Hands up all those who have heard of Edward Burra. I suppose I could have done before last week. I had heard of him but did not know much about him. One of his most famous paintings, ‘Street Scene in Harlem’ did feature in an exhibition at the Laing last year. But despite not being very well known he is one of the most interesting English painters of the 20th century. He lived from 1905 to 1976.
Tate Britain have an exhibition of his work this summer, and I have been lucky enough to see it. I will put in my usual moan here about such exhibitions not being accessible to most people in the North East. Thanks to National Theatre Live we can now see prominent plays from the West End in local cinemas. I am going to see Rosamund Pike and Imelda Staunton in Murton next month. Similar things should be done for exhibitions. When there is a major exhibition, and paintings are gathered from all over the world, why can they not be filmed so more people can see them?
The early work
Burra is difficult to categorise. Some of his paintings, like the one of almost naked waitresses pouring tea over customers in some imaginary fashionable café, are almost comic, like the late nineteenth century French painter Henri Rousseau. He certainly liked to send up the fashionable café society of 1920s London and Paris, and was later fascinated by the jazz scene in America, Harlem in particular. In the 1930s however, his paintings became much grimmer, depicting the slaughter of the Spanish Civil War. I think he is less known than his contemporary Picasso because Picasso favoured the Republic, and fashionable intellectuals supported that. Burra did not like the anti-clericalism of the Anarchists, which led to the burning of churches, and initially supported Franco. That alienated him from fashionable opinion, but to be fair to Burra he later became revolted by the butchery of it all, and simply did paintings deploring violence.
Burra’s art post the second world war
In later life after the Second World War, he took to painting the English countryside. Some of these paintings would appeal to modern day environmentalists, in that they show ugly roads and lorries spoiling the lovely countryside, although there is rather an attractive one of the Ingram Valley in Northumberland.
He is difficult to categorise into a particular school or period. From my limited knowledge of modern art I would say he most resembled the German Expressionist Otto Dix, who satirised the grim state of German society between the wars. One of his most well-known paintings was the lady with a monocle and cigarette holder, which is spoofed in the film Cabaret, and that is very like Burra. But Dix also painted grim anti-war paintings; many, like Burra’s, were also landscapes. Dix was regarded as degenerate by the Nazis. I think he and Burra are very much alike.
Learning from Burra’s life and art
I have drawn two big ideas from the exhibition. The first is overcoming adversity. Burra was born in London but lived most of his life in his family home at Rye in East Sussex. His family was well-to-do. He was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis at an early age and was later found to have a blood condition which caused anaemia. That is why most of his paintings are in water colours. Only one is in oils, which had to be painted standing up.
He could have simply been an invalid most of his life, but his family encouraged him to go to art school. I think his life and what he did shows that a disabled person, given the right support, can achieve as much, if not more, than the rest of us. This is acutely relevant to the contemporary debate about how we should support the ill and the disabled.
The second big idea I gained is what is the point of art? Artists are unusual people, and it is difficult to define where their creativity will take them. But Burra’s paintings of the violence of the Spanish Civil War strike a chord with us as we witness daily accounts of killings in Ukraine, Gaza, and the Congo. Artists more than the rest of us capture what is really happening in society, and as a race we seem unable to eschew the use of violence to solve problems. We dress it up in heroic rhetoric about defending the fatherland or something similar. Burra and Dix saw through all that. Violence is violence whoever does it.
And more …
I like all art but if you push me to name my favourite period I would say from the later 1890s to about 1940. I am not a great fan of either Picasso or the Impressionists. That does not mean I don’t like them – they are great artists – but I think we should look more closely at the lesser-known ones, starting with the Glasgow Boys and then going through the Expressionists up to the beginnings of modernism. During that period art and artists contributed a great deal to society, designing buildings which we still admire today, such as art deco and early modernism, rather than the anodyne identikit structures we see in our towns and cities now.
A society which does not encourage its artists will be the worse for it, but probably a more brutal and unpleasant one too.
‘The enigmatic world of Edward Burra’ Exhibition at Tate Britain until 19 October 2025.
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