Drawn to the dark side | Edward Burra at Tate Britain
Edward Burra, John Deth (Hommage to Conrad Aiken), 1931. Whitworth Art Gallery.© The estate of Edward Burra, courtesy Lefevre Fine Art, London
In the summer of 1933 the 28-year-old painter Edward Burra, living with his parents in the village of Playden, near Rye in East Sussex, wandered out of the house, seemingly heading for town. His mother thought he’d gone to buy a packet of cigarettes. In fact, he was bound for New York. He didn’t return for three months.
Why the secrecy? He didn’t, he later revealed, want to be talked out of making the journey. Burra suffered badly from rheumatoid arthritis and pernicious anaemia. The former caused chronic pain in his hands, feet and spine, the latter led to extreme fatigue after minimum exertion. For a man who could hardly walk, an arduous voyage across the Atlantic didn’t seem a wise idea, a mother’s nightmare.
Apart from a four-year period studying art in London, and several such prolonged trips abroad, Burra lived his entire adult life in the Rye area, even after the death of his parents. He painted almost all his paintings there, using watercolours, as working in oils was too painful for the inflamed joints in his hand. A less driven man would have limited his subject matter to the world that surrounded him, and become, no doubt, a regional watercolourist of some local repute.
The painter, however, had a taste for the sort of decadent, bohemian high life that wasn’t on tap in stodgy old Sussex (he called Rye ‘Tinker Belle Town’ and referred to it as a ‘morgue’). He was drawn to the marginal figures inhabiting the underground nightclubs and bars of Paris, Marseilles, New York’s Harlem, and Madrid. If he couldn’t dance, he wanted to watch others dance; if he couldn’t pick up prostitutes or sailors in dodgy bars, he wanted to hang around where other people did just that. He became a vicarious bohemian playboy, drawn to the dark side, storing up visual memories that he would recreate when he arrived back home, in need for serious spells of R&R.
Edward Burra, Three Sailors at a Bar 1930. Private collection, courtesy of Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert. © The estate of Edward Burra, courtesy Lefevre Fine Art, London
The latest retrospective of Burra’s work – and here is an artist who seems to drift in and out of fashion, ‘rediscovered’ by every generation – opened last week at Tate Britain, showcasing 80 of his works, along with paraphernalia highlighting his love of letter writing, jazz music, and theatre design. Applying watercolours on stitched-together pieces of paper with a density more akin to what you’d expect from oils, Burra veers between cartoonish distortion and delicate detail, nodding to Cubism, German Expressionism and Surrealism. There’s a lurking sense of menace, however mundane the scene: ‘I’m always expecting something calamitous to happen’, he once wrote. He crops his images like stills from a B-movie, flattening space a la Picasso, grotesquely caricaturing his subjects, like George Grosz.
There’s a touch of Stanley Spencer in there, too, though where Spencer brought Christ to Cookham, Burra brought Josephine Baker to Rye. In The Tea-Shop (1929) a quintessentially English establishment, doilies and all, is staffed by topless Moulin Rouge-style dancing girls. The foremost of these, strongly resembling the bob-haired American performer, pours the contents of a teapot onto a genteel old lady’s head. Two fingers to stuffiness!
Burra found himself in Spain as that country’s Civil War broke out in 1936, after which his work, already dark, took on a more disturbing mood, infused with Goyaesque horror, full of macabre figures, looming shadows, and surreal landscapes that suggest a world – and an artist – on the brink. Unable to fight, Burra spent WW2 holed up in Rye, painting soldiers preparing for the invasion of Europe. The figures in Soldiers at Rye (1941) with their massive bare arses and sinister carnivalesque masks, dance in a circle like a coven of witches: with Allies like these, who needs enemies?
Art historian/curator Hope Wolf dedicates an entire chapter to Edward Burra in Sussex Modernism, published to accompany the eponymous exhibition she has curated for Towner Eastbourne (showing until September 28, and including four works by Burra). Wolf suggests that the artist would have hated being included in a book with such a title. That, despite spending most of his life in Sussex, and creating most of his work there, he would have considered himself to be far too cosmopolitan to be associated with a single region, even alongside artists of the calibre of his great friend Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious, Edward Wadsworth, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Ivon Hitchens. Indeed, she points out, after being invited to contribute a work to the 1970 exhibition Twentieth Century Artists of Sussex and Kent, which was chosen to adorn the cover of the catalogue, he bitched in a letter to his friend John Banting about a ‘gruesome private view’ at ‘Rye Mausoleum’ on ‘Sussex and Kent Fartists’. Oh dear. If Burra was a ‘neo-regionalist’, he was an extremely reluctant one.
The Tate exhibition is curated chronologically, and some of the most poignant pieces are in the last room. Burra died, aged 71, in 1976, and in his later years confined his travels to the British Isles, either on road trips up north in his sister Anne’s Morris Traveller, or, as he got more frail, closer to home. Here we get a hint of what the artist’s work might have been like had he not developed a taste of the cosmopolitan; had he thought twice that summer day in 1933, and returned home with a packet of cigarettes in his pocket. Gentle roads lead over the Downs or the Cheviots to who-knows-where. Anthropomorphic folds in the hills invite a return to the womb: death as reverse birth, landscape as eternity.
Edward Burra is buried at St Michael’s Churchyard, in Playden, near Rye, a short walk from his family home. The exhibition Edward Burra runs until October 19.
Edward Burra, Landscape with Birdman Piper and Fisherwoman, 1946. © The estate of Edward Burra. Private Collection