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Telegraph
5 days ago
- 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.
Yahoo
04-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
About 500 law firms sign brief challenging Trump's executive orders targeting the legal community
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump's executive orders targeting the legal community pose 'a grave threat to our system of constitutional governance and to the rule of law itself,' according to a court filing submitted Friday by more than 500 law firms. The brief represents the most organized pushback to date against a series of White House executive orders that have sought to punish some of the country's most elite firms and to extract concessions from them. Some of the targeted firms have sued to halt enforcement of the orders, while others have struck deals with the White House either to avert an order or to have it rescinded. The filing was submitted as part of a lawsuit filed by Perkins Coie, which is among the firms that have challenged the orders in court. The order against that firm and others demands that security clearances of its lawyers be suspended, that federal contracts be terminated and that employee access to federal buildings be restricted. The firm won a court order temporarily blocking enforcement of several provisions of the executive order, but its court case is still pending. On Friday, more than 500 firms and law offices from around the country signed onto a brief urging a judge to permanently block the order. The firms, in their filing, call the order a 'grave threat to our system of constitutional governance and to the rule of law itself.' 'The looming threat posed by the Executive Order at issue in this case and the others like it is not lost on anyone practicing law in this country today: any controversial representation challenging actions of the current administration (or even causes it disfavors) now brings with it the risk of devastating retaliation,' the brief argues. It adds: 'Whatever short-term advantage an administration may gain from exercising power in this way, the rule of law cannot long endure in the climate of fear that such actions create. Our adversarial system depends upon zealous advocates litigating each side of a case with equal vigor; that is how impartial judges arrive at just, informed decisions that vindicate the rule of law.' Last month, Paul Weiss became the first firm to cut a deal with the White House, agreeing to dedicate $40 million in pro bono legal services to causes championed by the Trump administration and to ensure merit-based hiring instead of relying on diversity, equity and inclusion considerations in its employment practices. In exchange, the White House rescinded an executive order issued days earlier. Since then, the law firms of Millbank and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom have reached similar agreements to avoid being hit with an executive order. Several of the targeted firms have been subject to orders, in part, because of their prior or current associations with lawyers who either investigated Trump or are among the president's perceived adversaries. ___
Associated Press
04-04-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
About 500 law firms sign brief challenging Trump's executive orders targeting the legal community
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump's executive orders targeting the legal community pose 'a grave threat to our system of constitutional governance and to the rule of law itself,' according to a court filing submitted Friday by more than 500 law firms. The brief represents the most organized pushback to date against a series of White House executive orders that have sought to punish some of the country's most elite firms and to extract concessions from them. Some of the targeted firms have sued to halt enforcement of the orders, while others have struck deals with the White House either to avert an order or to have it rescinded. The filing was submitted as part of a lawsuit filed by Perkins Coie, which is among the firms that have challenged the orders in court. The order against that firm and others demands that security clearances of its lawyers be suspended, that federal contracts be terminated and that employee access to federal buildings be restricted. The firm won a court order temporarily blocking enforcement of several provisions of the executive order, but its court case is still pending. On Friday, more than 500 firms and law offices from around the country signed onto a brief urging a judge to permanently block the order. The firms, in their filing, call the order a 'grave threat to our system of constitutional governance and to the rule of law itself.' 'The looming threat posed by the Executive Order at issue in this case and the others like it is not lost on anyone practicing law in this country today: any controversial representation challenging actions of the current administration (or even causes it disfavors) now brings with it the risk of devastating retaliation,' the brief argues. It adds: 'Whatever short-term advantage an administration may gain from exercising power in this way, the rule of law cannot long endure in the climate of fear that such actions create. Our adversarial system depends upon zealous advocates litigating each side of a case with equal vigor; that is how impartial judges arrive at just, informed decisions that vindicate the rule of law.' Last month, Paul Weiss became the first firm to cut a deal with the White House, agreeing to dedicate $40 million in pro bono legal services to causes championed by the Trump administration and to ensure merit-based hiring instead of relying on diversity, equity and inclusion considerations in its employment practices. In exchange, the White House rescinded an executive order issued days earlier. Since then, the law firms of Millbank and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom have reached similar agreements to avoid being hit with an executive order. Several of the targeted firms have been subject to orders, in part, because of their prior or current associations with lawyers who either investigated Trump or are among the president's perceived adversaries.
