Edward Burra 1905-1976
Surrealist Figure
watercolour on paper
22¼ x 9¾ ins


Provenance
Mrs Roet



Burra’s art is in many ways one of the most eccentric manifestations of the catholicity of taste that was exhibited by British artists in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Within his work we see elements of mainstream surrealism and abstraction, but it is treated to his own particular distillation, via his interest in all that was bizarre or unusual.

The present work, a single-figure study, uses a rather unorthodox mix of modernist reduction, taking away all the direct indicators of the physical likeness bar one voluptuous leg, and the rather high camp swags, drapes and corsets of the victorian music-hall, to give us a figure whose decadence is never in doubt but whose identity, setting and purpose are cloaked in mystery.

To an extent unusual in his time, Burra swathed himself in the world of popular culture, and the exaggerated figure of the present painting is a clear sister to those who populate some of his most important work of the period. These paintings seem to have been particularly influenced by Burra’s visit to America in 1933, where he spent five months entranced by the flamboyant visual culture of the poorer and culturally diverse neighbourhoods of New York. The nightclubs and bars of Harlem were a particularly fertile source, as were advertising posters and Hollywood icons such as Mae West. Thus, Burra’s figures, such as our current example, inhabit a true surrealist world, half-way between the distortions of dreams and the overblown fantasies of the entertainment world.