**Edward Burra -** Dockside Cafe, Marseilles, 1929, © Estate of Edward Burra, courtesy Lefevre Fine Art Ltd, London

I recently enjoyed an exhibition of the work of Edward Burra. (Tate Britain, London until 19 October)

Burra painted satirical watercolours of French bohemians in the Roaring Twenties and the vibrant club scene during the Harlem Renaissance. He painted unsettling images of Spain as it descended into civil strife, and East Sussex in turmoil during World War 2. After the conflict, he painted British landscapes disfigured by industry and commerce. He had a knack for finding the nexus of social and historical change, immersing himself in culture, directing his acute eye to human foibles and foolishness.

Burra was born in London in 1905 into a wealthy banking and legal family. Diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and suffering from anaemia, he turned to painting as ‘a kind of drug’ that relieved the pain. He found it was physically easier to work with watercolours flat on a table, rather than with oils at an easel.

Edward Burra - Minuit Chanson, 1931. Photograph: © Estate of Edward Burra, courtesy Lefevre Fine Art Ltd, London

Having studied at Chelsea Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art, Burra, who had learned French at an early age, travelled to Paris. He visited the museums and galleries; feasted on the cinema, literature and music; soaked up the cosmopolitan nightlife in the cafes and clubs of Montparnasse and Montmartre; took trips to the sunny south, to Marseille, Toulon and Cassis.

We visit a mirrored dancehall, an underground gay bar, a grubby dockside hangout - where high-society smoothies rub shoulders with shady lowlife and flat-capped gangsters. Bobbed women in cloche hats and dark eye-shadow chatter conspiratorially, hold cigarettes nonchalantly, down cocktails eagerly - at Le Café du Dome, Le Select, Le Boeuf sur le Toit. Eager customers crowd into the listening booths at the new record store on Boulevard Clichy. Burlesque dancers serve at the teashop. Uniformed sailors stand chatting to the diffident attendant. It's all rather emancipated, permissive, decadent.

In 1933 Burra sailed to New York and stayed in Harlem for several months. (He would return throughout the ‘30s and ‘50s.) He was besotted with the nightlife, drinking and dancing; with Club Hot-Cha, the Apollo Theatre and the Savoy Ballroom. He collected 78 RPM records and would listen to jazz while he painted - to McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, Cab Calloway and Clarence Williams; to Billie Holliday, Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald. In his work he captured the syncopated glamour of the band; the joyful strutting on the dancefloor. He portrayed people hanging out on the doorsteps of brownstone tenements, a train passing by on the elevated railway.

Burra’s pictures were not always accurate records of reality. Rather he freely integrated his memories with his imagination.

‘When I go back there, I’m always puzzled by what I’ve left out.’

An independent spirit, one afternoon he walked out on his family home in Rye without saying a word. His parents only discovered he had been in the United States when he returned weeks later.

In the 1930s Burra travelled to Spain, visiting Barcelona, Grenada, Seville and Madrid. Again he immersed himself in the country’s art, literature and music. And again he learned the language. Inspired by Spain’s history and tradition, he painted strutting matadors and proud flamenco singers, austere governesses and sophisticated society hostesses. But he also became aware of the tensions on the street as Civil War loomed. Initially sympathising with the Fascists, his work grew darker and more surreal. The Grim Reaper, demons and the Devil stalk the cityscape, overseeing destruction and decay.

At home in Sussex during World War 2, with his medicine rationed and his movement restricted, Burra felt isolated, hemmed in. His paintings stayed depressed and downbeat. We are shown a claustrophobic world, distorted by trucks and military paraphernalia, crowded with soldiers in sinister carnival masks.

Burra was an elusive character. Garrulous and gossipy with his friends, he was guarded and reticent with strangers. He rarely gave interviews, and he refused to explain his art.

Burra: I never tell anybody anything… So they just make it up. I don’t see that it matters.
Interviewer: What does matter?
Burra: Nothing.

Looking back on Burra’s artistic journey, I was struck by his ability to locate himself in the hotspots of cultural change. He regarded what he found with a mixture of affection and cynicism; with the acuity of an eternal outsider. He teaches us to seek out the melting pots, the frontiers and borderlands; to learn the language and soak it all up; to participate and yet retain some distance.

In the 1960s, as Burra’s frail health deteriorated further still, he took long driving tours of Britain with his sister Anne. Once more, he was alert to change. Whilst depicting the beautiful hills, valleys and moorland that he saw through the windscreen, he also recorded the power stations, pylons and petrol stations; the motorways, diggers and brash advertising hoardings. This was an uneasy landscape, a countryside in distress. He was an early prophet of environmental decay.

Burra died in 1976, aged 71.

Edward Burra - Picking a Quarrel, 1968-69 © Estate of Edward Burra, courtesy Lefevre Fine Art Ltd, London

'I'm just a woman, a lonely woman,
Waiting on the weary shore.
I'm just a woman that's only human,
One you should be sorry for.
Woke up this morning alone about dawn.
Without a warning I found he was gone.
How could he do it? Why should he do it?
He'd never done it before.
Am I blue? Am I blue?
Ain't these tears in these eyes telling you?
Am I blue? Why, you'd be too.
If each plan with your man done fell through.’
Ethel Waters, ‘Am I Blue?’ (H Akst, G Clarke )

No. 525

I recently watched a fine documentary about the artist and designer Eric Ravilious. (‘Eric Ravilious: Drawn to War’ (2022), directed by Margy Kinmonth)

Ravilious was a cheerful soul with an observant eye and gentle touch. His design work was clear, concise and witty. His watercolours gave us an affectionate picture of England – at peace and war. He painted a world of serenity, stillness and restraint - at the same time both romantic and modern. And he had an extraordinary ability to recognise ordinary beauty.

Born in Acton in 1903, Ravilious was raised in Eastbourne where his parents ran an antiques shop. From an early age he was inclined towards art, recording in his notebook precise sketches of everyday objects: a scrubbing brush, bucket and boots; a candlestick, collar and tie.

Ravilious won scholarships to study wood engraving at Eastbourne School of Art and then the Royal College of Art. He went on to work as a commercial designer, creating illustrations for books, magazines and adverts. His woodcut of two Victorian gentlemen playing cricket has appeared on the front cover of every edition of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack since 1938. His ceramic designs for Wedgwood include commemorative coronation crockery and his much loved Alphabet mug. A is for Aeroplane, B is for Birdcage, C is for Cloud. The Y and Z - Yacht and Zeppelin - hide on the inside.

Although Ravilious’ commercial output was delightful, his clients could still be frustrating.

‘Wedgwood have given me some ceramics work. But I am sorry to say that the family think my beautiful designs above the heads of their public, and that to begin with something should be done which is safer and more understandable. I was for clean sweep, they were for a method of slow percolation.’

While earning a living from his design work, Ravilious also had a passion for watercolours. (He couldn’t stand oils, comparing them to toothpaste.)

He painted the countryside and village life of Essex and Sussex; gentle hills, ploughed fields and muddy tracks, under cold grey skies. Here are the ponds at East Dean and Wannock Dew; chalk paths twisting their way across the Downs; the vicarage at Castle Hedingham in the snow. A field-roller lies unattended. A delivery van pauses at a junction. Here’s Ravilious’ wife Tirzah shelling peas under a walnut tree, while her friend Charlotte is engrossed in her book. A man delivers coal to the back of the house. A woman beats a carpet in the shadows. A camp bed in the attic awaits a guest, in amongst the pot plants.

There is a timeless romanticism about Ravilious’ watercolours. But these are not cosy, traditional images. They often have an unsettling, haunted quality. And modern elements are consistently present. There are barbed wire fences, telegraph poles and cement pits. The ancient chalk horse on the hill at Westbury is seen from inside a third class railway compartment. In the yard old automobiles sit forlorn, hoping to be repaired.

Any item, any perspective, however mundane, presents possibility to Ravilious.

Sometimes the images of the late 1930s seem subtly to suggest impending crisis, peace soon to be disturbed. An empty room has the door flung open, as if someone has left in a hurry. The table in the back garden is set for tea, with an umbrella to hand just in case.

At the outbreak of World War II Ravilious joined the Royal Observer Corps.

‘As the war was starting this morning I put myself down for observing, and started at 2-00 this afternoon. It’s looked on as an old man’s job, which depresses me rather. But it is useful in these parts, and may even be dangerous. Or enough to count.’

Ravilious clearly relished the opportunity to get away, to see strange sights, to immerse himself in his work.

‘I feel a stir in me that it is possible to really like drawing war activities. It interests me to the bone and marrow.’

Before long he was commissioned by the War Artists' Advisory Committee and given the rank of Honorary Captain in the Royal Marines. His military employment took him to docks, coastal defences, submarine stations and aerodromes all over the UK; and on a perilous naval mission to Norway.

‘It was so nice working on deck long past midnight in bright sunshine. It never fell below the horizon. I do like this life and the people. It’s so remote and lovely in these parts. And the excitements above and below don’t interrupt much.’

Ravilious’ letters to Tirzah sustain the same jaunty tone. Perhaps he was putting on a brave face.

‘I’m going up to the cliffs twice a day like a man to the office. We’re bombed in the afternoons about 3-30, just as you want tea.’

Ravilious painted barrage balloons, magnetic mines and gun emplacements; docked destroyers in the dead of night; sentinels sitting among the sand bags; seaplanes seen through the sick bay window. A ship’s propeller rests on a railway trolley in the snow. Biplanes are reflected in puddles on the tarmac. Searchlights trace the night sky.

But Ravilious does not over-dramatise. He regards weapons of death and destruction with the same keen eye as he applies to agricultural implements. Each subject - a depth charge launcher, a fortified fishing vessel, an aircraft carrier - presents its own unique design challenge; its own particular beauty.

In August 1942 Ravilious was invited to visit RAF Station Kaldadarnes in Iceland. On the day he arrived, a plane had failed to return from patrol, and the next morning the artist joined the search party. He wrote a letter home before he set off.

‘I’ve just been offered a ride with a crew searching for a missing American plane. I intend to stay here drawing and painting ‘til Christmas. Goodbye Darling. I hope you feel well again. Take care of yourself. And kisses to the children. Eric.’

Ravilious’ aircraft did not return, and after four days the RAF declared him and the four-man crew lost in action. He was 39 years old.

For some 40 years after, Ravilious was a forgotten artist. It is only in recent decades that his reputation as a ‘romantic modern’ has been established. He teaches us to prize the landscape that surrounds us; to treasure the everyday sights of home; to find charm in the both the strange and familiar. And to approach life with a light heart and a love of beauty.

'Maybe we'll live and learn,
Maybe we'll crash and burn.
Maybe you'll stay, maybe you'll leave.
Maybe you'll return,
Maybe another fight.
Maybe we won't survive,
But maybe we'll grow.
We never know, baby, you and I.

We're just ordinary people,
We don't know which way to go.
'Cause we're ordinary people
Maybe we should take it slow.’

John Legend, 'Ordinary People’ (J Stephens / W Adams)

No. 413

Edward Burra: Cultural Immersion

Ravilious: An Eye for Ordinary Beauty