Latest news with #Burra
New Statesman
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Edward Burra's tour of the 20th century
John Deth (Hommage a Conrad Aiken) by Edward Burra, 1931 The art of Edward Burra is also the art of popping up in unlikely places. He was in the audience in Paris when Josephine Baker made her debut at La Revue Nègre in 1925 and in New York during the Harlem Renaissance; he visited Mexico with Malcolm Lowry and was in Spain as tensions bubbled towards the Civil War; he lived in coastal England during the Second World War witnessing troops departing – and sometimes returning – from the continent and captured the incursion of A-roads and pylons into the ancient landscapes of Cornwall and Wales in the early 1970s. If Burra was Zelig with a paintbrush he was also part of a strand of eccentric English art that, had its origins in William Blake and ran through Richard Dadd, Aubrey Beardsley, Percy Wyndham Lewis and Stanley Spencer. He may have joined Unit One, Paul Nash's short-lived avant-garde gathering of British artists, sculptors and architects, and exhibited alongside Picasso, Miró and Magritte at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936, but he stood outside stylistic groupings. As he told one questioner: 'I didn't like being told what to think, dearie.' That hint of bloody-mindedness was also perhaps the result of lifelong ill health. Burra suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and anaemia and as a boy contracted both pneumonia and rheumatic fever: 'The only time I don't feel any pain,' he later wrote, 'is when I am working. I become completely unaware.' Physical discomfort was why he chose watercolour over oil paint for most of his work – bending over a sheet on a table was easier than standing at an easel. Burra was nevertheless a social creature; his friends included Anthony Powell and the choreographer Frederick Ashton as well as innumerable artists and flâneurs. He travelled widely in company, diving into both the glitter and the demi-monde of Paris, the cafés, sailor-filled dockside bars and clubs of Marseille and the dancehalls and striptease joints of Harlem, but lived and worked for most of his life at the well-appointed family home in Rye. There, as he painted, he would play the newest jazz bands from his capacious record collection. It was this mixture of circumstances and experience that resulted in some of the most distinctive art of the British 20th century. Burra's hard-to-categorise career is the subject of an immaculate and revealing new exhibition at Tate Britain. It shows a man whose art reflected a rare sense of engagement with his times, especially its queer fringes. The works of the 1920s and 1930s treat his experiences in France and New York and verge on both satire and caricature. Burra used watercolour almost as oil paint and built up layers to give unusual depth of colour and subtle gradations. It was a technique he employed in teeming images: tight-suited sailors at a bar ('Everyone was sailor mad,' said Ashton), burlesque reviews on stage and riotous Harlem ballrooms. Burra moved in a gay milieu and in such places he found a liberating sense of sexual freedom and cross-class slumming. The pictures are peopled with 'types', from heavy-on-the-make-up women and lascivious and sinister men to simple beefcakes and beauties. Some are white-eyed, as if the headiness of the bars and clubs were acting as a narcotic. It is as if Bruegel or Jan Steen had wandered from the Low Countries into seedier and more cacophonous climes. In these paintings he is the English equivalent of Otto Dix and George Grosz but without the bitter edge. If the Germans showed the inequality of the postwar years – fat and seedy plutocrats made rich by profiteering contrasted with mutilated army veterans – Burra was more interested in communities, whether dancers, musicians or trufflers after sex – licit or illicit. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Burra's style and subject matter changed with the onset of the Spanish Civil War. He travelled to Spain in 1933 in search of an Iberian version of Harlem, a place of music and dance and, while he found flamenco and colour, he also found burgeoning violence. Unlike so many other British artists and writers, however, he was no Republican sympathiser. His own politics were ambiguous at best, and in 1942 he told John Rothenstein, director of the Tate Gallery, that he was pro-Franco, although this may have been mere provocation. In fact, he seems to have disliked both fascists and communists equally. The paintings he started to make were larger – multiple sheets glued together – and stuffed with rippling and bulbous figures, cloaked and faceless figures among ruins. These were characters of some indeterminate medieval past rather than modern-day combatants, with the sinister mood of Goya's Los Caprichos etchings and the atrocities depicted in his Disasters of War prints transposed into a present that was nevertheless timeless. Indeed the melons-in-a-sack nature of his figures, where shoulders, buttocks and calves bulge alarmingly, are more akin to the Mannerist frescoes of Giulio Romano for the Palazzo del Te in Mantua from the 1530s than anything Burra's contemporaries were producing. The Estate Of Edward Burra, Courtesy Lefevre Fine Art, London / Bridgeman Images What war in Spain and then across Europe awoke in him was a generalised disgust at violence and destruction. Witnessing the soldiers massing at Rye to fight across the Channel unnerved him. Even as they climb into a troop lorry in Soldiers' Backs (1942) there is malignity in their movement, and when he painted Soldiers at Rye (1941), showing a troop dozing, he gave them beaked plague masks that make the men both theatrical and menacing. In 1945 he described to a friend (in prose that was as idiosyncratic as his pictures) the feelings the times released in him: 'The very sight of peoples faces sickens me I've got no pity it really is terrible sometimes ime quite frightened at myself I think such awful things I get in such paroxysms of impotent venom I feel it must poison the atmosphere.' The cartoonist and author Osbert Lancaster astutely observed that, 'What Burra is trying to do… is not to select and record some single aspect of the modern tragedy… but to digest it whole and transform it into something of permanent aesthetic significance'. Nevertheless, Burra's impotent venom stayed with him. Sometimes he found release from it in designing costumes and theatre sets for Carmen and Don Quixote for the Royal Opera House and Sadler's Wells, but it remained lurking. From the late 1930s into the 1970s Burra also painted rural scenes, spurred by a new interest in gardening and by the car trips he took around Britain. Some are pure landscapes, such as a bewitching view of clouded hilltops, Near Whitby, Yorkshire (1972), and some introduce folklore into real views, such as Landscape with Birdman Piper and Fisherwoman (1946). In others, however, he took aim at the encroachment of modernity: a man at a petrol station is enveloped in the coils of his fuel pipe that has turned into a snake, a stream of cars and lorries invades the countryside like an army, and in Skeleton Party (1952-54) a cluster of ghouls, fresh from Mexico's Día de los Muertos, make merry in an industrial landscape. Burra once responded to a question about his art by stating: 'I never tell anyone anything… I don't see that it matters.' He didn't need to: it seems clear that that joyous Harlem jazz had turned into a danse macabre. Edward Burra Tate Britain, London SW1 Until 19 October [See also: Jarvis Cocker at 61: Is this hardcore?] Related
Time Out
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Edward Burra at Tate Britain
Born in London in 1905, the British artist Edward Burra suffered from acute rheumatoid arthritis and pernicious anemia from a young age. He travelled regularly, with a special fondness for Paris and New York. In photographs, though, he appears dour, studious and sickly. Most of the paintings that line the walls of his latest retrospective at the Tate couldn't be further from this image. In its first room, paintings on paper depict bars, cafés, weddings and cabaret shows, replete with voluptuous and lively characters. Though relatively small in scale, each sheet contains multiple scenes that unfold at once. Burra collapses our sense of perspective, stacking his subjects vertically to fit as much action as he can into each image. Each shape is impossibly smooth and rendered so precisely as to look airbrushed. In these works, painted during visits to France early in Burra's career, everything is voluminous. It's not just biceps, breasts and bottoms that bulge; at Burra's hand, pillars, plant pots, light fittings and fruits become equally taut, fleshy affairs. A dainty champagne coup sits in the foreground of Le Bal (1928), dwarfed by the monuments that surround it – from the tubular streamers that hang from the ceiling to the room's many animated revellers. In their curvaceousness and volume, Burra's subjects convey a playful sense of abundance that borders on kitsch. In today's context, where distorted figuration is the order of the day, it's a style that feels a little hackneyed. Remembering that these paintings are close to a century old makes them feel incredibly fresh. In Three Sailors at the Bar (1930), a casual drink with three uniformed friends becomes a dizzying, almost erotic arrangement of shapes and patterns (apparently, Burra and his friends would blow kisses to sailors on the street). Burra's France is a trip that brings to mind the swirling casino carpets of Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Subsequent rooms contain later works where many of the 20th century's cultural and historical moments are described in Burra's unique language. The Harlem Renaissance, Spanish Civil War and Second World War all get the treatment, the latter two demonstrating that a world of blobs and bulges isn't always a light hearted one. During more traumatic times, Burra's paintings become increasingly fragmented. Camouflage (1938), for example, is a composite image covering a number of pasted-together sheets. At first, it's difficult to make sense of what's happening in it, but using its globular shapes as a starting point helps. Two of them turn out to be the buttocks of a soldier laying on his side as he fixes a military vehicle. While Burra's style is a natural fit for the Roaring Twenties in France, it feels incongruous in this context. The result is a confusing, though still formally impressive, group of paintings. The show loses momentum somewhat with a room focussed on Burra's work as a costume and set-designer. Here, his wings appear to have been clipped and he paints naturalistically for the first time. After seeing the artist at his most bulbous, these works feel impoverished. The final room doubles down on this to devastating effect. Burra spent his final years painting English landscapes, sometimes dotted with figures who appear slender and glum. In Landscape, Cornwall, with Figures and Tin Mine (1975), painted the year before Burra's death, they stand against a bleak, grey sky; suits crumpled, faces severe, eyes pointed downwards. The buffet of ripe and inviting objects and forms that this show starts with are routinely undermined as it continues, Burra willingly disrupting his own light-hearted style to allude to grim realities and a sense of existential anguish. Only when it's snatched away do we come to understand the optimism of Burra's early vision.
Yahoo
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Edward Burra: Tate Britain curator on ‘queer life, joy and desire' in artist's work ahead of major retrospective
A top art curator has reflected on the unique appeal to LGBTQ art lovers of Edward Burra ahead of an exhibition of the artist's work at the Tate Britain next month. Edward Burra – Ithell Colquhoun, which runs from 13 June–19 October 2025, will showcase Burra's work alongside the works of fellow British great Ithell Colquhoun. This will be the first retrospective of Burra's work in London in 40 years. Burra, according to Tate reps, is renowned for his vibrant, satirical scenes of the uninhibited urban underworld and queer culture during the 'Roaring Twenties.' Thomas Kennedy, Curator, Modern British Art, Tate Britain tells Attitude: 'Edward Burra was a British artist who vividly captured the queer nightlife of Paris and the south of France during the 'Roaring Twenties'. 'In Paris, he immersed himself in gay-friendly bars and clubs lining streets like Rue de Lappe. His work Rue de Lappe (1930) depicts men dancing together in a club, embodying the era's spirit of queer liberation. 'He also painted sailors on leave in the sun-drenched south of France, as seen in Three Sailors at a Bar (1930). Burra and his bohemian friends were 'sailor mad', incited by the risqué stories found in French books and films. 'Though Burra's sexuality remains ambiguous – he lived at a time when homosexuality was illegal in the UK – his art pulses with depictions of queer life, joy and desire.' For more information about The post Edward Burra: Tate Britain curator on 'queer life, joy and desire' in artist's work ahead of major retrospective appeared first on Attitude.
BBC News
31-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Call to end mystery around Cornwall scenes by The Secret Painter
The family of an artist known as The Secret Painter are hoping people will help solve a mystery surrounding two of his paintings by Eric Tucker are believed to depict China Clay Country near St Austell in Cornwall but the exact location and the people he painted are paintings, one in oil and the other in watercolour, have been part of an exhibition at the Connaught Brown gallery in who died in 2018, left behind hundreds of his paintings at his former council house in Warrington, Cheshire. Tucker's nephew Joe Tucker said the two artworks were among 550 paintings discovered at his uncle's house but were very different to the others that predominantly featured working class life in the north of said they would love to know more about the location of the paintings and the people portrayed."These two are a bit of an anomaly in the collection because, as far as we know, they're the only images he produced of Cornwall," said Mr Tucker. "At least, we're pretty sure they're Cornwall – my dad, the artist's younger brother, believes they may depict the China Clay mines near St Austell."He said it seemed likely the paintings were inspired by Edward Burra's famous Cornish watercolours of the area. Mr Tucker said: "We know my uncle was a great admirer of Burra's – but my dad thinks his brother may have also travelled to the area for work."He worked as a labourer and, in later years, travelled around the country making deliveries to building sites. It's also just possible he was visiting the area on his way to St Ives." Mr Tucker has written a book about his uncle, The Secret Painter, in which he describes how his uncle, who was also a boxer, had a distant and unfulfilled ambition to live in St 400 paintings and thousands of sketches came to light after Tucker's death and it was hailed as an important discovery in British scenes depicting the streets and pubs of north-west England attracted comparisons with LS Lowry.
