London Calling: EDWARD BURRA Tate Britain Exhibition (13th June -19th October 2025)

Edward Burra.

Recently I went to the Edward Burra exhibiton at Tate Britain with Mark , a friend of mine. He had suggested it would be an exhibition we might enjoy. Mark knew something of Burra's work and I knew nothing.

Edward Burra was born on the 29th March 1905 at his grandmother’s house in London.

His father was a barrister and became the Chairman of East Sussex County Council. His family were well off. He suffered pneumonia as a child. This caused him to leave school and be educated at home. He took art lessons from a lady called Miss Bradley in Rye before going to Chelsea College of Art in 1921. He went on to the Royal College of Art in 1923 where he met colleagues many of whom became friends. In 1925 he was travelling in Italy where he met the artist Paul Nash. In October 1925 he visited Paris with William Chappel, who also became a lifelong friend. In 1928 the two of them were back in Paris along with Edward Ashton, the choreographer and ballet dancer. Chappel became a ballet dancer and choreographer who was taught and influenced by both Marie Rambert and Edward Ashton. In 1928 Burra was commissioned by Crawfords the Scottish biscuit company to design vehicle advertising signs. However these were not accepted. In May 1928 he visited Toulon with Chappel and other friends including Barbara Ker Seymer, who he had met at Chelsea College of Art, the society photographer and who also came from a wealthy background. Burra visited dance halls and music halls on the Rue de Lappe in Paris. The sorts of places he derived much inspiration. Many paintings he made of nightclubs and bars were done later from memory.

Burra wrote letters to Barbara Ker Seymour and his friend William Chappel thorughout his life. These letters were idiosyncratic and often amusingly illustrated. His letter writing was tongue in cheek, lively, stream of consciousness and in a conversational style. He used current slang words and often spelled phonetically. His letters were full of gossip, accounts of his travels and details of stage shows and films he enjoyed. Reading one of his many letters to Barbara Ker Seymer, that are on display at the Tate exhibition, illustrates all these aspects.

Here is an example of one of Burra's idiosyncratic letters.

“Dear Ma is Cotkland nice we had a fog yesteray a very bad wone. I am stil in London I am righring this letter this momen I am and a very nice letter too the best wone I have riten for a long time.

Miss Forbs came to meat me here on Saterday I dont know if Billy is any Better I roat him a letter yestern I am going home tomoro I am OH yes.

Barbara Ker Seymour (1980)

Painting style:

Minuit Chason and other paintings such as Three Sailors In A Bar, are examples of social realism. He portrays real scenes and real encounters between people. Often there is a political slant with sexual undertones. Standing in front of a Burra painting I feel drawn into the world he portrays There is humour and often a dark side, you wonder what are the intentions of the characters. What are they doing? You get a sense of who they are. You begin to know them. His paintings are often embellished by bright colours. You almost smell the smells, feel the heat or cold, feel an intimacy with his characters, smell their sweat.

Other pictures have deep political meanings such as his later paintings about the modern landscape of Britain in the 1960s. and sometimes, such as Beelzebub (1937), a moral and spiritual undertone.

Burra engaged at a deep level with the worlds he inhabited, and he takes us, the viewer ,there with him.

Dancing Skeletons (1934) (Tate Britain)

Painting

He had his first solo show at Leicester galleries in 1929. Other exhibitions at this time included an exhibition of his wood block prints at the Society of Wood Block Engravers.

Because of his illness he found it difficult to stand for long, so using an easel to paint was uncomfortable for him. He preferred painting with watercolours and gouache, on flat surfaces. Often his paintings are large. He would paint different parts of his paintings on separate pieces and join them together to make the final picture. Gouache and watercolours are both water soluble paints but gouache is opaque while watercolour is transparent. Gouche has a high pigmentation content and is often mixed with chalk and other additives to give it a thick matte finish. Many of Burra’s paintings have these qualities.

Ballet and Theatre, (Tate Britain)

In November 1931 the Edward Ashton ballet, “A Day in a Southern Port (Rio Grande) opened at the Savoy Theatre in the Strand. Burra designed the sets and the costumes. Later in the 1930’s Burra exhibited with the English surrealists.

Burra was active throughout his life designing scenery and costumes for ballet, opera, theatre and illustrating books. Edward Burra died in 1974 after breaking his hip in Hastings East Sussex. The Tate held a retrospective in 1973. The Arts Council produced a documentary about Burra in 1981.

The Tate Britain Exhibition (13th June to 19th October 2025)

This recent exhibition of Burra’s works at the Tate Britain is divided up into themed rooms. They are almost different periods of his artistic life but themes often overlap in time and are often in parallel to each other.

French sailors in a bar. (Tate Britain)

The first room covers France and metropolitan culture. An example of Burra’s work at this time is Le Bal painted in 1928 of a Paris dance hall. Metropolitan culture in Paris included dance halls, bars, music venues, cinemas and theatres. Burra engaged with them all. In Le Bal we see a crowd of people all close to each other. The atmosphere is sexually charged, men with women, men with men, women with women or are some of them cross dressing? There is a sexual fluidity in this picture as in many of Burras paintings. Burra makes their forms glow as though they have an inner light. Even the decorations on the ceiling, a series of material swags and electric lights have a luminescence. You can feel heat off Burra’s paintings often of human bodies but also from the structures and artefacts within the paintings.How would I feel if I was in that scene? What emotions, touches, conversations, smells, tastes? What do you talk about with the people you meet, being a part of a scene like that? What are you looking at?

A Harlem scene. (Tate Britain)

Another themed area was the Music and The Americas. Burra during the early years of the 20th century 1917 to 1930 visited Harlem in New York. He enjoyed jazz music and often listened to jazz which inspired many of his paintings. He visited Club Hot-Cha, Apollo Theatre, and the Savoy Ballroom. It was in places like these he heard Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway and Billie Holiday. His pictures of Harlem imaginatively fill your ears with the sounds of jazz and the conversations of hustlers selling something elicit, perhaps.

One of Burra's Spanish Civi war paintings. (Tate Britain)

The section entitled Culture and Conflict in Spain The Spanish Civil War 1936 to 1939, includes some of his paintings of conflict in war. His most famous painting depicting the Spanish Civil war is War in The Sun 1938. You can’t clearly see any of the faces of the characters in this picture. You either look at the backs of heads or side views in shadow. There is something of the Renaissance style of painting in the architecture of the buildings which show cracks in places. Artillery pieces and the intricacy of cogs , the workings of military vehicles, catter pillar tracks. The characters in the foreground show the curves of their bodies almost in grotesque fashion, coloured red, purple and blue. In the distance from behind a black curtain, perhaps a stage curtain drawn back, is a grey almost colourless landscape with men climbing onto a military truck heading into the distance. People are losing their humanity and becoming part of the machine of war. What would it be to be going to war with the characters in that painting?

Ropes and Lorries 1942-1943 (Tate Britain)

The next section continues Burras depiction of war ,"The War within 1939 to 1945. "Edward Burra lived in Rye in Sussex for much of his life. Burra was unable to serve in the military because of his physical health but living on the coast at Rye he would have seen military preparations. There he witnessed troops in the area during World War II. His painting, "Soldiers at Rye 1941", is an example of his work then. There are similarities with his Spanish Civil war paintings. The soldiers look bulky and fill the frame. Again Burra emphasises the curves of their bodies. He has a fixation with shoulder and back muscles and the curvature of buttocks. This gives a slightly erotic feel to many of his pictures. Once again many faces are turned from us or hidden in the shadow of helmets. But the faces now also have grotesque beaks like hawks or vultures. The soldiers are being turned into birds of prey, natural killing machines, "man’s inhumanity to man."

You can sense Burra’s horror of war and what it does to human beings.

Scenery for the ballet of Don Quixote. (Tate Britain)

During the 1930s at the same time he was witnessing war Burra was also working on stage designs. The next theme in the exhibition is Art on Stage 1931 onwards.

Burra’s design for the drop curtain "The Nightmare, Don Quixote, "Royal Ballet, Covent Garden, February 1950 has some of the elements of his war paintings, the man monsters have similar colours and actions. Don Quixote looks out at as shocked and distraught. The contrasting angles and sharp broken elements of the picture portray an emotional state of horror. His severe rheumatoid arthritis and the blood condition which caused anaemia made him suffer pain. You can see in this stage set and in many of his war paintings that pain being interpreted.

An English Country Scene 1970. (Tate Britain)

The final part of the exhibition, "Landscapes of modern Britain," shows how Britain is being affected by industrialisation and the infrastructure needed for cars. Petrol stations are a theme. Railway tracks being laid.One picture shows a thin winding road cutting across an undulating chalk downland landscape. As the road comes closer to us the lorries, motor cycle and cars loom into view. The road starts as a thin scar among other scars across the natural landscape of Britain. One particular painting ,"Near Whitby Yorkshire 1972", shows a road disappearing into the foggy, misty luminous distance across undulating moorland. The tops of the moors tilt at angles to each other careering drunkenly. A view of natural landscape scarred by the road and what will drive along it. It is an emotional response once again.

(Tate Britain)

This picture in particular reminds me of J M W Turner's 1844 painting Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway, also a picture about industrialisation combining with the natural.Turner portrayed emotion and ideas about Romanticism, something similar to Burra's achievement.

Edward Burra is one of those unique painters who does not easliy fit a genre although he has elements of many.

Minuit Chanson (1931) by Edward Burra, (Tate Britain)

Engaging with Minuit Chanson (1931)

On May 19th 1931 Burra wrote to his friend Paul Nash, the modernist landscape painter and brother of John Nash

“My new occupation is going to the Boulevard Clichy to Minuit Chanson which is glorious. You put bits in the slot and listen to gramophone records. The clientele is enough to frighten you a bit what with listening with one ear and looking at the intrigues going on elsewhere. I quite forsake Montparnasse for Place Pigalle. The people are glorious. Such tarts all crumbling and all sexes and colours.”

The people in this picture stand tall. They are the prominent part of the picture. The shop they congregate in front of acts like a series of thin black frames filled in with bright white. The clock says midnight but the shop is so brightly lit it looks like garish daylight.A manufactured light . It could be a lit stage. Midnight has mystical and religious associations, dreams, revelations, the witching hour an unsettling time. Midnight features in fairy tales usually having a powerful magical influence on characters lives changing them and affecting them profoundly. The characters in Burras painting appear to have entered a new world.

Most of the people in this picture do not look at each other apart from two men in the background but they can’t be conversing, focussed on smoking thin cigarettes and the one whose face we can see seems to be glancing away from the person he is with. One moustachioed gentleman on the left with bespectacled eyes is leering intently at a sailor who is focussed and intent on listening to a piece of music through an ear piece. It must be jazz. Two women dressed with fur stoles and elegant dresses stand near each other but are facing in different directions their lips rouged , their eyes dark rimmed with heavy black kohl make up. Is the thin woman in white a man in drag? Is the one in the black jacket and green skirt a young teenager? The man on the right in the light tan suit with a blue overcoat draped over his arm, is he really a woman dressed as a man? Is anything what it seems to be? At the front of the picture is a black man looking nonchalant and as smartly dressed as any other in the picture, an equal. He looks to his right and into the sky. They are lonely characters looking for a thrill, looking for adventure.

The picture is about equality in a variety of senses, sexual ,ethnic and social, its about the reality of being human released from societal expectations. There is a freedom of spirit. You can imagine the smell of perfume, cigarette smoke, the sweat of encounters, the emotional buzz. The Jazz and Blues music playing in the booths, require improvisation, a free expression of emotions and real feelings .Are these characters discussing political views or comments on the hardship of life and society?

As Burra describes in his letter to Paul Nash he visited Minuit Chanson while he lived in Paris and he thought it was glorious , a place where all sorts of people gather. Burra himself loved Jazz and Blues. That is what you can imagine these prostitutes, cross dressers, sailors, and black people, all of a youthful demeanour, are drawn to. It is a view of the 1930s, working class, a mixture of classes perhaps,where people are trying to escape into a more glamourous, risky, world. The aristocracy and wealthy of the time had their more glitzy version, just as hedonistic.