The next Artist You Need To Know is Edward Burra (1905 – 1976).
Burra was an English painter (often in watercolour), draughtsman, set and costume designer, and printmaker. Some of his best known works are his depictions of the urban ‘underworld’ of the 1920s and 1930s, Black culture (as manifest through his engagement with the Harlem scene of the 1930s in the United States which was the apex of the Harlem Renaissance) and other evocative pieces that often blended a poetic realism as well as being influenced by surrealism.
From a large exhibition of the artist’s work at the TATE in 2025 : “Edward Burra is one of the most distinctive British artists of the 20th century, renowned for his vibrant, satirical scenes of the uninhibited urban underworld and queer culture during the ‘Roaring Twenties.’ A master of watercolour painting […] Burra pushed the boundaries of the traditionally delicate medium to create bold and vivid scenes. His practice encompasses a rich spectrum of imaginative works influenced by everything from music and performance to popular culture, literature, and art history.” He was a “keen social documentarian, his scenes also include macabre landscapes that reflect his experience of world events, including the Spanish Civil War, Second World War, and post-war industrial revolution. Burra’s lived experience of disability influenced his artistic practice and may have informed his portrayal of marginalised communities.”
He was born in London (UK) in 1905 : his health was always poor and although this was a factor in how he lived nearly his entire life in the ‘genteel’ seaside town of Rye in Sussux (which Burra dismissed contemptuously as an ‘overblown gift shoppe’) he travelled often and widely, refusing to allow his chronic illnesses to limit his artistic vision and interests. “His career, in fact, represents a revolt against his respectable middle-class background, for he was fascinated by low-life and seedy subjects, which he experienced at first hand in places such as the streets of Harlem in New York and the dockside cafés of Marseilles. By his mid-twenties he had formed a distinctive style, depicting squalid subjects with a keen sense of the grotesque and a delight in colourful detail.” (from Artnet)
At 17 he was suffering from pneumonia and had to be withdrawn from school : he was educated at home until he was well enough to later attend the Chelsea School of Art (until 1923) and then the Royal College of Art (1923 – 1925) where he studied under the artists Randolph Schwabe and Raymond Coxon.
Near the end of this period – in 1925 – Burra was travelling in Italy and met the artist Paul Nash : they would often collaborate and Burra was one of the members of Nash’s group Unit One. This group of British Modernists included other important artists such as John Armstrong, Frances Hodgkins, Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore.
Burra’s paintings were often directly inspired and related to how he was an avid traveler : but with the outbreak of WW II, this became an impossibility and so he turned his hand to working in theatrical spaces, designing scenery and costumes for a variety of operas, ballets and other dramatic productions.
“In many of his paintings, there is an underlying and disconcerting oddness, born, perhaps, of not having been expected to live long and of the trauma of seeing Betsy, the beloved youngest of his two sisters, die a long and feverish death from meningitis at the age of 12. That oddness often took on a more sinister appearance; as [critic and writer Jonathan] Meades says, “He makes everything look threatening”. But that is an over-statement, as Burra’s paintings are also very often trenchantly amusing and full of small details containing intriguing sub-narratives. The people in his paintings are almost always frozen in the act of doing something, from the seeming mundanity of drinking tea or biting a ham roll, to flirtation, striptease or fortune-telling.” (from here)
The American poet Matthew Paul has published several poems inspired by Burra’s work and his lines offer interesting points of access to the artist’s scenes and characters :
You let your sloshing dreams take their
course, through the sandy sediment of the night before.
Burra exhibited widely during his lifetime, including solo exhibitions at the Leicester Galleries (London, UK – he would exhibit there regularly over his career), the Springfield Museum of Art (Massachusetts, USA), the Redfern Gallery (London, UK), the Magdalene Sothmann Gallery (Amsterdam, Netherlands, a 1955 retrospective), Swetzoff Gallery (Boston, USA), Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, USA), Treadwell Gallery, (London, UK), the Hamet Gallery (London, UK), Tate Gallery (London, UK, another retrospective in 1973) and the Lefevre Gallery (London, UK, a 1977 Memorial Retrospective Exhibition).
An extensive listing of his exhibitions – both solo and group – can be seen here. There is also a listing of the many productions that he supported artistically, as well, from theatre to opera, at that site.
Burra also illustrated a number of books over his career that were quite diverse in their subject matter : these include The Oxford Illustrated Old Testament: With Drawings by Contemporary Artists (1968 : the artist illustrated The Book of Judith in this text), The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe (1948), The Triumph of Death by C. F. Ramuz (1946) and Mark Twain’s seminal book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1948).
In 1971 Burra accepted a CBE (Companion to the British Empire) despite declining an associate membership with the Royal Academy in 1963. Two years later, the Arts Council of Great Britain produced a documentary titled Edward Burra : a decade later this was re edited (focusing upon the interview segments) and titled The Burra Interview.
After breaking his hip in 1974, his health – which had never been particularly robust – declined sharply and he died in Hastings in 1976 at the age of 71. The Tate Gallery Archive has many of his letters and other artist ephemera that are instrumental in terms of offering depth and detail to his career and art. His works can also be found in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among many others.
A documentary about Burra titled I Never Tell Anybody Anything The Life and Art of Edward Burra can be enjoyed here : it was produced in tandem with a massive retrospective of his work at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, UK (2011 – 2012).