The Burra enigma

There’s an Edward Burra Retrospective at the Pallant House Gallery, Chichester West Sussex at the moment. One of the first times I encountered the late work of Edward Burra was at the huge exhibition of British Painting at the Hayward Gallery in 1974. I had managed to attend the Private View as a result of doing some work experience with Richard Hamilton (assisting him on his flower- piece series – one of the works featured in the exhibition). This exhibition included all the cutting edge contemporary painters of the time.
However one watercolour landscape painting haunted me from this huge display of monumental abstract canvases by the likes of Hoyland, Irvin, McLean, Scully, Walker and Riley. This was a painting called a quarry near Buxton (31×52.5 inches) painted in 1970, a strange almost unfathomable painting -strange in the fact that it was executed in watercolours ( a highly unfashionable medium at the time) but also that the watercolours had been applied in a very intense style – no wishy -washy stuff here! I was only familiar with the Grosz influenced paintings that Burra had made in the mid-1930’s of seedy bars in Harlem, so this change was a complete surprised. There seemed to be no connection in style and I would not have known that this painting was by the same artist.
This is the enigma that is so apparent when you see the whole of Burra’s oeuvre together at the exhibition at Pallant House. The shifts in style, the sinister atmosphere and weirdness plays on the viewers imagination so that it is hard to remove these images from your psyche.
This is the first time that all Burra’s work has been drawn together and it is fitting that it should be in Sussex. Burra lived his whole life based at the family home in Rye, a prisoner of arthritis and anaemia, which forced him to use watercolour because it was easier for him to hold his brushes with his claw-like hands. I am sure that it was this physical incarceration that so enhanced this freeing of imagination. Paradoxically Burra was also an insatiable traveller and his paintings of Harlem, Mexico, the Spanish civil war and various parts of Britain reflect this. His family never knew where he was going because he would just take off – Burra would never give anything away!

On 18 February I shall be leading an -a “five C’s course trying to interpret these paintings for the viewer and stimulating debate. This is not an OCA session but it is open to OCA students to attend. Please contact me on rlbrnart@freenetname.co.uk for a booking.
Richard Liley