Rowena Easton on Edward Burra (1905-76)
If Edward Burra’s name is not so well known as those of his Royal College of Art contemporaries Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth perhaps that is because his often-riotous artistic output over a 50-year career is so hard to pin down. Drawing on a burlesque tangle of influences – from Old Masters to Neue Sachlichkeit painting, Surrealism and avant-garde photography, taking in Freudian concepts, jazz, Paris cabaret, Golden Age Hollywood, horror movies and HP Lovecraft – he painted nightlife, low life and still life, streetscapes, landscapes and inner-scapes, he designed for the stage and he illustrated books. Sexy and surreal, disturbed and distorted, his was a particularly singular vision.
Another of his influences was the American writer and poet Conrad Aiken (1889-1973), a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winner and the United States Poet Laureate from 1950 to 1952, who was himself strongly influenced by psychoanalytical theory and symbolism. Aiken moved to England in 1921, settling in Rye, where Burra lived for most of his life. It was Surrealist artist Paul Nash who, in 1931, introduced them to each other. The impact on Burra was immediate. That year he painted the macabre bacchanal John Deth (Homage to Conrad Aiken) inspired by Aiken’s poem of the same name. It depicts, in a visceral red, a scythe-bearing Death amidst a frenzy of dancing partygoers. It’s no surprise that, according to Aiken’s son John, ‘macabre’ was Burra’s favourite word.
As a keen traveller – who found inspiration in Harlem nightclubs, in Mexican festivals, in the Spanish Civil War, in Florence where his sister lived, and in Paris while staying with Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines – Burra was hard to pin down in other ways. He once left the house in Rye he shared with his mother and sisters for America without mentioning he was going, and didn’t return for several weeks. But with the outbreak of WW2 he found himself confined to the UK. This is when he sought creative adventure designing scenery and costumes for opera, ballet, and theatre. He was good at it and became highly successful.
Burra’s energetic work is all the more remarkable given his debilitating illness. Throughout his life he suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and a blood disorder, which meant that he couldn’t stand at an easel. Instead, he pasted together sheets of Whatman watercolour paper and worked flat at a table, drawing (from memory) in pencil a section at a time, before filling in with velvety layers of watercolour paint mixed with spit, again section by section. Aiken’s wife Mary described his unconventional method: ‘[it was] rather like fresco painting when a fresh section of plaster is applied to the wall, and work has to be finished completely before the section dries.’ George Melly wondered that his friend’s crippled claw had become ‘an unlikely instrument of so much precise beauty’.
A small sketchbook would have been easier for him to handle. Here are reproduced a few pages that show him working out ideas for the stage, as well as his fascination with all of humanity’s shades. It was given to Rye Art Gallery by the Aiken family (Aiken and Burra remained lifelong friends). The delight he takes in the interactions between people, his close observation of life, and the vivid sense of movement in his line is enormously engaging. It is likely that his painfully crippling condition kept him at one remove from the jostling crowd, more astute observer than full participant. What Burra’s sketches offer (that the highly stylised paintings don’t) is a way of seeing more immediately through his eyes. He is a camera.
With many thanks to Dr Julian Day, Director at Rye Art Gallery. Edward Burra’s original sketch books form part of the Rye Art Gallery permanent collection. His works, along with some reproduction prints, are on display in the ‘Burra Room’.