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The Guardian
5 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Jazz, Paris and war's brutality: the radical watercolours of Edward Burra, British art's great unknown
On any objective reading, Edward Burra occupies a distinguished place in the history of 20th-century British art. His work, especially his watercolours of demi-monde life in interwar Paris and New York, is a distinct and vivid record of the times. His paintings are held in major institutions – as is his extensive archive, which is housed at Tate Britain in London. And yet he remains 'one of the great known unknowns of modern British art', according to Thomas Kennedy, the curator of a new retrospective show at Tate Britain. It is being held more than half a century on from Burra's last show at the Tate in 1973, three years before he died aged 71. There are lots of reasons for Burra's 'unknown' status, explains Kennedy. 'He worked alone, and not being part of a defined group doesn't help to place an artist. But probably more important is the fact he absolutely hated talking about his work.' Kennedy cites some excruciating documentary footage (also from the early 1970s) illustrating Burra's painful reluctance to engage with questions about art. 'He just hated that stuff and would call art 'fart' and things like that. Apparently, he walked through that Tate show as if wearing blinkers, not looking at the work and just wanting to get it over with.' The exhibition runs alongside a parallel show of works by Ithell Colquhoun, another radical British artist who, like Burra, challenged artistic conventions and explored parallel ideas of identity and sexuality in surrealist work that often reflected her occult beliefs. The two defining features of Burra's early life – he was born in 1905 – were the wealth of his family (prominent in banking) and the fact he suffered from extremely poor health. This combination resulted in him later being able to travel – to France and Spain, the United States and Mexico – then return home to Rye in East Sussex, where he spent most of his life, to recuperate after his exertions and paint the things he had seen. His illnesses – rheumatoid arthritis and the blood disease spherocytosis among other conditions – also helped dictate the nature of his art in that it was physically easier for him to work with watercolours flat on a table than with oils at an easel. 'As a watercolourist he pushed the boundaries of a traditionally delicate medium to create bold graphic works, rich in detail,' says Kennedy. His illness also informed his empathy for those on the fringes of society and in his subject matter he engaged with some of the 20th century's most significant social, political and cultural events. 'After Paris in the roaring 20s and the Harlem Renaissance, he sort of pivoted to depict the violence of the Spanish civil war and then the second world war, before taking on British landscapes and reflections on postwar industrialisation and environmental degradation.' While Burra was publicly reticent about his art, the Tate show's exploration of his archives serves to deepen understanding of the man. As well as letters there are his gramophone records – mostly jazz – books and calendars he kept that show his obsessive cinema-going, sometimes seeing several films a day in French and German as well as English. 'Bringing these sources together is quite revealing,' says Kennedy. 'It all adds to the tapestry of his influences and what emerges is a socially conscious art that is warmly satirical while also being willing to confront the darker side of life.' Three Sailors at a Bar, 1930Burra's sexuality is ambiguous, but his work in the 20s and 30s often reflected queer culture and sensibility. While this image of a bar in the south of France is among his more explicitly queer work, it also reflected a general sense of sexual liberation among Burra's circle in the roaring 20s. Minuit Chanson, 1931 (main image above)In this Parisian music shop where you could pay to listen to a gramophone record, Burra's vibrant street scene celebrates its diverse clientele. In characteristic fashion, he deploys a satirical eye to heighten his subject matter rather than to cruelly caricature it. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Beelzebub, c 1937Burra loved Spain and was devastated by the outbreak of the civil war, as he was to be again by the second world war a few years later. In this painting, he transforms historical Spanish conquistador imagery into a grotesque tableau accompanied by an unnerving sexual charge. Cornish Clay Mines, 1970In his later years, Burra's travel was restricted to motoring around Britain, and here he presents a commentary on postwar car culture, featuring ghost-like figures and advertising icons, such as the Michelin Man, all the while acknowledging his own participation in modernity's environmental depredations. Near Whitby, Yorkshire, 1972 One of Burra's final works shows an empty road disappearing into the fog. With lighter applications of watercolour than his earlier graphic style, possibly due to his declining health, the painting's suggestion of moving into the unknown is typical of his later works in which he seems to be searching for moments of quiet reflection. Edward Burra – Ithell Colquhoun is at Tate Britain, London, 13 June to 19 October.
Forbes
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Seeing Each Other: Artists Through The Eyes Of Artists At Pallant House Gallery
Lucien Freud Portrait of Celia Paul at Pallant House Gallery. Lee Sharrock A powerful exploration of artistic connection and mutual gaze, Seeing Each Other: Artists Through the Eyes of Artists is a new exhibition at Pallant House Gallery featuring intimate portrayals and tributes of celebrated modern and contemporary artists, from Francis Bacon and David Hockney to Tracey Emin and Lubaina Himid—revealing the creative bonds that shape British art across generations. Step into a living constellation of faces, gazes, and friendships at Seeing Each Other: Portraits of Artists, the sweeping new exhibition at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. Spanning 125 years of British art, this poetic gathering of over 130 works —from drawings and sculpture to film and photography—unveils the tender, complex, and often electrifying relationships between artists and their creative kin. More than 80 voices echo through this show, including Lucian Freud, Paula Rego, Lubaina Himid, David Hockney, Lee Miller, Francis Bacon, Barbara Hepworth, Maggie Hambling and Peter Blake. Their portraits do more than capture likeness; they tell stories of admiration, rivalry, love, and influence—from the intimate circles of the Bloomsbury Group to the bold bravado of the Young British Artists. Covering a period of 125 years–and featuring drawings, installations, paintings, photography, prints and sculpture–the exhibition sets out to document some of the most intriguing images by artists of their creative peers. Mary McCartney, Being Frida, London, 2000, Giclée Print © Mary McCartney © Mary McCartney At its heart, this is an exhibition of artistic dialogue—painter meeting painter, friend painting friend, and women artists capturing the essence of their peers with unwavering insight. Lindsay Mendick's ceramic tribute to Tracey Emin reshapes a moment of performance art into permanent form, while Lubaina Himid's painted wooden figures honour a lineage of women whose images and ideas continue to shape the canon, and Mary McCartney's enigmatic image of Tracey Emin as Frida Kahlo captures the spirit of both women. Highlights include; a projection of Johnny Shand Kydd's enigmatic images capturing the YBAs when they were young and hanging out at The Groucho Club and Colony Rooms in Soho; and new commissions including a magical portrait by Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year winner Curtis Holder and double portraits by artists and long-term friends Ishbel Myerscough and Chantal Joffe studied together at the Glasgow School of Art. Double portraits by Ishbel Myerscough and Chantal Joffe © Lee Sharrock From previously unseen gems like Seóirse MacAntisionnaigh's 1924 painting The Slade Tea Party–of Slade School students including Mary Adshead and Eileen Agar–to Curtis Holder's luminous new portrait, each piece hums with connection. Whether glimpsing Johnny Shand Kydd's Soho snapshots of the YBAs or lingering before Ishbel Myerscough and Chantal Joffe's dual portraits of one another, visitors are invited into a world where artists become mirrors. While there are many husband-and-wife artist couples featured who have painted or drawn portraits of each other–from Barbara Hepworth and John Skeaping to Winifred and Ben Nicholson, and Lucian Freud and Celia Paul –there is also a strong presence of women artists who have immortalised fellow women artists through portraiture. Lubaina Himid installation at Pallant House Gallery. © Lee Sharrock Lindsay Mendick's ceramic ode to Tracey Emin in the form of a ceramic reimagining of Emin's 1996 performance Exorcism of the last painting I ever made is a highlight, as is Lubaina Himid's sculptural artwork featuring painted wooden full length portraits of female artists from past and present, including Bridget Riley, Élisabeth Vigée-le Brun, Frida Kahlo and Himid's friend, artist Claudette Johnson. Lindsay Mendick's ceramic ode to Tracey Emin. Photograph by Lee Sharrock. Lee Sharrock The exhibition features artists' portraits of fellow artists spanning several genres, movements and locations, starting at the turn of the 20th century with portraits of Walter Sickert, Sylvia Gosse and Nina Hamnett, through to The Bloomsbury Set in London and Suffolk, Newlyn School in Cornwall, pre-war modernism in Paris, to Pop Art art, the London School, YBAs and finally to contemporary artists and photographers such as Cindy Sherman and Mary McCartney and the British Black This final chapter in Pallant House's trilogy on modern British art—following still life and landscape—offers a deeply human tapestry. Curated by Melanie Vandenbrouck with scholarly grace, Seeing Each Other is a celebration of the artist's gaze—not just outward, but across the room, into the eyes of someone who understands. Seeing Each Other: Portraits of Artists runs from 17 May to 2 November 2025 at Pallant House in Chichester, Sussex. Curtis Holder painting. © Lee Sharrock
The Guardian
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Body of work: the transgressive art of Helen Chadwick
Helen Chadwick, who died unexpectedly in 1996 at the age of 42, has long been an artist more name-checked than exhibited. Her devotees include the lauded feminist mythographer Marina Warner, for whom she's 'one of contemporary art's most provocative and profound figures'. Yet she is habitually relegated to a footnote within British art: one of the first women to be nominated for the Turner prize in 1987 and an outstanding teacher of YBAs such as Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. She remains best known for Piss Flowers, her white bronze sculptures whose stalagmite protuberances are phallic inversions of vaginal recesses, cast from the holes she and her husband made by peeing in thick snow. (The artist's hotter urine went deeper, creating larger cavities. She described the work as 'a penis-envy farce'.) It's easy to see how her transgressive interests might have quickened British art's pulse. Yet her meditations on the sacred and profane, sex and death, were expansive, propelling diverse experiments across installation, photography and performance. Now, her prolific if all too short career is getting its first major showing in more than two decades. At a time when gender binaries are being dismantled, Laura Smith, curator of a retrospective at the Hepworth Wakefield, Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures, and editor of the accompanying book, hopes to make Chadwick's relevance to a fresh generation clear. 'She was trying to disrupt societal conventions, including gender normativity,' Smith says. 'She was really pioneering and she wasn't afraid of art being sexy or funny, either.' The exhibition opens with the decidedly fluid Cacao, one of Chadwick's most affecting evocations of how opposites such as desire and abjection entwine. It's a huge chocolate fountain set to be filled with 800kg of Tony's Chocolonely, which will gush from a central liquid erection. Needless to say, this brown pool evokes more than confectionery. 'It's joyous and kind of gross,' says Smith. 'It bubbles like a swamp. Basically, it farts.' Chadwick was also an inveterate craftsperson. The images of her MA graduation show of 1977, In the Kitchen, where she's encased in sculptural costumes of white goods, are often used to represent feminist art of that decade. What the pictures can't tell you is what went into those creations, including performances with wearable beds and latex nudity suits cast from their wearers' bodies. According to Errin Hussey, who's overseeing an exhibition in Leeds of her archive, 'the costumes really show the dedication she had. The intricacy of detail and planning that went into the textile and metalwork on just one shoe is amazing.' For her first major work, Ego Geometria Sum, she devised a novel way to embed shots of herself on to the plywood surfaces of sculptures by painting them with photographic emulsion. The Oval Court, part of the exhibition that led to her Turner nomination, took the experimentation further. She created its dreamy blue-and-white collage with a photocopier, making direct images of her own body alongside an apparent cornucopia of flowers, fruit and dead animals including lambs and a swan. Complementing this lusciously libidinal work is Carcass, a glass tower that, when originally shown at the ICA in 1986, was filled with dead animals' bodies, plus weeks of kitchen waste. When the gases generated by its live decomposition caused its glass to crack, and the gallery attempted to remove it, the lid blew off, spraying rot across the art space. (At the Hepworth, its vegetarian recreation features a gas valve so it can be 'burped like a baby' each night.) In what would be her final decade, frustrated by the heat she was getting from fellow feminists about her use of nudity, she abandoned depicting her outer body and looked within instead. Moving on from questions around objectified gender towards a polymorphous, fluid sexuality, in these works things are forever collapsing into their opposite, like Piss Flowers' erect recesses. As Smith reflects: 'In her thinking nothing was black and white.' Viral Landscapes, 1988-89In this work created after Chadwick stopped depicting her outer body, photography of Pembrokeshire's coast is overlain with images of cells taken from her urine, blood, cervix, mouth and ear. In the Kitchen, 1977 (main image)Chadwick's earliest works hinged on feminist concerns about constructed identity. For her MA degree show she and her performers donned sculptural costumes of white goods and made a tongue-in-cheek speech about 'kitchen lib' to a soundtrack of clips from daytime radio aimed at housewives. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Piss Flowers, 1991-92Chadwick's Piss Flowers first made a scatalogical twosome with her chocolate fountain sculpture Cacao at her exhibition Effluvia at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 1994. The press had a field day but the show attracted record numbers to the venue: 54,000 visitors in six weeks. The Oval Court, 1984-86In this sculptural installation featuring collage on a large, low platform, the artist created a vision of baroque excess using blue-and-white images of her own body, flora and fauna made with a photocopying machine. Unlike the finger-wagging Vanitas paintings Chadwick drew on, its vision of life's transient pleasures mixed with death has a luxuriant, unbridled energy. Loop My Loop, 1991Chadwick had a genius for evoking the slippage between desire and disgust. Here, she entwines the age-old lover's keepsake, a lock of golden hair, with pig intestines. Airy romance meets bodily urges; the human entwines with the animal. Where does one begin and the other end? Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures is at Hepworth Wakefield, 17 May to 27 October; the book of the same name is published by Thames & Hudson (£30); Helen Chadwick: Artist, Researcher, Archivist is at Leeds Art Gallery to 4 November.
