Edward Burra: Twentieth-Century Eye

Jane Stevenson, Jonathan Cape, 2007 £30 ISBN 9780224078757

One achievement of this book is to make one consider what the biography of an artist can do. Burra was, in many ways, a typical artist of mid-20th century England, in the sense that his style was personal to him. It is difficult to categorise his work and he seems to have worked largely independently of the mainstream of 20th century art. The work also went through quite a range of styles during his surprisingly (in view of his recurrent poor health) long working life. Now the pictures can occasionally be seen on the walls of Tate Britain, or regularly in the sale room. There are a number of easily available books on his work, containing many reproductions (in particular there is Andrew Causey’s catalogue raisonnée). These books analyse him as an artist and attempt to place his achievements in context.

So what can a professional academic from the English faculty of a Scottish university, who has never before published a book about 20th century British art, but who has written novels, say that can have any important contribution to our understanding of the artist’s work? It has taken me a very long time to answer that question. The book has 415 pages of text before the notes begin; I probably reached the middle before I began to accept that the book might have been worth writing. Now, having read all of it, I can see the relevance of a book of this type, but it has been mighty hard work unearthing it. To begin with, the author’s style is deplorable. No academic should write like this. There is an infelicity on almost every page, so many that it would be ridiculous to try to enumerate them. Burra’s parents were, apparently, ‘convention personified’ (p5); before the First War, Rye was, apparently, ‘maddeningly picturesque’ (p10); Burra as a child seems to have been ‘yo-yoing in and out of the sick-bay’ (p16); ‘Burra’s Ma was not a Freudian carnivore’ (p18); and, finally and triumphantly concluding the first 20 dreadful pages, ‘Nothing in Burra’s work suggests the compulsive need to create and blow up a Queen-Kong-like mummy-monster which afflicted so many of his male contemporaries’ (p20). I have not made up those hyphens; the style, so to say, defies parody. And yet, by the end, I felt it had achieved something. It had made me understand more about the world in which Burra’s work was created.

Depending upon one’s nostalgia for the camp world of the 1920s and 1930s, one may or may not find the life and people described sympathetic. The author rightly doesn’t attempt to judge them; she tries to describe them, some-times in too much detail. As she burrows into the world, largely through the use of the many surviving letters, she gets into her stride and begins to settle and think about issues which occur to her from her studies. Insights begin to emerge. The first I noticed began on p135 in relation to John Rothenstein.

The student of mid-20th-century British art finds himself developing a position on Rothenstein. He arises in a number of guises and is unavoidable. He was important as Director of the Tate, of course, but also as the author of the three volumes of Modern English Painters. These fascinating books were important because he personally knew many of the artists he wrote about and he wrote sympathetically and with authority about them.

It must be arguable that his work helped to establish the reputations of some of the artists concerned and we may well imagine the lazy or hurried later commentator, wishing to say something reasonably reliable about an artist covered by these books, simply reproducing one of Rothenstein’s sentences about them. In other words, they have some status as works of authority. Jane Stevenson, however, has clearly immersed herself in written material on Burra and she rightly feels herself qualified to challenge Rothenstein’s views on him. She particularly feels the need to question Rothenstein’s position on Burra – and I respect the way she does this – because Rothenstein not only included a chapter on the artist in his great work, but wrote the book on Burra in the Penguin Modern Painters series (published in 1945), selected the pictures to include in the first large Burra retrospective (at the Tate in 1973) and wrote the essay for the catalogue. Rothenstein clearly regarded himself as an expert on Burra. But Stevenson astutely notes that Rothenstein seemed to pick up those features of Burra that he wanted to find, rather than letting the facts speak for themselves. How often do those writing supposedly historical things do that? It is the mark of amateur historians to use facts to prove what they want to portray, rather than being guided by the facts, and I am inclined, without doing my own analysis, to believe that Stevenson may well be right when she questions Rothenstein’s judgments about Burra. If she is right, she raises a fundamental question about the bias of one of the major commentators on 20th century British art; and if Rothenstein warped our impressions of Burra, what else might he have manipulated?

In fact, the Rothenstein piece comes up in what may well be the author’s best chapter (Chapter V). She is excellent in her analysis of what it takes to establish an artist’s reputation. This is a difficult, subtle area and some of her comments show a sureness of touch for which her writing style does not prepare one.

Slowly, therefore, as the long book develops, one comes to appreciate that Stevenson has much to offer. At some point (around p226) she debates the effect of travel on Burra’s work. This is an important theme for anyone wanting to study mid-20th-century British artists. Many of them travelled extensively – Burra certainly did so, but so did many others (Craxton is a good example). How this affected their work would merit closer analysis.

Sometimes her determination, so typical of a biographer, to ‘defend’ her subject or to make him out to be more special than he necessarily was, lets her down. A comparative study of the development of the reputation of that other individual talent, Francis Bacon, with that of Burra could perhaps be made to reveal fascinating similarities. Both were largely uneducated; both were regarded as great readers and given to holding forth with ideas taken from their readings. But how intelligent they really were, in an intellectual rather than an artistic sense, it would be difficult to say. Yet commentators insist that we regard Bacon not merely as one of the great British artists of the century, but also as an intellectual and Stevenson would like some of the same status for Mr Burra. Well, maybe. In the end this turns out to be a book worth reading. It is sometimes laboured, often difficult to read, but by the end the persistent reader has been shown the world in which Burra produced his strange pictures. That is probably as much as a biographer of an artist can be expected to achieve.