormous landscape watercolours.  The majestic scale of these late landscapes gives them an epic quality that is remarkable given his frail physical state at the end of his life.

Of the late landscapes, my outright favourites are  Near Whitby, Yorkshire and Valley and River, Northumberland (in the Tate collection), both painted in 1972. Neither are in the current exhibition, but there are several more fine examples of this strand in Burra’s work, most notably English Countryside (1965–7, top) and Connemara (1962-63), a superb, wild and rocky landscape that is in the Devonshire Collection at Chatsworth House.

English Countryside is typical of many of these later landscapes in that, although there is little evidence of human beings in these scenes, Burra did not shy away from showing man’s impact on the landscape – depicting electricity pylons, tunnels, motorways and heavy goods vehicles.

Often, these are not pure landscape views in the traditional sense, being  imbued with a sense of supernatural activity.  The most startling example of this tendency here being Black Mountain, painted in 1968.

Black Mountain, 1968 (detail)

Against a distant view of the dark hulking mass of the mountain, Burra depicts a modern-day tractor and its driver tractor with blue cans of Shell diesel in the foreground.  But they are surrounded by mysterious, medieval-looking hooded figures, perhaps cowled monks, one of whom appears to be radiating from his eyes red bolts of electricity. ‘Visitors from the past, perhaps usually invisible to the living’, suggests Andrew Lambirth in the exhibition catalogue.

While Burra was alive, his late landscapes were seen by many art critics as something of a distraction from the main body of his work.  This began to change after his death in 1976, and by the time of the 1985 retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, Andrew Causey was writing in a catalogue essay that ‘these late landscapes are one of the most important and undervalued aspects of his work’.

These landscapes are not conventional, picturesque views and there is sometimes a sinister edge to them, with dark brooding colours or unlikely choice of subject matter, such as a menacing petrol tanker or bulldozer. Burra’s late landscapes seem to reflect a return to his roots, but also a concern with the despoilation of the English countryside taking place around him. There are powerful paintings in which diggers, lorries and tractors appear as monsters ripping hungrily through the landscape. Commenting on the late landscapes, Jane Stevenson writes:

In the 1950s, he turned away from the human form to concentrate on landscapes of luminous serenity and weirdly powerful flower pieces. In the 1960s and 70s, he was one of the first artists to protest about the ravaging of the English countryside that went along with the creation of the new motorways, to perceive the real costs of you’ve-never-had-it-so-good. His interest in ecology as well as in the built landscape can be charted in letters and paintings from the end of the war onwards. He produced, for instance, a series of pictures in which the vast diggers and dumpers of the construction industry have morphed into carnivorous dinosaurs, snapping at each other and at the landscape with hostility and greed.

Writing in The Observer, Rachel Cooke concluded:

It is his landscapes, though, that for me are the best paintings in this show: transcendent and wonderfully modern – you see Hockney here, and Michael Andrews – even as he nods to the masters. In his last years, Burra toured Britain, chauffeured by his sister, Anne. He went to wild places – to Cornwall, the Peak District, the Yorkshire Moors – and he gawped and gawped. “It fascinated me to watch Edward when the car halted,” said his friend, Billy Chappell. “He might, I thought, have been staring at a blank wall, until I saw the intensity of his gaze.” Only when he got back home did he settle to work, reproducing the heather and the screes, but with curious dashes of his own: a road as blue as a river, a field as brightly coloured as an orange. And often, too, an invader or three: a crawling lorry, a demonic motorbike, a rapacious tractor, even an aeroplane, tiny in the sky, but indelibly black. Black Mountain (1968), English Countryside (1965-7) and An English Scene No 2 (1970) are unforgettable paintings: giant postcards from a man who could not ignore what was happening to England, even if it is sometimes hard to tell if her changing landscape was more a source of regret or delight. Oh, you must see this show. It is fascinating and beautiful – and we will not, perhaps, see its like again: the majority of these works are in private collections. Feast your eyes while you can.

Another section of the exhibition surveys the work that Burra did for the stage. Burra’s love of theatrical spectacle was exuberantly expressed in his depictions of music halls, and of actors and movie stars such as Mae West. He was also one of the greatest British designers for the stage in the twentieth century; he designed striking décor and costumes for several notable ballets and operas, as well as a set for the 1948 film A Piece of Cake.  Not only were Burra’s costume designs concerned with an understanding of fabric and movement, they also conveyed the personality of the individual character and had much in common with the people that appear in his watercolours of bars and street scenes. With his interest in depicting ordinary people in the streets, Burra was the perfect choice to design sets and costumes for Robert Helpmann’s wartime ballet The Miracle in the Gorbals.

Front cloth for Don Quixote, 1950

Burra’s front cloth for an operatic version of Don Quixote in 1950 was, I thought the most striking.  It depicts Quixote on his donkey heading out into the Spanish plains, with Sancho Panza behind. The Sadlers Wells choreographer Ninette de Valois recalled:

There stands out clearly a special memory: the magic front-cloth for Don Quixote. Rarely does there appear such force and spiritual strength in a stage set painting. Every line conveying purpose with a defiance that is highlighted; a fate framed in ennobling colours – whatever the outcome. We do not get such cloths today in the theatre.

The exhibition concludes with a display of Edward Burra’s paintbox and paints, alongside colour tests on opened envelopes and a shopping list.

It looks increasingly likely that Edward Burra will be accepted as one of the greatest British artists of the 2oth century. He is a unique figure, impossible to categorise, who charted his own highly individual course, never aligning himself with any particular movement or group. In the exhibition catalogue, Simon Martin gives this overall assessment of his significance:

With [his] baroque exuberance Burra does not neatly fit into the restrained and cerebral modernism of his contemporaries such as Henry Moore, Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, John Piper or Graham Sutherland. He was not interested in good taste. If anything he embraced ‘bad’ taste: garish nightclub performers, sailors in search of a pick-up, tarts in a snack bar or dancing skeletons. He was unafraid of expressing a gay sensibility at a time when such personal honesty and an overtly camp aesthetic were by no means widely acceptable.  Decades before the contemporary artist Grayson Perry was exploring transvestism in his art, Burra was depicting men in drag and in his hilarious letters to friends adopting the alter egos of ‘Lady Ex Bureaux’, ‘Tottie’, ‘Gladys Dilly’, ‘Marguerite’ and ‘Madame Mata-Hari’.  He was not interested in what other people thought of him, but he was interested  in people,  in their foibles and eccentricities, but also in mankind’s dark side – to which he gave powerful expression during the Spanish Civil War and Second World War. His fascination with the macabre led to the creation of uncanny images of unsettling  power that are  as disquieting as his other images are humorous.

Acknowledging his importance internationally, Burra’s work was rightly included in the major survey of the art of the  Harlem  Renaissance, Rhapsodies in Black, and in time his paintings inspired by the Spanish Civil War will be viewed as an important contribution to the visual legacy of that conflict.  Likewise,  his ballet and opera designs will be celebrated as some of the most significant artistic contributions to modern set and costume design, while his late landscapes, scarred with motorways, pylons and construction, will come to be seen as a powerful and un-idealised record of man’s environmental impact on the great British landscape. […] Edward  Burra deserves to be considered as one of the greatest British artists of the twentieth century: utterly unique, and to be celebrated for his extraordinary individuality.

Burra hated all the talk around pictures and once, in a TV interview, got annoyed at the question, ‘So what does it all mean then?’  With a twinkle in his eye, Burra responded, ‘Nothing’.  He died in 1976 at the age of 72 having lived far longer than anyone could possibly have predicted, and leaving a far greater legacy than he was given credit for at the time.

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Edward Burra: Hastings to Harlem and back

Edward Burra: Hastings to Harlem and back

I confess that when I first encountered Edward Burra’s vibrant paintings of African-Americans languidly hanging out on the streets and in the the jazz clubs of Prohibition New York I assumed that Burra was black – a member of the Harlem Renaissance, perhaps.

I couldn’t have been more wrong, as I later discovered.  Burra was a white Englishman, the son of a rich lawyer who never needed to earn his living. Born in 1905, he had a dull, comfortable upbringing in Rye, and led a particularly closeted life since he had been crippled by a rare form of arthritis from an early age. The family lived in a handsome and substantial mansion with eight servants and 11 acres of garden.

Back in October on BBC 4, Andrew Graham-Dixon presented an excellent film on Edward Burra – ‘the most intriguing 20th century artist you might never have heard of’ in his words.  The film coincided with the first major retrospective of Burra’s work for 25 years at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester.  Since I’m unlikely to get to Chichester before the exhibition closes, this post is by way of an appreciation of an artist whose work I have loved since I first encountered his paintings of Harlem night life.   Andrew Graham-Dixon’s film revealed to me aspects of Burra’s work of which I was unaware – most especially, the beautiful watercolours of English landscapes which he produced in the post-war years.

The Tea Shop, 1929

The unpromising elements of his early life were probably the key to Burra’s artistic trajectory – in the sense that he became determined to overcome the constraints of his class and physical condition through art, travel, music and the night life.  By the age of 15 Burra was off to art school in London. From there, over the next few decades, he travelled incessantly: to art hotspots such as Paris in the 1920s, Harlem in the 1930s and Spain during the Spanish Civil War.

There’s an early painting, In The Tea Shop (1929), in which Burra pokes fun at his home town.  In it, the prim local matrons are served by nubile waitresses, naked except for a tiny pinafore. The waitress in the foreground appears to be pouring coffee on the cloche hat of a lady customer, pop-eyed with shock.  Men in bowler hats look on in astonishment or hide behind their newspapers. Marriage a la mode painted a year earlier, as well as being a homage to Hogarth, is reminiscent of Stanley Spencer in its modelling and the intermingling of the earthly and the divine – and also seems to suggest a satirical slant on local mores.

Marriage a la mode, 1928

Another early painting inspired by a metropolitan rather than provincial setting is The Snack Bar (1930).  It’s an odd affair: a woman whose thoughts are elsewhere is frozen in the act of placing a sandwich between her brightly-painted lips, while the man behind the counter suggestively slices an enlarged salami while  glancing in her direction.

Burra’s biographer Jane Stevenson has written of this painting:

Two of his friends, in interview, pinpointed both the subject and the place: “Soho tarts were mostly French around 1930 and dressed and made up just like that.” The venue is the Continental Snack Bar in Shaftesbury Avenue, which “was very handy for ladies on the game to have a sit down and a cup of tea in their rest periods”. This image of a working girl stuffing food into her mouth is an extremely unusual approach to the representation of the female body in its time. Women, particularly prostitutes, were persistently eroticised, reified or abstracted in the art and imagery of the period. Burra enjoyed the rhetoric of “sin flaunting with a painted grin”, but that is not what he represents in this picture. Eliot’s typist could be slumped on the next stool, slurping tea and bolting a quick snack before returning to her afternoon’s stint in the office. Though he seems never to have been sexually attracted to women, Burra was more aware of them as people than most artists of his time, and less scared of them, for the simple reason that he shared his home life with his mother, two sisters and a nanny, all of whom he liked and understood.

The Snack Bar, 1930

In early paintings like this Burra comes across as a caricaturist and satirist in the style of Otto Dix or George Grosz, capturing and exaggerating every telling detail of the eccentric, bustling crowds in the cafés and nightclubs he frequented with the close friends he hade made at art school. The 1920s were, Burra observed, a time of great frivolity and fun – ‘we spent much of our time going to the cinema and reading Vogue magazine’.

That Burra relished travel and city nightlife is remarkable given that, as a result of his disability, he was subject to regular collapses (eventually diagnosed as being the result of a disease of the red blood cells) which meant that invariably ‘his basic state of being was akin to a machine operating on a nearly flat battery’ (Jane Stevenson).  His  lifelong struggle with rheumatoid arthritis and the debilitating blood disease meant that he was never able to use an easel in the conventional way. Instead he opted to sit, working mostly in unfashionable watercolour on thick paper laid flat on a table. But he created watercolours like no others:  idiosyncratic images teeming with the men and women who fascinated him: bohemians, sailors, prostitutes, lowlifes – those who live by night.  George Melly, a close friend, once expressed his wonder at the way that Burra’s crippled hand became ‘an unlikely instrument of so much precise beauty’.

Striptease -Harlem, 1934

Andrew Graham-Dixon’s film traced Burra’s life, from his native town of Rye to the jazz clubs of Prohibition New York, then to the battered landscapes of the Spanish Civil War and back to England during the Blitz. Graham-Dixon argued that Burra’s work deepened and matured as he experienced at first hand some of the most tragic events of the 20th  century. He painted a fascinating portrait of Burra – a master of the camp, throwaway phrase, who preferred to create art rather than talk about it, and who responded to most queries about his work with an ‘Oh Dearie, I never tell anyone anything…’ (thereby providing the title for the film).

Minuit

Simon Martin, the curator of the Pallant House exhibition, writes that although born into a solidly middle-class family,

Burra was always attracted to the less salubrious side of society. While some artists spend their careers trying to achieve a respectable social position, it seems that he spent years trying to escape from his. It is typical of Burra that when given money by his mother to treat his enlarged spleen he spent it instead on getting a tattoo of a fearsome Chinese mask on his left shoulder. Despite suffering from crippling arthritis throughout his life, he had a tenacious will, and often went on cosmopolitan excursions; his experience led him to produce some of the most remarkable watercolours by any British artist in the 2oth century.

Blues For Ruby Matrix, 1934

The cinema remained a great love – and source of inspiration – throughout his life.  As Graham-Dixon pointed out, Burra’s sense of composition – with extreme close-ups, plunging, vertiginous perspectives, close cropping and heavily made-up faces with exaggerated expressions – was derived from the old silent movies.  Burra’s biographer, Jane Stevenson, suggests that rather like the novelist Christopher Isherwood, Burra was a ‘camera’ – a spectator with an extraordinary memory for vivid detail.

The Common Stair

Burra was fascinated by modern urban life, whether dockside bars in Toulon or Marseille, or jazz dives and nightclubs in Harlem or Boston. He was British, yet, except for some Second World war paintings the evocative English landscapes of the post-war period, much of his work did not deal with Britain at all.  Burra was fascinated by the cheap glamour of dancers and prostitutes, in Mediterranean seaports or the boulevards of Montparnasse. Though it seems certain that Burra’s sensibility was gay, he never took a lover according to biographer Jane Stevenson, and it’s unlikely that he had any first-hand experience of brothels. Scenes such as the prostitutes depicted in The  Common Stair (1929) hanging up their garments to dry on a communal staircase were a combination of his memories of life on the streets of Toulon or Marseilles and elements drawn from the movies that he watched avidly: ‘ the picture is unmistakably Burra – a fusion of his ability to draw together disparate influences into his own distinctive world view’.

Three Sailors at the Bar, 1930

Burra embraced the unrespectable: scantily-clad nightclub performers, transvestites, sailors in search of a pick-up, tarts in a snack bar. Simon Martin writes:

He expressed a ‘gay’ sensibility at a time when such personal honesty and an overtly camp aesthetic were by no means widely acceptable. Decades before Grayson Perry explored transvestism in his art, Burra depicted men in drag and in his hilarious letters adopted the alter egos of ‘Lady Bureaux’ and ‘Madame Mata-Hari’.  He was not interested in what other people thought of him, but he was interested in people, in their foibles and eccentricities, and in the dark side of humanity.

Market Day, 1926

Crowded urban scenes first began to appear in Burra’s paintings in the late 192os, partly reflecting his love of cinema and his admiration for contemporary French poets such as Jules Romains, whose imagery was drawn from the streets and dance halls.  Market Day (1926) is a busy port scene with two black sailors on shore leave carrying their ditty bags and being accosted by hip-jutting prostitutes. Burra’s attention to detail ranges from the tonally matching jacket and tie worn by the sailor on the left, to the bowl of fruit carried on a woman’s head like a still life at the centre of the composition.

Saturday Market, 1932
Harlem, 1934
Dockside Cafe Marseilles

Simon Martin continues:

Burra’s Dockside Cafe Marseilles (1929) is a study in the coded language of sexual ambiguity, employing  high camp and innuendo. Although the cinematic view of cranes and the upper deck of a boat confirm the waterfront location, the characters within are not the macho sailors or dockworkers one might expect. Instead young man with his cap at a rakish angle, bejewelled ring and seemingly plucked eyebrows stands at the bar. The two barmaids have the exaggerated appearance of men in drag, while the body language of the black youth in a pink sweater, cropped trousers and ballet shoes who stands smoking to the right of the image suggests that this is a covert place for gay men to meet.

Izzy Orts, 1937

Izzy Orts depicts a popular bar and dance-hall once located at the docks in Boston. On visits to the city to stay with his friend, the writer Conrad Aiken, Burra was a frequent visitor to the bar, perhaps attracted by its lively and diverse clientele. Burra visited America several times and this picture is believed to have been painted during his second visit in 1937. The vibrant scene contains a number of strange characters, such as the disquieting blank-eyed sailor who faces the viewer. The sailor in the foreground on the left is a self-portrait of the artist.

Harlem, 1934

Edward Burra’s paintings of Harlem fall into two groups – street scenes and scenes of night-time entertainment. This painting, Harlem, depicts the area’s daytime street life. Several men and women are shown in front of a row of brownstone tenements, with New York’s elevated railway visible in the background. The street is shown as a place of social interaction: people linger on their doorsteps to smoke, talk and read newspapers. In contrast to the glamour and exuberance of Harlem nightlife, this painting presents a more downbeat scene of uncertain, possibly illicit, employment.

Harlem Theatre, 1933

Burra adored the glittering spectacles of dancing revues at the Folies-Bergere, in particular the African-American dancer and  jazz  singer Josephine Baker. But whilst many modern artists conflated Baker and the Revue negre with the ‘primitivism’ of African tribal sculpture, Simon Martin argues that Burra’s appreciation seems to have been rooted in a genuine love of modern black jazz music and visual culture, with no suggestion of any ‘primitivising’ tendency in his work. Indeed, Burra depicted a multi cultural society that has few parallels in the work of other artists. Martin continues:

At a time of widespread racist imagery in the media, his pictures  were conspicuous for their lack of prejudice and genuine warmth towards black people. The series of paintings inspired by street life in Harlem that he did following visits to New York in 1933 and 1934 stands out as a major contribution to the history of black visual representation and deserves to be seen in the context of the African-American cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. With apparent warmth, they capture a sense of nonchalance: women smoking out of the window of apartment blocks, groups lingering on the steps, and men idling on street corners with  their  prohibition liquor in paper bags. These, and later images of Boston nightlife such as Silver Dollar Bar (1953),led the poet Conrad Aiken to describe Burra as ‘the best painter of the American scene’.

Silver Dollar Bar, 1953

In 1937, during his second visit to the USA to stay with Conrad Aiken, Burra joined him on a trip to Mexico. They took the train through the American South and on to Mexico City before travelling on to Cuernavaca to stay with Malcolm Lowry – then beginning to write Under the Volcano. Burra suffered from the heat and humidity and after two weeks, with dysentery and rheumatic feet, he returned to Boston alone in a state of collapse and needed to recuperate there for a month before returning to England.

Skeleton Party, 1956

Back in England Burra painted Mexican Church, its composition based on two postcards of churches he’d visited. Burra had been influenced particularly by the Mexican muralists and the prints of Jose Guadalupe Posada with their depictions of lively skeletons. The Day of the Dead theme, central to Under the Volcano is echoed in Skeleton Party, completed nearly 20 years after the trip. The pyramid shapes on the horizon have been identified as slag heaps in an industrial landscape, rather than the twin peaks of Lowry’s Mexican volcanoes.

Although Burra will probably always be best known for his early images of city life, his painting continued to develop throughout his career.  Affected by the civil war in Spain, which  he had witnessed first-hand, and then the outbreak of world war, he painted scenes of the cruelty of war in the manner of  Goya, whom he greatly admired. Key pictures from this period are War in the Sun (1938) painted at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, Soldier’s Backs (1942-3) and the remarkable Beelzebub (1937).   In the Second World War he created powerful images of monsters to represent the terror of the war, such as Blue Baby, Blitz over Britain (1941).

Beelzebub, 1937
Blue Baby, Blitz Over Britain, 1941

Reviewing the Pallant House exhibition in The Observer, Rachel Cooke suggested that to understand Burra a good place to start is with  later painting,  The Straw Man (1963), a painting that Pallant House has on long-term loan.  It’s a wonderful, dynamic composition, all intersecting diagonals.  This is what Rachel Cooke had to say about it:

The Straw Man is purest essence of Burra: mysterious, antic, wild. Five flat-capped men – or is it six? – appear at first to be dancing, their calves bulging and stockinged, as if they had come from the ballet. Then you understand: these high steps are not celebratory. They are kicking some kind of mannequin. In the right-hand corner of the painting (right-hand corners are important with Burra; the novelist Anthony Powell recalled that this was where the artist began a painting, sweeping diagonally leftwards), a mother pushes a small boy away from the scene, her gesture confirmation, if it were needed, that this is a tale of violence, not joy.

The Straw Man, 1963

For Simon Martin, Burra is ‘one of the most elusive British artists of the twentieth century’ – long overlooked and underrated.  But recently his reputation has grown dramatically: a record price for one of his works was paid at auction when Zoot Suits sold for £1.8m. That painting, made in 1948, records a London street scene after the arrival of the first Jamaican immigrants to Britain on the SS Windrush.

Zoot Suits, 1948

From the 1950s Burra began to concentrate on painting the English landscape, and from 1959 to his death in 1976 landscape became his main subject matter. At first glance these later landscape paintings can seem quite different from his other work. Whereas much of his earlier work is cluttered and full of detail, there is a great deal of space in the late landscapes. While the earlier paintings are full of eccentric characters and situations, the late landscapes often have few or no people in them.

Landscape near Rye, 1943

These landscapes are not conventional, picturesque views and there is sometimes a sinister edge to them, with dark brooding colours or unlikely choice of subject matter, such as a menacing petrol tanker or bulldozer. Burra’s late landscapes seem to reflect a return to his roots, but also a concern with the despoilation of the English countryside taking place around him. There are powerful paintings in which diggers, lorries and tractors appear as monsters ripping hungrily through the landscape. Commenting on the late landscapes, Jane Stevenson writes:

In the 1950s, he turned away from the human form to concentrate on landscapes of luminous serenity and weirdly powerful flower pieces. In the 1960s and 70s, he was one of the first artists to protest about the ravaging of the English countryside that went along with the creation of the new motorways, to perceive the real costs of you’ve-never-had-it-so-good. His interest in ecology as well as in the built landscape can be charted in letters and paintings from the end of the war onwards. He produced, for instance, a series of pictures in which the vast diggers and dumpers of the construction industry have morphed into carnivorous dinosaurs, snapping at each other and at the landscape with hostility and greed.

Picking a Quarrel, 1968

Writing in The Observer, Rachel Cooke concluded:

It is his landscapes, though, that for me are the best paintings in this show: transcendent and wonderfully modern – you see Hockney here, and Michael Andrews – even as he nods to the masters. In his last years, Burra toured Britain, chauffeured by his sister, Anne. He went to wild places – to Cornwall, the Peak District, the Yorkshire Moors – and he gawped and gawped. “It fascinated me to watch Edward when the car halted,” said his friend, Billy Chappell. “He might, I thought, have been staring at a blank wall, until I saw the intensity of his gaze.” Only when he got back home did he settle to work, reproducing the heather and the screes, but with curious dashes of his own: a road as blue as a river, a field as brightly coloured as an orange. And often, too, an invader or three: a crawling lorry, a demonic motorbike, a rapacious tractor, even an aeroplane, tiny in the sky, but indelibly black. Black Mountain (1968),English Countryside (1965-7) and An English Scene No 2 (1970) are unforgettable paintings: giant postcards from a man who could not ignore what was happening to England, even if it is sometimes hard to tell if her changing landscape was more a source of regret or delight. Oh, you must see this show. It is fascinating and beautiful – and we will not, perhaps, see its like again: the majority of these works are in private collections. Feast your eyes while you can.

An English Country Scene No 2, 1970

Blogger Simon Glassock writes of these late landscapes:

Ultimately Burra’s late landscapes are the most elegiac of his works and arguably his finest. The soft, pleasure-seeking crowds of the 1920s and early 1930s gave way to sombre but more finely crafted pieces informed by the dark middle decades of the twentieth century while the landscapes from the 1960s and 1970s might perhaps best be described as resigned. The eye is still strong but more readily strips away ephemera and the increasing absence of real people from Burra’s paintings reflects his own questioning answer to a question posed by one of his oldest friends, the dancer Billy Chappell. Chappell asked why Burra had been painting transparent people in some of his works: ‘Don’t you find as you get older, you start seeing through everything?’

English Countryside
Near Whitby, Yorkshire, 1972

Of these later landscapes, my outright favourites are  Near Whitby, Yorkshire and Valley and River, Northumberland (which is in the Tate collection). Both were painted in 1972.

Valley and River, Northumberland, 1972

It looks increasingly likely that Edward Burra will be accepted as one of the greatest British artists of the 2oth century. He is a unique figure who should be celebrated for the extraordinary vitality and individuality of his paintings. Burra hated all the talk around pictures and once, in a TV interview, got annoyed at the question, ‘So what does it all mean then?’  Burra, with a twinkle in his eye, responded, ‘Nothing’.  He died in 1976 at the age of 72 having lived far longer than anyone could possibly have predicted, and leaving a far greater legacy than he was given credit for at the time.

The Harbour, Hastings, 1947

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7000 Oaks

The third episode of Andrew Graham-Dixon’s BBC 4 series, The Art of Germany,was both the bleakest and the most hopeful of the series. Graham-Dixon began with the work of Otto Dix and George Grosz before moving on to consider how art and architecture served the nightmare of Nazism under Hitler – and Stalinism in  postwar East Germany.

After the war the shadow of the Third Reich persisted, Germany remained divided and traumatised. How would artists deal with a past that everybody wanted to forget? In a telling scene, Andrew Graham-Dixon underlined his point that ‘heritage’ has a somewhat different meaning in Germany, compared to Britain, by ripping off the bubble-wrap mummifying statues and art objects from the Nazi and Stalinist regimes that fill a whole warehouse in a Berlin suburb. ‘Almost radioactive’, as he put it.

He finished, though, with the hope for the future reflected in Joseph Beuys‘ project 7000 Oaks, begun in 1982  in the city of Kassel, 90% of which was destroyed in the Second World War.  The project involved the planting of seven thousand trees, each paired with a columnar basalt stone approximately four feet high above ground, positioned throughout the greater city of Kassel.

The first tree was planted outside Kassel Museum in 1982 (top).  The photo below shows Beuys planting the first of the 7000 oaks in front of the Fridericianum in Kassell, 1982. The last tree was planted eighteen months after Beuys’ death in 1987 by his son Wenzel Beuys.

With support from the Dia Art Foundation, the project took five years to complete, the last tree being planted in 1987. Beuys intended the Kassel project to be the first stage in an ongoing scheme of tree planting to be extended throughout the world as part of a global mission to effect environmental and social change; locally, the action was linked to the renewal of the city after the devastation of war.

My point with these seven thousand trees was that each would be a monument, consisting of a living part, the live tree, changing all the time, and a crystalline mass, maintaining its shape, size, and weight. This stone can be transformed only by taking from it, when a piece splinters off, say, never by growing. By placing these two objects side by side, the proportionality of the monument’s two parts will never be the same.
– Joseph Beuys

I think the tree – the image of the tree – is an element of regeneration, which is itself a concept of time. The oak is especially so because it is slowly growing with a solid heartwood. The oak has already been a form of sculpture and a symbol of this planet ever since the time of the druids, who used their oaks to define their holy places. To use the oak in this way will represent a really progressive aspect of the idea of understanding art, as art is placed next to the life of humankind within the social body of the future. The tree-planting enterprise provides a very simple but very radical possibility for this when we start with the 7000 oaks.
– Joseph Beuys

The project has a lot to do with the quality of time, and also it has a lot to do with the new understanding of the human being in itself; that everyone is basically a creative soul, whether they are a doctor, a policeman, a bus driver, a street cleaner, a prisoner, or a prison officer. This has to be more than a clear and reasonable practical anthropology: it is also a spiritual necessity, which we have to view in relation to this permanent performance [of the planting of the oaks]. This action will enable us to reach the heart of the existing system – especially the heart of economics, where the flow of money is going to make society sick.
– Joseph Beuys

The Art of Russia

The Art of Russia is another absorbing art history series on BBC 4 in which Andrew Graham-Dixon tells the story of Russian art.

In the first programme Andrew Graham-Dixon explored the origins of the Russian icon from its roots in Byzantium and the first great Russian icon, Our Lady of Vladimir, to the masterpieces of the country’s most famous icon painter, Andrei Rublev. He visited the monastery founded by Ivan the Terrible, where his favourite forms of torture found inspiration in religious art.  The programme continued by examining the impact of Peter the Great, inspired by the time he spent in Deptford in south London, and determined to bring European culture to Russia.

In the second part Graham-Dixon explored how Russia changed from a feudal nation of aristocratic excess to a hotbed of revolution at the beginning of the 20th century and how art moved from being a servant of the state to an agent of its destruction. He traced the journey through Russian art history from monuments that celebrate the absolutism of the tsars to the epic Russian landscape as inspiration; from the design and construction of gold and glittering palaces to the minutiae of diamond-encrusted Faberge eggs; and eventually to the stark and radical paintings of the avant-garde.

A good part of the programme was devoted to the Wanderers, an important group of Russian artists who broke away from the St Petersburg Academy and focused on Russian landscape, contemporary social issues, scenes from traditional peasant life and Russian history.  Andrew Graham-Dixon looked at works by Ilya Repin, Ivan Kramskoy, Isaak Levitan, Valentin Serov and Mikhail Nesterov.  He visited the image of Jesus Christ painted by IIya Repin (1844-1930) inside the church of the Saviour at the Abramtsevo estate (above). This brought back memories of the wonderful From Russia exhibition that we visited in London last year.

The final part examined political revolution and how art was at the forefront of throwing out 1,000 years of royal rule, from its earliest revolutionary days of enthusiasm and optimism when painting died, the poster was king and the machine-made triumphed over the handmade to the dead hand of Socialist Realism. Andrew rooted out portraits of Stalin now hidden in museum storerooms and never on public view, looked at the transformation of the Moscow metro into a great public art gallery and visited the most stunning creation of post-war Communist rule, the Space Monument.

Finally, he considered the confusion and chaos of Russia today and how it is producing some of the world’s strangest art – from heroic sculptures of Russian leader Vladimir Putin to the insides of a giant erotic apple; from the recreation of the Imperial royal family facing the firing squad to sculpture in liquid oil; from Russia’s embrace of the commercial art market to a return to Socialist Realism. Russia seems to stand on another brink of revolution.

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