Edward Burra British, 1905-1976

Edward Burra (1905-1976) was an enigmatic and reserved, yet equally inventive and precise, British painter specialising in watercolour. His oeuvre engages with a vast array of twentieth century subject matter, mediated through an exacting eye and inimitable aesthetic sensibility. From vivacious depictions of Black and queer communities in Roaring Twenties New York City, to harrowing reflections on the atrocities of WWII and post-war landscape ruminations on ecocide, his intricate paintings consider some of the critical urgencies of modern and contemporary culture. His works often simultaneously express the artist’s subjective suffering alongside and via depictions of the high exuberances and horrors of the mid-twentieth century. Burra’s art thus stands as both an intimately personal appraisal of the period and a transcendent consideration of the human experience at large.

Burra was born in 1905 and spent the majority of his childhood at his wealthy family’s home in Rye, East Sussex. He was a slight, sickly child and suffered throughout his life with chronic arthritis which caused immense pain and swelling in his joints. Burra’s disability meant he spent most of his childhood isolated indoors. This sheltered early life motivated him to begin making art, though he struggled with the prolonged periods of physical activity some kinds of painting necessitate. He quickly developed unique watercolour and gouache techniques that mimic the vibrancy of oil paint without the relatively labour-intensive requirements of the latter medium. Burra honed his intricate approach to painting while studying at the Chelsea School of Art (1921-23) and then the Royal College of Art (1923-24).

Though physically limited by his disability, Burra was an avid and passionate traveller who gleaned immense inspiration from his peripatetic, often solitary, lifestyle. In 1925, he first visited Paris while the city was at the heart of European Modernism and the Avant-garde. The sexually liberated and culturally uninhibited energy of the city was something the young artist had never experienced, and it became a huge inspiration to him, manifesting boldly in his art thenceforth.

In 1933, Burra visited New York City for the first time – a place which, similarly to Paris, would provide immense inspiration for his artworks. Staying in the predominantly Black neighbourhood of Harlem, he was once again immersed in an unfamiliar yet energising cultural landscape. It is from this period that many of Burra’s most engaging artworks emerge and during which he produced paintings documenting the seminal era known as the Harlem Renaissance.

Burra spent a lot of time in Spain throughout his life. He was closely familiar with Spanish culture, enamoured with its rawness and fluent in the language – he felt quite at home there and made a number of paintings depicting Spanish ebullience. In 1936 however, with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, his art took a decisively dark, nightmarish, and increasingly pictorially twisted turn. Three years later, when WWII began, the themes of Burra’s work further descended into the void of human suffering so palpably felt at the time.

After the end of the Second World War, and towards the end of his life, Burra’s art became increasingly concerned with society’s reliance on fossil fuels and the resultant anthropogenic destruction of the natural environment. His paintings from this period vary greatly in style and approach, from violent depictions of machinic ecocide to delicate (more introspective and at times almost abstract) landscapes of the English countryside. These artworks are the last major pieces he made before his death in 1976.

Burra received commercial and critical success during his lifetime and many of his works are held in prominent collections – including those of Tate, London and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He was the subject of a major retrospective at the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) in 1973 and another posthumously at the Hayward Gallery in 1985. More recently, in 2011, his work had its first museum show in over 25 years at Pallant House Gallery and will be the subject of another major show at Tate Britain in 2025.