Edward Burra's tour of the 20th century

Summary

John Deth (Hommage a Conrad Aiken) by Edward Burra, 1931 The art of Edward Burra is also the art of popping up in unlikely places. He was in the audience in Paris when Josephine Baker made her debut at La Revue Nègre in 1925 and in New York during the Harlem Renaissance; he visited Mexico with Malcolm Lowry and was in Spain as tensions bubbled towards the Civil War; he lived in coastal England during the Second World War witnessing troops departing – and sometimes returning – from the continent and captured the incursion of A-roads and pylons into the ancient landscapes of Cornwall and Wales in the early 1970s. If Burra was Zelig with a paintbrush he was also part of a strand of eccentric English art that, had its origins in William Blake and ran through Richard Dadd, Aubrey Beardsley, Percy Wyndham Lewis and Stanley Spencer. He may have joined Unit One, Paul Nash’s short-lived avant-garde gathering of British artists, sculptors and architects, and exhibited alongside Picasso, Miró and Magritte at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936, but he stood outside stylistic groupings. As he told one questioner: “I didn’t like being told what to think, dearie.” That hint of bloody-mindedness was also perhaps the result of lifelong ill health. Burra suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and anaemia and as a boy contracted both pneumonia and rheumatic fever: “The only time I don’t feel any pain,” he later wrote, “is when I am working. I become completely unaware.” Physical discomfort was why he chose watercolour over oil paint for most of his work – bending over a sheet on a table was easier than standing at an easel. Burra was nevertheless a social creature; his friends included Anthony Powell and the choreographer Frederick Ashton as well as innumerable artists and flâneurs. He travelled widely in company, diving into both the glitter and the demi-monde of Paris, the cafés, sailor-filled dockside bars and clubs of Marseille and the dancehalls and striptease ...