A chronic nonconformist, an elusive voyeur, a hedonistic globetrotter: Edward Burra painted grotesque, queer, and sensual moments of modern life — from his countryside watercolours to his war scenes and jazz ensembles – with a singular style. As a retrospective of his work, shown alongside occultist Ithell Colquhoun, continues at Tate Britain, Ethan Price asks: can Burra ever be contained?
“There’s no Fartist like a dead one dearie — Im dead I suppose if theres a horrible exhibition at the Tate. They will have a horrible dinner (by candle light!) I realy shall have to be away or sick or dead I can imagine what that will be like.
Yrs Ed”
— Edward Burra, Well, Dearie! The Letters of Edward Burra
In the brass taps of every pub (those with a pulse remaining) I see Edward Burra’s work — in the augmented, swirling, drunken faces of the punters. Burra’s characters are constructed from seamy, campy details. In Dockside Cafe, Marseilles (1929), women, on closer inspection, are revealed to be men in drag, embalmed with rouge, lipstick and mascara; sailors wear ribboned ballet pumps with phallic coffee spouts positioned in front of their crotch. Burra sucked in life like marrow from a bone. “The people are glorious — such tarts all crumbling, and all sexes and colours”, he wrote to Paul Nash of the clientele at Minuit Chanson, a Parisian music shop Burra painted in 1931 where he listened to the latest jazz and blues. Burra delighted in making the ordinary scream. As George Melly observed: “His torturers, his bullies, his soldiers, some of his phantasmagoria are evil, but many of his creatures are simply louche and disreputable. He loved naughtiness. He enjoyed depravity and bathed it in a glamorous, eccentric light. He was acquainted with imps as well as demons.”
Burra wrote to a friend when the Tate last mounted a retrospective of his paintings in 1973 that “Its like a night mare to me — very wrong Im sure but there it is.” How does an institution present the work of an artist that famously hated institutions? With slight difficulty, it turns out. But first: to the work, endlessly compelling and completely exquisite.
Throughout Burra’s earlier work, there is the constant innuendo of inanimate objects and hands in flirty places. Positioning is key and, with it, sex is laid out on the table. In Three Sailors at the Bar (1930), one sailor shows us only his back, featuring very ripe buttocks (Burra’s joy in the male behind does not go unnoticed throughout the show), while a second sailor, sipping a drink, sits with his head in perfect alignment to this pert view — the arse enthralling as cinema. The third sailor and the barman stare at the first sailor with expressions deranged by lust. A ravenous appetite for pleasure is apparent — Burra’s pictures are full of homme fatales.
Plain Dirt was the original title of the work Balcony, Toulon (1929). The former feels correct, feels like true Burra. It tells you everything. The figures are extreme, and knowingly so; they have made themselves such. Heavy make-up, a clear distrust of one another despite their close proximity. One seems to point directly at another’s unveiled breasts, held in a silk and lace slip and surrounded by the acrid pink fur of a dressing gown. Is this gesture barbed?
Le Bal (1928) features men dancing with men, grasping one another, dolled-up in blue eyeshadow and lipstick-covered cupid bows. Gossip, sneers: these are tired, side-eyeing creatures. Burra recalled his time in such queer clubs: “We went to the rue de Lappe on Sunday, me and Billy [Chappell] danced a beautiful tango. My dear you should of seen it.” The scene is drenched in life, yet it recalls the party attendants of today, pretending to be cool, everyone assessing each other, unable to remember who is who, uninterested with the splendour, the decadence, the excitement. Burra relishes the distance between how people want to appear and how they actually look.
Later in the show, Burra’s work shifts, becoming darker as he is affected by the Spanish Civil War. The eponymous figure in Beezlebub (1937) is high camp, naked and red with a lascivious grin, fey hand on hip and long finger nails that feel more manicure than menacing. The battle in front of him features soldiers in form-fitting clothing, so tight they may as well be naked. Their shared nudity aligns them: devil and men, all playing with evil.
A chronic nonconformist with a lifelong taste for looking steadily at horror, Burra was a storyteller at a time of arid abstraction and intellectualisation. His paintings let you gaze down the throat of the world. His early work — vibrant, sleazy, and cinematic — often zooms in like a close-up at the flicks, sucking you inwards. A devoted filmgoer and reader of Vogue, Burra and his friends from Chelsea School of Art devoured the visual culture of the 1920s and ’30s. The influence is clear: lurid faces, exaggerated expressions. Nash called him the modern Hogarth — drawn to oddities, to city strangeness. He worked in unfashionable watercolours, but made the pigment rich and bodily, often mixed with his own spit. Jane Stevenson, author of Edward Burra: 20th Century Eye, observed that “he was not always easy company, but he saw through his own eyes and never through anyone else’s.” Burra “spent his life jumping off bandwagons,” a movement always aimed toward feeling, not thinking. In a film interview conducted in 1972, Burra’s humour emerges, knife-like. “I never tell anybody anything” he says to the interviewer. “What does matter?” she asks. “Nothing,” comes his Beckettian response.
Burra was distanced from the world by his lifelong illnesses (including rheumatoid arthritis) and saw himself as a sexless creature. A delighted voyeur, he had to view the world somewhat through a pane of glass. “Painting is of course a sort of drug,” he said — one that kept him alive.
A section of the exhibition dedicated to his sketches and letters (festooned with glorious caricatures, swirling around the sentences) is a joy. The reality of a person is portrayed in a few swift, Burra-unhinged marks. His subjects are messy, baggy eyed. Mascara is laid on with a trowel. They’re going out, they’ve been out, maybe they’re never going back in again. As his life-long friend Billy Chappell has said: “The letters are a testament to his inventive wit and his brilliantly lively mind. […] It was his unquenchable interest in life and people which made him see at once and with crystal clarity the terrible jokes always embedded in the very worst events.”
Burra moved away from his earlier, lighter work for good during the second World War (“what can a satirist do with Aushwitz?” he commented), a lightness only re-kindled within his gorgeous stage and costume designs for the ballet. He began depicting Rye, Sussex — the place he lived all his life, and which he described as “an itsy bitsy morgue quayte DEAD” — not as quaint but brutal and otherworldly. Soldiers at Rye (1941) shows bulbous-bodied military figures bird-like and terrifying in their Venetian masks. Ozbert Lancaster, reviewing the collection of works created around the War, remarked that “what Burra is trying to do […] is not to select and record some single aspect of the modern tragedy but to digest it whole and transform it into something of permanent aesthetic significance.”
Later landscape works are haunting, seemingly concerned with the rape of the land by humans. Distant mountains are actually spoil heaps in Cornish Clay Mines (1970) while people, who once held so much joy and fascination for Burra, become a scourge and a stain, gradually becoming more transparent until they barely form outlines. Landscapes have moments that resemble sickened bodily orifices and watercolours actually begin to be used as watercolours — as a wash, rather than the spit-thickened oil-like use of the paint in earlier work. The Straw Man (1963) is a bleak wasteland, a ferocious display of thugs violently kicking and beating a scarecrow. Skin is grey, sky is grey, the railway underbridge, grey. I am reminded of the photography of Chris Killip, and his theatrical, brutal depiction of the working class communities of Tyneside in the 1980s.
Later in life, Burra became a heavy drinker, surrounding himself with low-life-but-high-reward people, plastered in Soho. When the Royal Academy phoned in 1961 to ask if he would consider becoming an associate, he called down to his manservant, who had answered the call: “Tell them to fuck off, I’m busy.” He accepted a CBE in 1971, partly because people had told him it might help prevent publicans from kicking him out. “No wonder they wouldn’t serve me – what I looked like – mehthylated spirit in person.” What to do with such an idiosyncratic character? The work changes at a frenetic pace as it becomes shaped by some of the largest events in the twentieth century and influenced by his extensive travels. Burra’s own mother once remarked that she could never tell if he was going out for a pack of cigarettes or for a journey across Spain.
And so, the challenge for Tate: can Burra be contained? This exhibition gestures to the full scope of his work — from flamboyant debauchery to apocalyptic stillness — but it stumbles in atmosphere. The curators’ attempts at reverence threaten to flatten the flamboyance; the walls’ colours, though rich, seem to sap the energy of the work. Their texts are too dry, too earnest — they miss the gossip, the filth, the fabulousness, his delicious disregard for grammar and spelling. In one room, a loop of jazz from Burra’s collection plays overhead, but it feels ghostly and sombre, rather than transporting us to the Harlem nightclubs he depicted so joyously. His paintings should feel like a hangover, not a eulogy.
Burra didn’t haunt life — he consumed it.
Written by Ethan Price
Edward Burra runs in parallel with an exhibition of works by Ithell Colquhoun, on view at Tate Britain until 19 October 2025.
