There’s a self-portrait David Jones painted in 1931 when he was in his mid-thirties. In Human Being he depicts himself almost as a boy, an unworldly youth with a thoughtful, quizzical look in his eyes who radiates a sense of inner strength. His hands are delicate, sensitive, almost feminine.
At Pallant House Gallery in Chichester last week I stared at this memorable image for some time, trying to figure out the man who is the subject of Vision and Memory, a major exhibition of his work showing there until February. There was much about Jones that I found a strange, complex and difficult to understand – whether in terms of the historical, religious and mythological allusions that fill his paintings (and his poems) – or in the sense of knowing the human being behind the work. Continue reading “David Jones: Vision and Memory at Pallant House”→
Here’s Santa Claus – but not, as in conventional representations, hauling a sack of toys. Instead, in this woodcut that is typical of the work of its creator Clare Leighton, Santa shoulders a tree, recently harvested from the forest.
Many of Clare Leighton’s works contain images of physical labour: farmers toiling in the fields, fishermen pulling in their catch, dockhands off-loading goods, and women washing clothes or mending nets. She is an artist whose work I have admired since seeing some of her woodcuts displayed in an exhibition in Manchester’s Whitworth Gallery. She was an artist, writer and wood engraver, best known for the illustrated books she produced in the 1930s that recorded English rural life (The Farmer’s Year, 1933, Four Hedges, 1935), and her recording of life in America to where she emigrated in 1939. Southern Harvest, 1942 and New England Industries, 1952, are considered amongst the most celebrated and poignant records of American rural life in the middle of the last century.
Leighton had an unconventional childhood. Both her parents were writers – her father wrote cowboy stories whilst her mother wrote yarns for the daily newspaper in order to keep the upper-class household going. Her brother Roland, killed in 1915, was later immortalised by his fiancé Vera Brittain in her memoir Testament of Youth.
‘Sowing’ from ‘The Farmer’s Year’
Leighton attended Brighton Art School before studying at the Slade School of Art, where she spent ‘months on end sitting before a model and drawing and drawing and drawing.’ Faced with the reality of needing to earn her living she left the Slade and began illustrating her father’s Wild West stories, enrolling for evening classes at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in order to learn about black and white reproduction.
In the late 1920s Leighton took a job teaching children from one of the poorest slum districts of London, taking them to the National Gallery and encouraging them to see beauty in the shapes and forms of chimney pots around them. During this time she continued to engrave ‘countless wood blocks, aware of neither fatigue or impatience’.
As Leighton built up a reputation as a book illustrator her teaching career gave way to lecturing, and in 1928 she embarked on a lecture tour of the United States. There she produced a series of engravings of Canadian lumberjacks at work in remote snowy woodland, created during a subsequent trip to a lumber camp on the Quebec-Ontario border in the winter of 1930-31.
The cover of the recent republication of ‘The Farmers’ Year’
‘Threshing – March’ from ‘The Farmer’s Year
During the 1930s Leighton worked on several celebrated books, such as The Farmer’s Year (1933, recently republished by Toller Books), which depicted rural activities such as threshing, haymaking, apple-picking, lambing, ploughing and sowing that were associated with the months of the year, examples of which are included in the show. Other books that she authored and illustrated included Four Hedges: A Gardener’s Chronicle (1935) which was inspired by her garden, and the very influential manual Wood-engraving and Woodcuts (1932).
‘Cotton Picking’ from ‘Southern Harvest’
In 1939 Leighton settled in the Unitesd States. The landscape and rural activities of the American South, such as cotton picking and corn shucking, inspired her 1942 book Southern Harvest, whilst activities such as cranberrying, codfishing, whaling and lobstering in Connecticut were the focus of a series of twelve designs for Wedgwood plates on the theme of New England Industries.
Other notable works include a powerful and bleak engraving called Breadline, New York produced at the height of the Great Depression in which men warm themselves before a fire at the end of a seemingly endless queue that stretches through the city.
I was reminded of the strength and beauty of Clare Leighton’s work by a recent post on Caught by the River (which was also the source of the Santa Claus woodcut). The post gave news of a forthcoming exhibition of Clare Leighton’s work at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, West Sussex. Pallant House put on some magnificent exhibitions – but they are about as far from Liverpool as it’s possible to be. However, I did see their magnificent Edward Burra exhibition when it went on tour.
And so – Happy Christmas. And may Santa, shouldering his load, bring you good things.
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, 1943The Harbour, Hastings, 1947Cabbages, 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.
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.
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.
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, 1937Blue 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.
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 CountrysideNear 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.
That's How The Light Gets In 