The Brooklyn Rail

With Edward Burra, Tate Britain tries once more to rescue early twentieth century British painting from its slog through modernism. Burra rarely stood still, darting between places, fixations, and slippery sensibilities—even as rheumatoid arthritis and anemia inevitably tied him to the placid port town of Rye, where he grew up the son of a wealthy barrister who later chaired East Sussex County Council. The show suggests that this chronic illness also shaped his attraction to unlikely subjects—the downtrodden, the disreputable, the decadent—because apparently, physical suffering breeds radical empathy. That’s one reading; envy’s another. Burra’s comfortable life may have seemed to him like a shadow of the real world, one made more vivid by those who had suffered more deeply. While realism helped his generation reclaim a sense of order after World War I, it appears to offer Burra a portal into another life. Indeed, his Neue Sachlichkeit doubles as a campy confession from a scion hooked on the illusion of freedom.

Spanning six rooms, the retrospective loosely follows his sojourns from Rye to rougher ground. It opens in late-1920s Paris, where Burra painted the after-hours bars and backstreets of Belleville and Ménilmontant. His French sailors, flat-capped Apache gangsters, garçons, and prostitutes huddle, conspire, and sway in same-sex pairs. He would never paint better. No bigger than a tabloid, these works are tinted like slices of game terrine. Their brightness defies the hour, as if remembered into clarity. They fuse Fernand Léger’s grease-slick tubism with Kees van Dongen’s libidinousness, all undercut by a delicate innocence, like a sudden flush rising on the cheeks.In these scenes, the eyes reveal a quiet calculation, a furtive game of gauging signals. Everyone’s a hunter with a catch in sight, but the prettiest prey forever dangles just out of reach.

Three Sailors at a Bar (1930) frequently recurs in discussions of Burra’s sexuality, a mystery the artist himself coyly kept winking at. In the painting, sleeves bunch tight on biceps and trousers cling to legs and buttocks.The erotic charge is obvious, almost comical. If it doesn’t reflect Burra’s appetite, it reads as a kind of coded cruelty—the leer Otto Dix so masterfully wielded to make men look just a bit too pleased with themselves and too aware of each other. A sailor sips his drink while two others chat nearby at the bar. One wears practiced focus, as if waiting for the perfect moment to make a witty comment. Behind the barkeep, the mirror captures the speaker’s image, yet it seems to belong to someone else—someone silent, tense, and displaced—a misalignment reminiscent of Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882). Might this be a fourth sailor or simply a portrait of his interiority? Either way, the pinched expression on his face betrays a mix of self-pity, snobbery, and sorrow, a messy ache of wanting into a world he also resents.

Burra thrived on these innuendos. According to fellow painter Paul Nash, Burra landed in the US in October 1933 with a suitcase stuffed with paints, Woolworth’s underwear, and dog-eared French and Spanish novelettes. Customs barely blinked—until a bulge in his pocket ratted out a hefty bottle of whiskey. The officer gave the lump a knowing jab with his pencil. But before he could intervene, Burra grinned and said, “It’s a growth.”

New York, however, offered his sardonicism little to chew on. His devotion to jazz—from Cab Calloway to Louis Armstrong and McKinney’s Cotton Pickers—immersed him in Harlem’s rising Black bourgeoisie. Savoy Ballroom, Harlem (1934) makes jazz corporeal: hips propelled, limbs loosened, faces lit with something like rapture—a visual rhythm Aaron Douglas, Archibald J. Motley Jr., and Palmer Hayden also translated to canvas. But while these Harlem Renaissance painters forged distinct styles to frame jazz as a possibility of Black cultural memory, Burra receded into anonymity. Was it possible for Burra to capture escapism as anything more than simple joy? The hollow laughter in Savoy Ballroom raises doubt. The expressions of his figures offer no trace of hard-earned relief, thrill in the night’s false danger, or dread of the crueler truths that break with daylight. Here, for Burra, it’s as if the end of Prohibition freed more than just the flow of liquor.

Burra grappled with his feelings around the Spanish Civil War through a visual language that feels similarly jejune—not out of indifference, but because any reckoning with the conflict’s moral entanglements collapsed into cartoonishly simplistic metaphors. In Beelzebub (ca. 1937), soldiers brandish bloodied spears as a muscle-bound incubus confronts the viewer, lips curled in smouldering delight. It’s the sort of image scored by gashes, not pain, where horror is indulged rather than interrogated. Burra’s grief, when it surfaces, seems reserved for clergy killed by the far left, which tracks with his pro-Franco sympathies and echoes how fascists justified their escalating terror. Wake (1940) depicts red-hooded figures gathered at the lip of a grave, peering down at a skeleton—the fate awaiting them all. Behind them, ashen vaults and pillars loom like the husks of a shattered creed.

In the following decades, however, Burra’s often literal surrealism took gentler form in the British countryside as failing health gradually narrowed his travels. Hills in his watercolors fold and puff like playdough. Tea-stained greens and browns ripple across quilted pastures. Trucks and cars and motorbikes barrel down the road, their exhaust at times forming black-shrouded figures that drift through the landscape like ghostly premonitions. Here, themes of profanity, unrest, and disrupted beauty resurface. Yet these works look gorgeously clammy, with droplets of pigment sagging in pale, waterlogged patches. They reveal an artist resigned to the medium’s cloying sentimentality and to a world already slipping away. The vanishing point lies between a countryside dimming beneath smoke and a modernism folding in on itself before Burra’s generation could shape it into something distinctly British. Because of that, even the best of his work plays like an echo from a room already emptied.