Edward Burra at Tate Britain

As I was saying, artists often study the work of their predecessors and pay them homage: Faces at an Exhibition.

I was not familiar with Edward Burra’s work – I missed an exhibition at Pallant House in 2012 as I hadn’t much time to go to exhibitions in those days – and his last London show, at the Tate, was in 1973 three years before he died aged seventy-one.

William Boyd has made a bit of a speciality writing fictional biographies such as Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928–1960. The title is a combination of The National Gallery and The Tate Gallery and Nat Tate is an overlooked artist. When it was published in 1998 Boyd encouraged people to think he was real; a literary hoax that succeeded briefly. The very real Edward Burra’s life could have been written by Boyd. “One of the great known unknowns of modern British art”, according to Thomas Kennedy, curator of the very real Tate exhibition. He had rich parents and poor health enabling him to travel extensively and paint what he saw. In the 1920s and 30s he spent time in Paris, New York and Spain at the time of the civil war.

I was surprised that his bold, vivid, slightly surreal pictures are all in watercolour. I also observed while the Tate has a large archive of his work most of the pictures in the current exhibition are on loan from private collections; a reason in itself to trudge to Pimlico. World War II curtailed his travels but his war paintings are in a similar, perhaps darker, style as his early work.

This slightly unsettling watercolour evoked Clockwork Orange to me and perhaps to Burra as the novel was published in 1962. His other and more probable source of inspiration was The Straw Man by Francisco Goya, showing what women can do to a helpless man

Towards the end of his life Burra’s style softened and he turned to large watercolour landscapes some of which reminded me of those by his friend Paul Nash. I liked them very much.