Tate Britain is presenting the first major London retrospective in forty years of Edward Burra (1905-1976), one of Britain's most enigmatic and incisive figurative artists. The comprehensive exhibition traces the career of an artist who transformed watercolor into a powerful medium for social critique and surreal expression.
Born into a middle-class family in Rye, East Sussex, Burra was educated at Chelsea School of Art and the Royal College of Art. Throughout his life, he suffered from chronic illnesses including rheumatoid arthritis and pernicious anemia, which left him unable to work in oils. Despite this limitation, he revolutionized watercolor—long considered a delicate or secondary medium—into a vehicle for radical artistic expression. Through innovative layering techniques, bold pigmentation, and intricate detail work, Burra achieved a richness in his watercolors that was often indistinguishable from oil paintings.
The exhibition follows Burra's artistic journey chronologically, spanning from his early satirical urban scenes to surreal wartime imagery and haunting post-war landscapes. Special emphasis is placed on his extensive travels, which took him to the nightclubs and docks of Paris and Marseille, the cafés and music halls across Europe, and to New York during the vibrant period of the Harlem Renaissance. The retrospective positions Burra at the center of British modernism, a movement from which he was later marginalized as abstraction and formalism came to dominate post-war art.
Burra's early artistic development occurred during the revolutionary artistic ferment that followed the Bolshevik Revolution. He briefly joined Unit One (1933-35), a short-lived British art group that opposed academic tradition and sought to unify abstraction, surrealism, and contemporary design alongside notable artists Paul Nash, Barbara Hepworth, and Henry Moore. However, Burra remained fundamentally a solitary figure throughout his career, never joining another artistic group or political movement. He consistently avoided public statements and interviews, choosing instead to express his opposition to militarism, authoritarianism, and bourgeois values through satirical and ironic imagery rather than ideological clarity.
His early paintings are characterized by vivid, cartoonish, and highly stylized elements, influenced by Tubism, a Cubist offshoot associated with Fernand Léger. Notable works from this period include "Hop Pickers Who've Lost Their Mothers" (1924) and "Market Day" (1926), which reflect post-World War I poverty and migration while retaining a sense of belief in social progress and interracial solidarity. "Balcony, Toulon" (1929) serves as a pointed mockery of bourgeois superficiality, while "Minuit Chanson" (1931) celebrates the rich diversity of Parisian nightlife. In "John Deth (Hommage to Conrad Aiken)" (1931), Burra stages a macabre allegory of desire and mortality, featuring Death seductively gate-crashing a bourgeois orgy.
While Burra never publicly identified as gay, his artwork revels in homoerotic themes and camp ambiguity, with "Three Sailors at a Bar" (1930) serving as a prime example of this artistic approach. His transformative visit to the United States in the early 1930s profoundly influenced his perspective and artistic output. "Red Peppers" (1934-35) actively rejects racial stereotypes and captures the musical dynamism of Black urban life, shaped by his genuine desire for interracial collaboration and understanding.
Burra's 1933 visit to Spain, initially drawn by the country's rich literature, religious iconography, and the grotesque artistic visions of Francisco Goya and Hieronymus Bosch, culminated in a harrowing encounter with the outbreak of civil war in 1936, ultimately forcing him to leave the country. This experience resulted in a powerful series of works marked by horror, ambiguity, and violence, populated by skeletal figures, demons, and cloaked specters. Burra interpreted the Spanish conflict in distinctly moral and quasi-religious terms, describing Spain as being gripped by a demonic force and collective insanity. His perspective conflated the violence of the fascist forces with that of the Republicans and socialists who were fighting against General Franco's military coup.
Key works from this period include "Beelzebub" (1937), which depicts a menacing red demon overseeing the destruction of a church, and "The Watcher" (1937), presenting a cloaked skeletal figure amid ruins—a chilling allegory of death, surveillance, and societal collapse. While the National Galleries of Scotland claim Burra was pro-Franco, citing a single curatorial interpretation of "The Watcher," no letters, interviews, or political affiliations support this controversial view. On the contrary, Burra's personal correspondence expresses clear revulsion at Franco's coalition of priests and generals, with him writing: "Spain is ghastly now makes one want to vomit. I'd rather be in Harlem with the jazz and the gin."
Burra's artistic response to World War II proved complex and nuanced. Rather than issuing overt political or moral statements, he employed surreal, grotesque, and occasionally religious non-doctrinal imagery to counter the sanitized propaganda produced by official British war artists, reflecting his profound horror about the war's devastating impact on society. "Soldiers at Rye" (1941) notably does not glorify the British military but instead presents their presence as ominous and alien, with figures that appear stiff, puppet-like, and devoid of individual humanity.
In his private correspondence with friends during this period, Burra consistently mocked patriotic fervor, wartime bureaucracy, and the absurdity of civilian life under siege. His wit was expressed through flippant comments such as likening blackout drills to "rehearsals for a very dull opera" and complaining that "even the cabbage has to register now." These personal observations reveal an artist deeply skeptical of official narratives and bureaucratic control.
Burra's post-war letters reveal a distinctive blend of satire, wit, and irreverence that defined his worldview. Writing to fellow artist Paul Nash, he declared: "I loathe all that Empire stuff. It's just pomp and rot—like a Gilbert and Sullivan nightmare with medals." Regarding the British middle class, he wrote: "A plague of tweed and teacups. They'd hang a Picasso in the loo if it matched the curtains." When declining Royal Academy membership in 1963, he quipped with characteristic humor: "I'd rather paint a corpse in a café than hang with the RA crowd. They're all frightfully clean and frightfully dull."
In his later years, Burra became increasingly reclusive, turning away from urban life and human subjects toward creating eerie landscapes suffused with environmental anxiety and concern. "Cornish Clay Mines" (1970), featuring petrol stations and scarred terrain, contrasts sharply with his earlier scenes of human vitality and social interaction. "Valley and River, Northumberland" (1972) offers a pared-down pastoral vision, notably devoid of human figures—serving as a quiet elegy on his former hopes for society and human connection.
Despite his ideological failings and personal ambiguities, Burra's artistic legacy reveals important objective social truths about his era. His paintings consistently critique fascism, state violence, and bourgeois complicity in social problems. In this light, he emerges not merely as a chronicler of twentieth-century British society but as one of its most perceptive and uncompromising witnesses, whose work continues to resonate with contemporary audiences seeking to understand the complexities of modern life.
