Edward Burra is an artist who defies categorisation but whose acerbic wit, visual brilliance and dead-eyed skewering of sex, society and religion makes him one of Britain’s most significant artists of the 20th Century. He is fully deserving of the forthcoming Tate retrospective in June.
Burra’s irreverence, his immunity to the prevailing movements of his time (although his work is shot through with the surreal) and his virtuoso technique (almost always in watercolour) masks the importance of his work, which is an intense and serious investigation into the strangeness of the modern world and that darkness that lurks behind to the brightness of money and power, including, in his later years, an unexpected role as a critic of environmental destruction in the name of progress.
Burra had a lifelong engagement with the theatre, as can be seen in these two costume designs, that seethe with menace and a disquiet that extends beyond the stage and to the backstreets beyond. Yet all of Burra’s work has that Kleig-lit feel – a high-voltage, full saturation vision in which people and objects are transformed into personnages (to borrow a term from Surrealism) – ciphers of the strange and uncanny. Burra’s eye transforms the everyday into the extraordinary.
It wasn’t really until later in his life that landscape, specifically the downlands of East Sussex and Kent that he had known and loved since childhood, began to dominate his art. Yet even his interest in the landscape is political – in many of these late landscape Burra was railing against the destruction of this landscape, home to man’s earliest wanderings in Britain, by road building and quarrying and the erection of endless electricity pylons.
Burra has often been seen as a painter of his time, of the inter-war era (and lifestyle) of the Bright Young Things in London or the Harlem Renaissance in New York. Whilst this is true – and perhaps no other artist, other than George Grosz, painted city life in the 20s and 30s quite so well – he is also much more than this. He is also a painter of the macabre, of the hidden and strange, of dislocation and unbelonging. And this makes him very much an artist for our times too
