Latest news with #EdwardBurra
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
Yahoo
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Edward Burra - Ithell Colquhoun: Tate's double-bill is a revelation
Tate Britain's latest offer? Two exhibitions for the price of one. For the first time since 2013's Gary Hume-Patrick Caulfield double-header, separate yet similarly engrossing shows occupy the lower-floor galleries at Millbank, accessed with a single ticket. (The order in which you see them is unimportant, but some stamina is required; allow a couple of hours.) The juxtaposition isn't obvious but neither is it forced: although it's unlikely they ever met, the 20th-century British artists Edward Burra and Ithell Colquhoun were born only a year apart, to upper-middle-class families, and were both associated with Surrealism. They also shared preoccupations, such as an interest in same-sex relationships and a concern for the British landscape – as well as (to varying degrees) the paranormal and the occult. A ramshackle, sickly character from Sussex, Burra (1905-76) specialised in stylised, graphic watercolours with a satirical edge, often depicting people on society's margins. (For the artist Paul Nash, a friend, he was a modern Hogarth.) In part because watercolour was his preferred medium – thanks to lifelong rheumatoid arthritis and anaemia, he found it easier than painting in oils at an easel – he's often considered an idiosyncratic, tangential figure within British visitors to Tate Britain may be familiar with his composition The Snack Bar (1930), in which a chalky-faced barman suggestively slices a firm, pink ham (it remains on display upstairs), but this show of more than 80 paintings – Burra's first London retrospective in 40 years – contains so many exhibits from private collections (almost 50) that it feels like a revelation. Accompanied by music drawn from his collection of 78rpm gramophone records (he was a big fan of American jazz, which inspired a trip to Harlem during the 1930s), the exhibition tautly traces Burra's career, from his teeming early pictures of bohemians and pert-bottomed sailors living it up in France – Le Bal (1928) is a standout – to his brooding post-war visions of an enchanted British countryside blighted by motorways and concrete. Each picture is a mini-world of incident and observation, often saturated with seediness and innuendo. The conflicts of the 1930s and 1940s cut Burra deeply, darkening an already dour disposition, and inspiring in his work a menacing new strain (sometimes charged with sadomasochism), as the flirting, gurning hedonists of his earlier paintings are replaced by hooded wraiths and sinister men in birdlike masks. Colquhoun (1906-88), an avowed occultist, was more interested in magic and the power of female sexuality than in macho menace; whereas Burra fetishised the male form, Colquhoun – who may have been bisexual, and was married only briefly, during the 1940s – painted imagery evoking impotence and castration. Who knew that a trimmed cucumber could be so troubling?This show, first seen earlier this year (at Tate St Ives) in Cornwall, where Colquhoun lived during her latter decades, takes her obsession with magic seriously – devoting space to diagrams of tesseracts and tarot-card designs, and teasing out impenetrable alchemical concepts such as the 'Divine Androgyne'.Don't let this put you off. Inspired by the crisp art of Salvador Dalí, which she encountered in London in 1936 (at an exhibition of Surrealist art in which Burra also participated), Colquhoun's mature paintings – often produced using 'automatic' techniques – have a flaming, dream-like intensity. In Dance of the Nine Opals (1942), a ring of opalescent rocks inspired by a Cornish stone circle appears to revolve around a golden tree of life before pink-tinged mountains. Fantastical pictures like this – like much of Burra's original output (which, although the shows aren't in competition, probably edges it) – deserve greater prominence in the history of 20th-century British art. From June 13;
Telegraph
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
London was the centre of the art world. Now it's the English countryside
Where would you start looking if you wanted to find the heart and soul of British culture? Is there somewhere you can pinpoint, like the source of a great river? 'That's easy!' I used to think, considering these questions. 'The city is where art gets made.' From the Italian city-states that birthed the Renaissance to the metropolises of Paris, Berlin and Vienna from which Modernism emerged, dynamic urban environments have provided the settings for important cultural vibe shifts. The same is true of Britain, isn't it? Elizabethan theatre flourished in playhouses on the fringes of the capital. Four centuries later, the Young British Artists flocked to empty warehouses in the East End. A symbiosis between art and cities makes sense. To thrive, significant new art requires certain conditions: the circulation of stimulating ideas; proximity to ever-shifting entertainments; networks of like-minded creative types on the lookout for inspiration. These things are commonplace in cities. Yet, to deny that culture can also coalesce in the countryside would reflect terrible metropolitan bias, as I realised while visiting Tate Britain's enthralling new double exhibition devoted to the 20th-century artists Edward Burra and Ithell Colquhoun, both of whom had a profound sensitivity to the British landscape. Towards the end of his life, Burra depicted rural locations that he believed were menaced by modernity. After the war, Colquhoun settled in Cornwall and produced visionary paintings inspired by topographical features such as standing stones. Both were products of their times. A generation earlier, the British avant-garde – led by Wyndham Lewis and his fellow Vorticists – had been an urban affair. But hankering after rural spots gradually became de rigueur for progressive artists. (The same period witnessed the British folk-song revival associated with the musician Cecil Sharp.) In 1907, the artist Eric Gill settled in the Sussex village of Ditchling. A little later, the Bloomsbury set began congregating at Charleston, a few miles to the east. In the 1930s, Paul Nash lived in Dorset, in the coastal town of Swanage, where he cavorted with fellow artist Eileen Agar (the pair became known as the 'seaside surrealists'), and painted Event on the Downs (1934), with its mysterious face-off between a tree stump, a cloud, and a levitating tennis ball. By the end of that decade, Ben Nicholson had moved to the Cornish enclave of St Ives. In 1945, the exiled 'degenerate' German artist Kurt Schwitters ended up in Cumbria (following in the footsteps of the artist and writer John Ruskin, who lived in the Lake District from 1872 until his death). During the 1970s, Henry Moore – who for decades had been collecting pleasing pebbles and flints, which he often used as a starting point for new work – made a series of dramatic prints depicting Stonehenge. It isn't only aspects of British modernism: various earlier cultural moments could be considered rural phenomena too. Romanticism wouldn't have happened without a newfound interest in awe-inspiring native mountain scenery: swathes of the country, once written off as desolate wilderness, were now 'sublime'. Several artists from the British Isles responded to this fascination for rugged landscapes, including, famously, JMW Turner – who was struck by Snowdonia during a trip to north Wales in 1798 – but also Francis Danby and John Martin, and, of course, James Ward, whose colossal, 14ft-wide Goredale Scar (exhibited 1815), an epic, primordial vision of limestone cliffs in Yorkshire, dominates Tate Britain. And what was the 19th-century Arts and Crafts movement if not a reaction against the Industrial Revolution? Perhaps, like an ancient chalk figure cut into a hill, the spirit of British culture should be located far beyond the city's gates. That said, we shouldn't romanticise the countryside as a bucolic paradise where artists perpetually work and play. The truth is that rural settings aren't especially conducive to generating culture; country people aren't known for embracing change or new ideas. Still, according to Adam Sutherland, the longstanding director of Grizedale Arts (an arts organisation based in a valley in the Lake District), every so often something of lasting cultural importance 'blows up' in the countryside – and these 'little explosions', as he put it to me recently, are 'all interconnected', and even represent 'a kind of rural movement'. Are we witnessing another rural 'explosion' today? I suspect so. Signs of a so-called 'rural renaissance' have been evident for a while – since the success of Jez Butterworth's rambunctious 2009 play Jerusalem, which was set in the middle of nowhere in Wiltshire, and debuted shortly after the artist Sarah Lucas (the most gifted – and urban – of the YBAs) had swapped Shoreditch for Suffolk. More recently, the BBC's brilliant 'mockumentary sitcom' This Country, which shone a light on everyday ennui in a Cotswolds village, ran for three series between 2017 and 2020. During the pandemic, people moved out of cities in droves, and 'gorpcore' – an outerwear fashion trend associated with hiking – became a thing; judging by the footwear sported in my patch of east London, it's still going strong. Nature writing by the likes of Olivia Laing and Robert Macfarlane, whose latest best-seller, Is a River Alive?, was published last month, remains popular. Within visual art, too, there's been a 'turn' towards the rural. In 2021, two artists, Matthew Shaw and Lally MacBeth (whose study of enchanting folk customs, The Lost Folk, will be published by Faber & Faber next week), set up Stone Club (membership: £7), as 'a place for stone enthusiasts to congregate'. Next month, the finale of the National Gallery's bicentenary celebrations – a 'day-long spectacular' in Trafalgar Square orchestrated by the artist Jeremy Deller – will involve hundreds of participants including Boss Morris, a troupe of 'progressive' Morris dancers. A few years ago, this would have prompted sniggers. But Boss Morris have performed at Glastonbury and the Brits. What is motivating this interest in non-urban modes? The root cause may be economic. Thanks to sky-high rents, younger artists can no longer afford to be in the capital. Many are clustering instead in seaside towns where a relationship with the natural world is more pronounced. Is St Leonards the new St Ives? Since there isn't much of an art market in these places, they're also finding other ways to work, e.g., by creating art that's useful, and embedding themselves in local communities. Rural art is as much a mind-set as a cultural product. Above all, though, the rural renaissance is surely a reaction to the Digital Age, and a call-to-arms for those of us who are sick of staring endlessly at screens. Back to the land!
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.
Telegraph
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Edward Burra - Ithell Colquhoun: Tate's eccentric double-bill feels like a revelation
Tate Britain's latest offer? Two exhibitions for the price of one. For the first time since 2013's Gary Hume-Patrick Caulfield double-header, separate yet similarly engrossing shows occupy the lower-floor galleries at Millbank, accessed with a single ticket. (The order in which you see them is unimportant, but some stamina is required; allow a couple of hours.) The juxtaposition isn't obvious but neither is it forced: although it's unlikely they ever met, the 20th-century British artists Edward Burra and Ithell Colquhoun were born only a year apart, to upper-middle-class families, and were both associated with Surrealism. They also shared preoccupations, such as an interest in same-sex relationships and a concern for the British landscape – as well as (to varying degrees) the paranormal and the occult. A ramshackle, sickly character from Sussex, Burra (1905-76) specialised in stylised, graphic watercolours with a satirical edge, often depicting people on society's margins. (For the artist Paul Nash, a friend, he was a modern Hogarth.) In part because watercolour was his preferred medium – thanks to lifelong rheumatoid arthritis and anaemia, he found it easier than painting in oils at an easel – he's often considered an idiosyncratic, tangential figure within British modernism. Regular visitors to Tate Britain may be familiar with his composition The Snack Bar (1930), in which a chalky-faced barman suggestively slices a firm, pink ham (it remains on display upstairs), but this show of more than 80 paintings – Burra's first London retrospective in 40 years – contains so many exhibits from private collections (almost 50) that it feels like a revelation. Accompanied by music drawn from his collection of 78rpm gramophone records (he was a big fan of American jazz, which inspired a trip to Harlem during the 1930s), the exhibition tautly traces Burra's career, from his teeming early pictures of bohemians and pert-bottomed sailors living it up in France – Le Bal (1928) is a standout – to his brooding post-war visions of an enchanted British countryside blighted by motorways and concrete. Each picture is a mini-world of incident and observation, often saturated with seediness and innuendo. The conflicts of the 1930s and 1940s cut Burra deeply, darkening an already dour disposition, and inspiring in his work a menacing new strain (sometimes charged with sadomasochism), as the flirting, gurning hedonists of his earlier paintings are replaced by hooded wraiths and sinister men in birdlike masks. Colquhoun (1906-88), an avowed occultist, was more interested in magic and the power of female sexuality than in macho menace; whereas Burra fetishised the male form, Colquhoun – who may have been bisexual, and was married only briefly, during the 1940s – painted imagery evoking impotence and castration. Who knew that a trimmed cucumber could be so troubling? This show, first seen earlier this year (at Tate St Ives) in Cornwall, where Colquhoun lived during her latter decades, takes her obsession with magic seriously – devoting space to diagrams of tesseracts and tarot-card designs, and teasing out impenetrable alchemical concepts such as the 'Divine Androgyne'. Don't let this put you off. Inspired by the crisp art of Salvador Dalí, which she encountered in London in 1936 (at an exhibition of Surrealist art in which Burra also participated), Colquhoun's mature paintings – often produced using 'automatic' techniques – have a flaming, dream-like intensity. In Dance of the Nine Opals (1942), a ring of opalescent rocks inspired by a Cornish stone circle appears to revolve around a golden tree of life before pink-tinged mountains. Fantastical pictures like this – like much of Burra's original output (which, although the shows aren't in competition, probably edges it) – deserve greater prominence in the history of 20th-century British art.
