posted on 12 May 2020

Edward Burra: Twentieth-Century Eye by Jane Stevenson

It’s always astonished me that Edward Burra has never been anything like as famous as many of his contemporaries in the world of British 20th century art. It always seemed to me that his often outrageous paintings would be just the sort of thing to make him into a cult figure – but somehow it’s never seemed to happen. Having now read Jane Stevenson’s quite wonderful biography of this cantankerous and extraordinary man, I think I have a better grip on why it has worked out that way. Perhaps the insight from this book that will stick with me the longest is that Burra, always one for the most unexpected and outrageous gesture, ‘spent his life jumping off bandwagons’ he inadvertently found himself on.

Stevenson’s book is a witty, thoughtful and even affectionate portrait of an artist who lived through the best part of the first 70 years of the 20th century and who was shaped by the events and ideas of those years. This is a portrait of a man in time – what it is not is art criticism. I think quite deliberately, Stevenson really spends only minimal time on the art and there are no attempts at detailed appreciations of any of Burra’s paintings; indeed, the only painting of his you’ll find in the whole book is the one used for the jacket.

This decision to focus on the man is a stroke of genius because Burra himself is quite extraordinary. A frail and sickly child, he grew up and lived most of his life in Rye – a place he hated but could never quite leave – but despite his chronic illnesses, he loved travel and seemed to always be on the move. Gay and with a pretty marked camp sensibility, Burra was drawn to the excitement of the seedily glamorous. He developed deep and long-lasting friendships with both men and women but he never entered a single intimate relationship – although his clear love for the working class dancer, Billy Chappell would last his whole life.

Born into an essentially Victorian upper middle class family, Burra, as Stevenson points out early on in this portrait, was effectively saved from the public school and Oxbridge mould by his illnesses. The fact that he never had to travel that route was probably the thing that liberated him from expectations and he was free to develop into the artist he became. What this lack of formal education did leave Burra with was a truly glorious disregard for spelling and punctuation but with a love for words and letter writing. And it really is Burra’s massive legacy of correspondence that absolutely lights up this book. Free of formal constraints, he writes indiscreetly, inventively and fantastically expressively about his friends, his family, himself and his travels. If you get this book for no other reason, get it for the letters because they are a wonderful, entertaining window on the man himself.

Travelling changed Burra’s life completely. He was besotted with America – especially Harlem – travelled extensively in France, Spain and Italy before heading off to Mexico. Each journey marked some kind of change in his art and his world view. It is this willingness to travel and change that made it almost impossible to pin him down to a particular artistic movement – some claim Surrealism has most in common with his output, others plump for Modernism and then he surprises everyone after the war by essentially becoming a landscape painter!

But in all honesty, art itself takes a back seat in this book because the characters who populate the pages are so huge. Jane Stevenson has clearly got a pretty well developed wicked streak of her own because the way she lingers on and brings to life Burra’s time in both Spain and subsequently Mexico with the over-weight and alcoholic Malcolm Lowry is positively laugh-out loud.

The book is far too rich to do it full justice here but it must be one of the most enjoyable biographies I’ve read for a long time. I think it’s fitting to leave you with Stevenson’s final verdict on Edward Burra, the man and the artist:

“It is worth remembering that at a time when English art was almost wholly dominated by abstraction and landscape – the Thirties – Burra painted highly individualised people against city backgrounds. At a time – the Sixties – when art was dominated either by abstraction or the human figure…he turns to landscape…He was not always easy company, but he saw through his own eyes and never through anyone else’s.”

 

Terry Potter

May 2020