‘Edward Burra’

Tate Britain 13 June–19 October 2025

 

Thomas Tuohy

 

The illustrations are of works by Edward Burra (1905–1976)

1 John Deth (Hommage to Conrad Aiken), 1931. Whitworth Art Gallery. © The estate of Edward Burra, courtesy Lefevre Fine Art, London

 

The last major showing of works by Edward Burra (1905–1976) in London was at the Hayward Gallery in 1985. It was curated by Andrew Causey, who wrote the exhibition catalogue as well as the well-illustrated catalogue raisonné published by Phaidon (Edward Burra Complete Catalogue, Oxford 1985), both of which are still very useful. Forty-five of his works were briefly exhibited at the Olympia Fine Art Fair 27 February–4 March 2001 (reviewed by Robin Simon in The Spectator, 24 February 2001, p44) and there was a good exhibition, curated by Simon Martin, at Pallant House in Chichester in 2011; but the last time the Tate dedicated an exhibition to Burra was in 1973 (it was the first public gallery showing). John Rothenstein, director of the Tate (1938–1964), collected Burra’s work, promoted him with a monograph in Kenneth Clark’s series Penguin Modern Painters (1945), and was largely responsible for the Tate’s holding of Burra’s work. Regrettably his pictures are now very rarely on display. The artist is not otherwise well represented in public collections and, given the reluctance of many provincial galleries to show anything that was not produced yesterday, such as the Whitworth, Manchester, which holds the important early John Deth (Homage to Conrad Aiken) 1931 (Pl 1), his works are only sporadically visible. The present exhibition at Tate Britain which has many loans from private, as well as public, collections, presents a rare opportunity to assess one of the most distinctive and imaginative figurative painters working in Great Britain in the 20th century.

The Burra family had origins in Westmorland, being descended from Robert Burra (1767–1846) of Crosby Ravensworth, who moved south around 1790. The family prospered and in 1864 Edward’s grandfather, Henry Burra, after a career in India, bought a substantial William IV house standing in its own grounds, ‘Springfield’, Playden, very close to Rye. Edward’s father, also Henry, was a barrister, but had a private income and like his own father was involved in local government in Sussex. They were both amateur painters, and Edward’s aunt, Anne Burra, was married to the architect Reginald Blomfield.

Edward was born in South Kensington in March 1905 in his maternal grandmother’s house, 31 Elvaston Place, but Rye was his base for his entire life, from which he made frequent forays to London, and also to France, Spain, and North America, notably Harlem and Mexico. His interests were primarily metropolitan and cosmopolitan. He disliked the conventional bourgeois values of his parents’ life, but was prevented from breaking free entirely because of ill health. He ‘had a little money’. Paul Nash referred to him as the Laird of Springfield, which he only left in 1953, when his parents built a new house on the site of a bombed Methodist chapel in the centre of Rye. He never liked the town, which he derided as ‘Tinker Belle Towne’, and after the death of his mother in 1968 he moved to a gardener’s cottage at Springfield. His sister Anne was very supportive and drove him around various locations in the British Isles which feature in landscapes painted after 1965, and she kept an eye on him until he died in 1976.

Edward boarded at prep school at Potters Bar, but severe arthritis and anaemia followed by rheumatic fever, prevented him from going to Eton. He was in pain for much of his life, but found relief in painting. He was educated privately, with art lessons from Miss Bradley in Rye, and French lessons in Kensington. His mother was an important influence, taking him to Switzerland and Bordighera as a boy. In the library at Springfield he had access to satirical prints by Hogarth and Caran d’Ache, and the epic visions of Doré. Aged 15 he went to the College of Art at the Chelsea Polytechnic, 1921–23. Learning to draw figures at this stage was fundamental and his skill in architectural drawing was to feature in later works, but he soon began freer, unshaded contour drawings. Jazz Fans (Pl 2) and Rue de Lappe (Pl 3) are good examples.

2 Jazz Fans, c1929. Government Art Collection

3 Rue de Lappe, 1930, Mayor Gallery, London

 

These recall the portraits done by Picasso for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes programmes, but with the more sensual influence of Beardsley. After college he no longer drew from life, but from memory or his well fuelled imagination. Because of his physical discomfort when standing at an easel he painted on a flat table, on paper, sometimes requiring large sheets which had to be joined together. He developed a laborious, dense watercolour technique, using his own spit in layers of tempera. Bold, assured outline drawing would then be coloured, in sections, akin to the giornata method of Italian fresco painters, and the result could be very saturated and lustrous.

At Chelsea Burra met three people who remained friends for the rest of his life; William (Billy) Chappell, two years his junior, who became a dancer and designer; Barbara Ker-Seymer, a photographer, who much later described him having a photographic memory, and Clover Pritchard, later de Martinez, who for a while was assistant to the French novelist Jules Romains. Burra’s letters, edited by Chappell in 1985 as Well, dearie!, reveal an unashamedly camp personality when dealing with his intimate friends. He regularly went to the cinema – with enthusiasm for Fritz Lang and Otto Pabst, and actresses Pola Negri, Kay Francis and Mae West – listened to jazz records, collected post cards and cut out pictures from popular magazines. His studies continued at the Royal College of Art, 1923–5, where his coterie was expanded to include Lucy Norton. Through Barbara he met Beatrice (Bumble) Dawson, who married Gerald Corcoran who ran the Lefevre Gallery, at 30 Bruton St, where Burra regularly exhibited from 1952. The gallery showed a Memorial Retrospective Exhibition in 1977, and Lefevre has been responsible for a number of loans from private collections to the current exhibition.

In 1926 Burra was taken by his mother to Florence, where his sister Anne was at finishing school. He particularly admired Botticelli, who was conceivably an influence on his outline drawing style, and later had reproductions of works by Signorelli in his studio. He is likely to have visited the major exhibition ‘Italian Art’, curated by Kenneth Clark at the Royal Academy in 1930. This exhibition inspired a ballet choreographed by Frederick Ashton, A Florentine Picture, which included a Botticelli tableau. Burra later visited Florence several times in the 1960s. In 1925 he took Billy to Paris, where, at the Revue Nègre, they saw Josephine Baker in her banana bunched skirt, which inspired the dress of a topless waitress in The Tea Shop (Pl 4). The figures in these early works have a pneumatic quality found in works by Leger.

4 The Tea shop, 1929. Private collection

 

Thanks to Lucy Norton, then a scene painter for the Ballets Russes they met significant figures in the world of ballet, including Frederick Ashton who, like Billy, joined Ida Rubinstein’s company. Burra designed sets and costumes for a number of Ashton ballets, the first of which, in 1931, Rio Grande, initially called A Day in a Southern Port, was based on a poem by Sacheverell Sitwell, with a jazzy score by Constant Lambert. This was inspired by the seedier side of Toulon, the major French naval base, a place crowded with sailors who frequented the bars and brothels that provided the subjects of Burra’s early Three Sailors at a Bar (Pl 5).

5 Three Sailors at a Bar, 1930. Private collection, courtesy of Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert. © The estate of Edward Burra, courtesy Lefevre Fine Art, London

 

It was in Toulon that Burra was introduced by Barbara to Cocteau and Gide, who were similarly attracted by sailors. In a letter to her in 1928, Burra describes a visit to a bar in the rue de Lappe in Paris, together with Ashton and the designer Sophie Fedorovitch, where he danced a tango with Billy, adding ‘as for the matelots such buttocks, ma chère’. Burra was intermittently in Paris, where he sometimes visited a shop in Pigalle, where you could listen to, and buy jazz records (Pl 6), and also went to the southern ports of the country between 1925 and 1933.

6 Minuit Chanson, 1931. Private Collection. © The estate of Edward Burra, courtesy Lefevre Fine Art, London / Bridgeman Images

 

When his work was shown at his first solo show at the Leicester Galleries, in London, in 1929, the critic RH Wilenski wrote that Burra had ‘been recently to Marseilles and succumbed with the enthusiasm of youth to the sordid glamour of the Marseilles underworld with its strange conglomeration of racial types and its thousand facets of Mediterranean life’. Elsewhere, Burra had contact with the Sitwell family though ballet, and would have been aware of the murals commissioned by Osbert Sitwell at Montegufoni in Tuscany by the futurist painter Gino Severini. They feature commedia dell’arte characters in masks, which Burra went on to use to sinister effect in his later paintings, such as Soldiers at Rye (Pl 7) and Birdmen and Pots (1946, Hove Art Gallery).

7 Soldiers at Rye, 1941. Tate (presented by Studio 1942). © The estate of Edward Burra, courtesy Lefevre Fine Art, London

 

From 1927 Burra was influenced by Paul Nash, who lived near Rye and introduced him to continental periodicals including Der Querschnitt, which regularly featured the work of Otto Dix and George Grosz. Nash also introduced Burra to the American poet Conrad Aiken, with whom Burra first visited Spain in 1933, and with whom he later stayed in America. Burra exhibited with Nash’s Unit One at the Mayor Gallery in London in 1934 and at four surrealist exhibitions between 1936 and 1940, but he never fully associated with any group of artists. The influence of Max Ernst, and Giorgio de Chirico is evident, but the architecture that Burra uses in his surrealist paintings has Moorish arches, which he first saw in Spain from 1933. With Clover he visited low life districts in Barcelona 1935, and they made several visits to the Prado in Madrid, where Goya, as well as The Garden of Earthly Delights by Bosch, and Breughel’s Triumph of Death, with its gibbets, made an impact. He considered settling in Spain and learned the language, but was discouraged by the burning of churches and the violence before the Civil War. Three of his theatre production designs have Spanish subjects.

The menacing political developments in Europe from 1933 were expressed in Burra’s most monumental and powerful works, dating from 1937 to 1942. The theatrical effect of these sinister, unsettling, frequently sadistic scenes, is emphasized by perspectival classical architectural settings. These include Bal des Pendus (1937, MOMA, New York), and Beelzebub (Pl 8) with its pink Mannerist demon dripping blood in a setting of collapsing 16th-century classical architecture.

8 Beelzebub, c1937. Private collection. © The estate of Edward Burra, courtesy Lefevre Fine Art, London

 

Could The Watcher (Pl 9), which has a Roman amphitheatre and a figure which may be wearing a cardinal’s hat, be a reference to fascist Italy?

9 The Watcher, 1937. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. © The estate of Edward Burra, courtesy Lefevre Fine Art, London

 

The largest of these paintings, Camouflage (1938, Danny Katz Family Trust) was originally wider, as illustrated in Rothenstein’s 1945 book (colour plate 17), but the left-hand section was removed. This missing section continued the rusticated fenestration in a scenographic perspective, and showed a foreshortened figure inspired by Mantegna’s Dead Christ (Brera, Milan), which was in the 1930 ‘Italian Art’ exhibition in London and which Burra used in more modified form in Soldiers at Rye. His works are full of remembered magpie borrowings, but they generally retain a distinct Burra style. The masculine shoulders, buttocks and calves used here appear again in Soldiers Backs (Pl 10), painted in Rye, displaying what Wyndham Lewis described as ‘bulging, husky leathery shapes’. Wake (1940, Tate), is a diptych with draped, foreshortened, crouching figures encircling a corpse in a deep grave, with an architectural perspective of a classical arches, adapted from the interior of the Mezquita of Cordoba.

10 Soldiers Backs, 1942. Towner Gallery Eastbourne

 

Most of Burra’s works have an edge, an atmosphere of teasing or unease but, after his visits to Spain the transgressive satirical mood of the 1920, recalling the novels of Ronald Firbank, took a darker turn. Rothenstein detected a sense of menace and evil, linked to his reading of Huysmans. His choice of louche, meretricious or macabre subjects, none of which was polite, might account for his lack of popular appeal but, as John Piper said in 1941, his works were ‘worth buying for their technique alone, and rich and rare imagination’. Burra was aware that his work might not be easy to sell, and his commissions for the Festival of Britain in 1951 included a gruesome Judith and Holofernes (Andrew Causey, Edward Burra Complete Catalogue, Oxford 1985, pl 202). He wrote to Clover in his characteristic ungrammatical style: ‘Some monster of perversion a sex maniac(?) totally devoid of any sensibility bought “Judith and H’s Head” for 200£! The first prayvate (horror of horrors) person to buy a picture from the exhib.’. Burra painted a number of Biblical scenes between 1938 and 1952, and it is regrettable that none appears in the current exhibition

In 1973, Burra was only persuaded to visit his exhibition at the Tate to spare the feelings of the organizer. Even then he walked through, barely glancing at his work, as it had long been his habit not to look at his works once they were finished. He never cared what other people thought of him, and refused the offer of ARA because he would have been obliged to attend a dinner. He only received a CBE in 1971 because John Banting, by then a neighbour in Hastings, sent an acceptance letter on his behalf. Rothenstein’s introduction to the 1973 catalogue concludes, ‘However indifferent the general public, his work, even routine life drawings made as a student, has always been treasured by his intimates, as well as a slowly growing number of others. It is my own long held conviction that posterity will share the admiration of his friends rather than the indifference of the general public.’ This exhibition at Tate Britain in 2025 will put that to the test.

The changing styles and subjects which vary throughout Burra’s prolific output will appeal to the public in different ways, and many will find some works disturbing. The exhibition presents a chronological /thematic sequence beginning with small-scale jazz-age subjects of the 1920s, These are set off, with a jewel-like lustre, against dark blue walls and, with different dark colours for each section, the exhibition shows the works to advantage. Music and the Americas focuses on Burra’s connection with the Harlem Renaissance: bands and dance halls, but with some sleaze, in Striptease, Harlem (1934, Lefevre), and Izzy Orts (1937, NGS Edinburgh), the latter set in a sailors’ bar in Boston.

The Burra archive was bequeathed to the Tate, by his sister Anne, Lady Ritchie, in 1977, and the display includes bakelite jazz records, as well as periodicals and press cuttings. A section is dedicated to Burra’s small-scale designs for ballet and opera. In 1949 the ballet critic Richard Buckle recognized Burra as the most successful ‘easel painter’ to follow those artists commissioned by Diaghilev, citing the ‘prow of a great half built liner in the Dockyards’ for the front curtain for Robert Helpmann’s The Miracle in the Gorbals. Frederick Ashton considered Burra to be ‘the last to carry on this tradition of painting in the theatre’. Burra’s final theatre work was in 1958 for Simply Heavenly (Pl 11), a ‘negro’ musical comedy by Longston Hughes, set in Harlem and featuring Bertice Reading.

11 Simply Heavenly. Scene in Harlem, 1957. Private Collection. © The estate of Edward Burra, courtesy Lefevre Fine Art, London

 

The final section of the exhibition presents his landscapes. Rye landscape with figures (1947, Higgins, Bedford) features a sinister backward-looking figure and a devastated industrial landscape, but most of his landscapes date from 1963 to 1975. These are painted from memory, in a more conventional transparent watercolour technique, without outline drawing. Some are wry comments on the destruction of the countryside, with the view dominated by pylons or polluting vehicles (Pl 12), but one of his last works features redundant tin mines, some challenging figures tattoos, and a self-portrait (Pl 13).

12 An English Country Scene No 2, 1970. Private collection

13 Landscape, Cornwall, with Figures and Tin Mine, 1975. Private collection. © The estate of Edward Burra, courtesy Lefevre Fine Art, London

 

The pink publication associated with the Tate exhibition is disappointing. It has no proper catalogue; the check list of exhibits is confused and, printed on matt paper, the colour illustrations are muddy, failing to convey the splendour of Burra’s colour, which emerges so well in the exhibition. The book is edited by the curators, Thomas Kennedy and Eliza Spindel, and has additional essays by Rosemary Shirley, Andrew Stephenson, and Catherine Tackley, which, together with the labels in the exhibition, helpfully illuminate the different sections of the display.