I Never Tell Anybody Anything: The Life and Art of Edward Burra

This is a film about the most intriguing 20th-century artist

you may never have heard of.

At least, I hope it is a film about him.

Rather than one that just goes in search of him.

Because above all, he is an enigma.

His name? Edward Burra.

His character? Diffident, self-contained.

No wonder, perhaps, he spent his life trapped inside a crippled body.

For him, I think, there were only two escapes, painting and travel.

He loved Paris and France and came here often and if you know where

to look, you can still find echoes of the city he knew and loved.

BELL RINGS

HE SPEAKS IN FRENCH:

I get the feeling Edward Burra would have been very happy here.

BIG BAND MUSIC PLAYS

It's the Burra rhythm!

His name may not be familiar,

but Edward Burra is one of the overlooked geniuses

of British art and one of the most acute chroniclers of the 20th century.

Although his is definitely not the official version of history.

He painted humanity's dark side.

Its warmongers, lowlifes and outsiders.

Illuminating dark and murky corners wherever he went.

His idiosyncratic tour of the 20th century is strange,

unsettling and always compelling.

Edward Burra died in 1976.

I never met him.

And I am not sure how well even his very best friends really

knew him, or knew about his art, because Burra was quite

possibly the single most elusive British artist of the 20th century.

He very, very rarely talked about his images, in fact, he was so reticent,

he did not even like to give them titles.

He only ever give one interview to the media,

and that was a filmed interview

that he conducted towards the end of his life.

It's rare footage, not very often seen

and they keep it here in the archive of the British Film Institute.

Here it is.

Recorded four years before his death, the interview shows

an artist deeply uncomfortable about revealing anything of himself,

or his art.

A man who hated being interviewed.

Who would much rather be doing what he does best.

I was just bored, I don't know what to do.

-What would you be doing if you weren't here?

-Painting.

Born in 1905, Burra was a delicate and sickly child,

plagued by illness. From a young age, he suffered

from chronic debilitating arthritis.

His joints began visibly to deform from the age of five or six

and the pain never left him for the rest of his life.

His one buffer against the hand fate had dealt him was prosperity.

He was the son of a rich lawyer.

Burra would never need to earn a living.

He was born in this house, Springfield, near Rye

and would spend much of his life living here

with his mother and father, a semi-permanent invalid,

always forced to return to this, his refuge and main painting space.

The Window is one of Burra's earliest pictures,

painted when he was still a teenager.

Like many of his works, its whereabouts is uncertain

and it is known only in black-and-white reproduction.

It is an image that reveals his sense of his own predicament with piercing clarity.

An ambiguous figure sits on this side of the window.

Not wheelchair-bound, but certainly chair bound.

While outside, life in all its vigour goes on.

Two girls can be seen through the window, perhaps his sisters,

little Betsy and Anne.

But the central figure, Burra's alter ego, remains fixed

and frozen in place.

It is as if there would always be a sheet of glass

between him and the world.

He could look, but not touch.

Throughout his childhood,

Burra escaped the limits of his own body through painting and drawing.

Art had become the most important thing in his life.

At the young age of 15 in 1921,

he decided to escape Rye for the Chelsea College of Art in London.

He loved London's spirit of limitless possibility,

but it was the hidden, darker side of the city

that he caricatured in many of his early drawings.

Burra received a fairly straightforward art education

by the standards of the early 1920s

with a strong emphasis on draughtsmanship,

which perhaps helps to explain

his very confident and strong sense of line,

but equally important to him were

the lifelong friends he made at art school.

Clover Pritchard, the future photographer Barbara Ker-Seymer, and the future ballet dancer

Billy Chappelle. What they had in common was a great sense of fun

and as Burra later said, essentially, frivolity.

"We spent all our time going to the cinema and reading Vogue magazine."

I think those things, too, filtered straight into his art.

Burra had developed a lifelong love of the cinema, especially B-movies

and cheap serials, which he could enjoy while he was sitting down,

one of the few positions in which he was comfortable.

What Burra took from the cinema was his sense of composition,

he was always very fond of extreme close-ups,

or plunging, vertiginous perspectives, or close cropping.

He goes for these heavily made-up faces

with Cupid's bow lips and exaggerated expressions,

just as you see them in the old silent movies.

Films like The Hazards of Helen also hinted at the darker sides

of human nature, they are full of undercurrents of sex and violence and crime.

And right through to the end of his life,

Burra would retain a deep affection for schlock horror, trashy movies.

As well as going to the movies, the young Burra went to galleries

of modern art, absorbing the new languages of Cubism,

collage and abstraction.

A mix of influences soon to be reflected in his own work.

The Snack Bar is unusual for Burra,

in that it is one of his very rare oil paintings, and yet,

I think it is a classic Burra image and it gives a wonderful snapshot

of where he is at as an artist in his early maturity.

He is clearly fascinated by Leger, by Picasso,

by painting the modern world as a kind of collage of startling detail.

The wood grain of a door, the tiling of a floor,

the texture of a bar counter.

But I think what makes it quintessentially Burra-eque

is the sense that underneath

the apparently innocent surface of the scene,

all kinds of rather disturbing currents seem to be running.

The young woman shovelling what George Melly once called "a distinctly phallic sandwich"

into her mouth wears the clothes and make-up of a cheap whore.

The blank-faced young food-monger

seems to be cutting into that piece of sausage with disturbing relish.

Could he be dreaming the dark thoughts of a schlock horror sex murderer?

In 1925, Burra had travelled to Paris

to see the great city of modern art and modern life at first-hand.

He arrived when Paris was at its peak as a centre for the avant-garde,

and the city would change Burra for ever.

Burra loved the energy and the dynamism of Paris,

and he particularly loved the city at night.

I'm on my way to one of his favourite haunts,

one of the most famous places in all of Paris - there it is,

the Folies Bergere, with its orange neon sign.

And right in the middle, you can see this huge frieze,

showing a cavorting dancer, with her pneumatic limbs

and her short bob, the classic image of the '20s flapper.

And that image, of a dancing woman, letting all her inhibitions go,

that would come to occupy centre stage in Edward Burra's imagination.

Les Folies de Belleville

is Burra in the first flush of his love affair with Paris.

But what an ambiguous love affair.

Right of stage, the cross-legged dancer,

her modesty protected by a piece of diamante the size of a postage stamp,

stares out at the audience with fierce impassivity.

Her trailing hand reaches out towards the phallic dagger,

thrust nonchalantly into the black dancer's loincloth.

This is the spectacle of sex, the promise Of sex,

without the slightest prospect of sex.

All sex could ever be for Edward Burra.

His own predicament mimed in the harsh, angular forms of a stage show.

'I met Sandrine Voillet, an expert on Parisian popular entertainment,

'backstage at another famous nightspot of the '20s,

the music hall des Champs Elysee.'

So here we are, one of Burra's favourite Paris hangouts.

I get the feeling it probably hasn't changed much since then.

No, it hasn't changed since 1925, when La Revue Negre actually opened.

So this is how it would've been

-when Josephine Baker was dancing for the Parisian bourgeois?

-The Charleston.

-Wow!

When she appeared, there was a huge scream. People were gobsmacked!

-Imagine the effect on the male audience!

-Poor Edward Burra!

He said he only had one erection in his whole life,

watching Mae West in the movies.

Maybe there was a tremor when he saw Josephine Baker.

Josephine Baker really epitomised

the new style of a woman.

Showing her body, not having a corset anymore, having short hair,

so she is really the modern woman.

What's behind this embrace of black culture, American culture?

There is a real appetite for pleasure.

People want to put behind them the trauma of the First World War.

And the people who can afford to go to nightclubs and cabarets,

come here to have fun.

You call that the Roaring Twenties, we call them Les Annees Folles -

the crazy years.

-So it's the party after the trauma?

-Absolutely.

The straitjacket that has held the continent for four long, tragic years has loosened,

and Paris, the heart of the Continent, lets herself go.

Post-war Paris really was a party town.

The streets of Europe's major cities were full of reminders

of the brutality of World War One.

Crippled bodies of young soldiers,

who had been literally dismembered by shrapnel, and machine-gun fire.

So no wonder there was such an appetite in the nightclubs

for the spectacle of young, unblemished, dancing bodies.

Burra loved the un-English exuberance of Paris.

He sketched the dancers of the chorus line,

advancing on the audience like a new model army,

stormtroopers of liberating decadence.

By day, he went to the record shops, where you could buy the soundtrack

to this new era of social and sexual freedom.

The new music, known in Paris as "le jazz", or "le blues".

And he painted the favourite of his hangouts,

a store on the Boulevard Clichy, called Minuit Chanson - Midnight Song.

"It's glorious", he wrote to his friend and fellow painter Paul Nash.

"You put bits in the slot and listen to gramophone records.

"The clientele is enough to frighten you a little bit,

"what with listening with one ear and looking at the intrigues going on elsewhere.

"The people are glorious.

"Such tarts, all crumbling, and all sexes and colours."

As well as record shops and music hall entertainments,

Burra loved to paint Paris's bars and cafes,

dwelling on the minutiae of the cheap decor.

Brightly patterned tiled floors, gleaming chrome counters,

steaming coffee machines.

And he was fascinated by their ever-changing clientele.

The whole city was, for him, an unfolding entertainment,

a kind of living cinema.

Burra also travelled to the south of France,

where he was drawn to the seamier port towns, like Marseille,

with their air of abject poverty and their picturesque shabbiness.

In his Dockside Cafe, there's a palpable sense of boredom

and seediness.

Men hanging around with no real place to go.

And maybe there is more going on at the counter

between the greasy matelot and the fanged barmaids than the mere purchase of a cup of coffee.

As in Paris, Burra was drawn to the nightlife of the port towns,

in particular their Spanish-style flamenco establishments.

Here, in a painting called Flamenco Dancer,

he's compressed a whole lot of different memories

of the things he experienced on his travels.

It's an image of a sexual predator.

Burra has depicted her as a cross between a femme fatale

and a dangerous insect.

He's made her train resemble the sting of a scorpion,

her male victims, completely entranced.

And for once, you get the sense that Burra, the sexual outsider,

the man on the outside of life, is quite glad to be there.

He's watching what's going on and feels happy he is not part of it.

Over here, as so often again in Burra,

you get this huge foreground detail,

perhaps she's the next flamenco dancer to perform.

Perhaps she's wondering if she can live up to the example of her rival.

It's a picture full of hallucinatory details,

and look at this, almost storybook image,

of a boat under the moonlight.

I don't think any one experience inspired this image,

I think it's an example of exactly what Burra did

with the excitement of all that he'd seen abroad,

compressed it into a single image full of colour, light, vigour

and sexual energy.

Burra's art isn't the only record of his youthful peregrinations across France.

He was also a prolific letter-writer.

I've come to the Tate archive to meet Jane Stevenson,

his biographer, to see whether his letters might add more pieces to the puzzle of the man.

Jane, how much time did you spend here in the Burra archive at the Tate?

It's quite hard to remember, but the main point was it was such fun.

I get the feeling sometimes he was a man who almost lived through his correspondence?

He did, because he was so disabled.

He must have written at least one letter a day for his whole life.

So at the very least, he thought it was worth it.

I think he wrote the way he drew, which was by holding the pen, or brush, static,

and moving from the shoulder.

How much of his personality do you think is reflected in these letters?

What you get from the letters is the observation. This one...

THEY LAUGH

That's fantastic!

He loved the distinction between people trying to be smart and cool,

and what they actually looked like.

You get the sense from that of this eye,

that he's sort of eating the world up with his eyes, and then writing it down

and transforming it into these cartoons,

which are seen through this rather camp, caricatural,

-and yet somehow affectionate sensibility, would that be fair to say?

-Yes.

Do think there is a sense in which he sees life as a kind of theatre?

Yes. What we have is the important question

of whether their mutual friend Billy has or has not lost his virginity.

Billy Chappell, the dancer?

"And pray, dear, from whom did you hear that our little pox had been had?

"I must try and find out."

-That's Burra's love of gossip!

-That's Burra's love of gossip, all right.

They'd have loved text messages!

Burra's life as an artist fell into an unusual pattern,

forced on him by his illness.

Exciting bursts of foreign travel would be followed by long periods of enforced rest,

back with his parents in Sussex.

I think Edward Burra was a complicated mixture of the bohemian and the conservative,

and nowhere is that encapsulated more than in his attitude

to his home town, Rye, where he was born and where he would die.

On the one hand, he loved to complain about it,

to mock what he saw as its aura of suffocating gentility,

its tea shop cosiness. He called it "Tinkerbell Town".

On the other hand, he needed it. This was his recuperation zone.

He'd come back here after his adventures overseas,

with his store of images and memories.

This was where he would actually create the vast body of his work.

Burra's method was idiosyncratic.

He'd form a picture in his mind, and then simply paint it from left to right,

as if rolling it out of his imagination.

You can see the process very clearly in this unfinished landscape from the end of his life.

Burra's arthritic hands were too weak to hold anything

except watercolour brushes, so almost all his works,

however large, were carried out in watercolour.

But watercolour used thick and heavy, like oil paint,

to give as much density and substance to every image.

In one of his most playful paintings, The Tea Shop,

done just a year after Les Folies de Belleville,

he imagined the scantily-clad dancers of the Parisian nightclub scene

descending on some staid tea shop in Rye, serving tea and cakes

to a thoroughly bemused clientele of bowler-hatted, newspaper-reading,

repressed Englishmen, and blue-rinsed ladies of a certain age.

One of whom, to her astonishment,

is having a pot of tea poured over her head

by none other than a smirking vision of Josephine Baker herself.

But if his art was meticulous and carefully constructed,

real life was not so obliging.

Because of his personal fragility,

I think Burra always had a very keen sense of mortality.

But death actually entered his life for the first time

with the passing away of his maternal grandmother.

They were very fond of each other, and Burra was particularly horrified,

he kept the image with him until the end of his life.

He was horrified by how long it took them to lower her coffin

into the seemingly bottomless pit of the grave.

But while the death of his grandmother was sad,

it wasn't entirely unexpected. She'd lived a long life.

But a genuine tragedy would, very shortly afterwards,

befall the Burra family.

It was here at Springfield in 1929

that real tragedy befell the Burra family.

His younger sister Betsy, with whom Edward was very close,

fell mortally ill with meningitis.

Betsy's bedroom was just off the landing at the top of these stairs.

And at the very end, Burra spent his sister's last day

watching her die.

And that night, he stayed with her, keeping a long vigil.

I think it's as if this man, who spent so much of his life

living through his eyes, wanted to drink her in one last time.

Wanted to fix her image on his retina.

Preserve her, at least as a memory that could never be obliterated.

He hasn't got a vocabulary to handle it.

He and his friends were all busy being smart at each other,

and witty, and observant,

so there isn't room in that world for genuine tragedy.

The most significant thing to me is a long letter,

which is mostly about other subjects, skinny dipping,

idiot things like that, and he has obviously written this,

and then looked at the letter, and he ends up writing,

in the margin at the bottom,

"Believe me, I feel her death very much."

Burra's response to sadness, at least in early life, was never to dwell on the pain.

And during the decade that followed Betsy's death,

he seems to have been even more determined

to escape his troubles by travelling to foreign cultures.

None more so than America.

For Burra, America had an attraction unlike any other country in the world.

He'd journeyed there many times in his imagination, through the jazz and cinema that he loved.

When he finally visited, in 1933, aged 28, he stayed in Harlem,

which had a profound impact on him.

He loved the style and attitude of black New Yorkers, and the rhythm of the streets.

He was having the best time when he was in New York.

I think he was really enjoying himself.

If any of the work can be joyful,

and not light, it's never light, but that's him feeling...

..he's in a place he wants to be, I think. He's having a good time.

The vibrancy and colour of the place are vividly conveyed

in his pictures of Harlem street life.

They instantly evoke an extraordinary time and place,

the birth of America's first genuinely confident, exuberant black culture.

And Burra was on hand to record it all.

Not just the brash street fashions, but the importance of pose a gesture.

Just by the way he stands and holds his cigarette,

a man can embody the hip and the cool.

But as in Paris, it was New York by night that really captured Burra's imagination.

The bars, the nightclubs.

"We went to the Savoy dancehall the other night,"

Burra wrote about his time in Harlem.

"You would go mad. I've never in my life seen such a display.

"And the women had to be twirled around 10 times.

"It's most extraordinary."

Burra himself couldn't dance. He could barely walk.

But in these pictures of his favourite Harlem club,

he managed something very much like dancing with the paintbrush.

There's a tremendous, giddy energy

about this panoramic watercolour of the Savoy dancehall.

It's a pictorial fantasy of being thrust

into a mass of writhing, cavorting bodies.

Burra's art mirrored the world that he was observing.

Burlesque shows in Paris, whores and matelots in Marseilles

and dancing black couples in New York.

'His eye was drawn to them all.

'I have the feeling the one place

'he was desperately trying not to look was within.

'But no one can avoid confronting reality forever.'

How do you paint?

Do you make notes or... What do you do?

I paint straight onto a piece of paper.

'And the experience of travelling to one particular place,

'perhaps his favourite place of all.

'would force Burra to face the world in a far more naked and serious way.

'That place was Spain.'

Burra travelled light. He didn't plan his journeys.

He himself, it seems, sometimes

didn't know if he was going to go away for a week

or for six months.

His mum once famously said, "I don't know if Edward's gone out

"for a packet of cigarettes

"or if he's gone for a journey across Spain."

He wouldn't tell anybody where he was going, what he was doing.

And unlike most English travellers to Spain,

Burra really knew Spanish culture, really had a feeling for it.

He could speak Spanish, he could read Spanish.

And, in fact, one of his favourite quotes,

almost his motto,

came from the Spanish poet Gongora.

Whenever Burra had been away and been on one of that his journeys,

if someone was quizzing him about what he'd been doing

or where he'd been, who he'd been talking to,

and perhaps he didn't like that person,

he'd take this quote from Gongora, throw it in their face.

A mis solidades voy,

de mis solidades vengo.

To my solitudes I go,

from my solitudes I come.

Keep your nose out of my business, in other words.

'Burra travelled to Spain many times during his youth,

'particularly in the 1930s.

'The journey there was much less arduous than that to America.

'Yet in just a few days,

'he could get as far away as possible from the terribly enclosed world

'of his home in Rye.'

Burra was part of an entire generation of post-war Englishmen

who were determined to travel to escape the monotony,

the dreariness, the greyness of what they saw as safe old England.

As another member of this generation Norman Douglas wrote,

"The monotony of a nation intent upon respecting laws and customs,

"horror of the tangent, the extreme, the unconventional."

God save the King! Travel was a way out.

They wanted to escape into sunshine, into colour, into freedom.

Burra's great friend Billy Chappell

captured the allure Spain held for the artist.

Spain possessed every element that was most pleasing

to Edward's senses. Satisfying his eyes, his ears, his nose,

his emotions and his taste buds.

The fabric of Spanish life might have been specially designed

for his pleasure.

"I don't want to leave Spain," he had written to Chapell.

"Not till I must."

Above all, Burra loved Spain's rawness, its roughness,

the way everything seemed a bit seedier and seamier

and rough round the edges, even than in places like Marseilles.

He loved the fact that the flamenco dancers in Spain

were often rather past their prime but still going strong.

This is one of them.

Madame Pastora, preserved forever by Edward Burra.

What he loved about her, I think, was her brilliant, proud brashness.

Her determination to embody joy and song and sexiness

despite advancing years.

I can't help wondering if he didn't see in her an emblem

of his own determination to embrace life, despite his wasting illness.

And even today, when you walk in Burra's footsteps through a town

like Granada, you still catch glimpses of his Spain.

In fact, you can even find people who look as though

they've walked or danced straight out of one of his paintings.

SPANISH SINGING

Madame Pastora might be dead

but long live La Perona!

# La, la, la, la, la-la-la

# La, la, la, la, la-la-la. #

Burra's spirits were lifted

by all aspects of Spanish culture. And for him, even the bullfight

was really just a piece of light theatre.

The death of the animal an occasion for mass excitement.

"I went to a bullfight last Sunday, my dear," he wrote in a letter,

"It's gorgeous, all the bulls gore everybody.

"Do the bulls bleed? Yes, sir!

"Do the audience roar with laughter? The costumes are lovely.

"My favourite costume was vermillion trimmed with black lace."

The Bullfight shows Burra drinking in the spectacle,

but painting it all without any great sense of horror.

Looking at it, I can't help thinking

that he'd managed to turn himself into such a disengaged voyeur,

there was a risk of him becoming a merely superficial artist.

A lightly caricatural, rather inconsequential painter

of life under the Mediterranean sun.

But then came this.

The greatest shift in his art

and his life.

It's a nightmare vision of a modern Medusa.

A blanket of dead bodies draped over her shoulder.

A sudden turn to darkness, nightmare.

A terrible sense of man's inhumanity to man.

And then there's Beelzebub.

The devil dripping blood from a weapon

over a world in ruins.

It's as if something had broken in his mind.

What happened? What turned Edward Burra?

To understand that, I'm on my way to a town just north of Zaragoza,

or what's left of it.

Burra arrived in Spain just before the outbreak

of the Spanish Civil War.

As he later said, "One day when I was lunching

"with some Spanish friends,

"smoke kept blowing by the restaurant window.

"I asked where it came from.

""Oh, it's nothing," someone answered with a shade of impatience.

""It's only a church being burned."

"That made me feel sick."

When Burra came to Spain in 1936, he found he'd stumbled into a world

which was on the brink of tearing itself apart.

And when the Spanish Civil War broke out,

the level of atrocities committed on both sides was truly horrific.

During the first few days of the war,

over 50,000 people lost their lives.

The way in which they did so was peculiarly horrible.

It was called the paseos - the promenades -

with grim irony.

And what happened was that up to 1,000 people,

2,000 people at a time, who happened to be in the wrong place,

on the wrong side, would simply be taken out of town and shot dead.

It's very hard in modern Spain to get a sense

of the terrible violence that ripped the society apart,

but here, you still can, because this is the town of Belchite.

It was torn apart by an exceptionally violent conflict

between the Republicans and the Nationalists.

But they preserved the whole of this ruined city as a memorial

to an atrocious time, that must never be forgotten.

ARTILLERY FIRE

SHELLS WHINE AND CRASH

The battle for Belchite ripped the heart out of the town.

Amongst those caught up in the conflict was Maria,

who was then just a child.

TRANSLATION FROM SPANISH:

How do you feel when you return?

ANDREW SPEAKS SPANISH:

The fascists won the battle for Belchite,

and the town was abandoned.

But what's left behind is a stark reminder

of the disasters of war.

And it was from this rubble that Burra's new art would emerge.

In this one bombed-out structure,

you can feel 1,000 years of Spanish culture...

..just going up in smoke, in a flash. When you stand here,

you can really sense what it was

that so shocked Burra

about this collective descent into a kind of Spanish insanity.

How could a people abolish their own past, destroy their own history,

1,000 years of it, in a single flash

of an exploding bomb?

War In The Sun is Burra's most solemn meditation

on the Spanish Civil War.

It's a picture, full of a sense of menace and foreboding.

Everywhere you look, you see details of modern warfare.

Tank number 26, with its caterpillar track,

an ack-ack gun, thrust up into the sky,

shrapnel-scarred masonry.

And yet, the picture also is very puzzling.

Because within this modern scene of modern warfare,

Burra has introduced all these characters

in what seems to be a form of Renaissance costume.

These figures also suggest to me that Burra is trying to evoke

memories of the era of the Spanish conquistadors,

that time when the Spanish raped Latin America.

And I think, through this layering of past and present,

Burra is trying to suggest

that mankind is hardwired to violence. We've always gone to war.

We always will go to war.

History is one mistake after another

that we can't help repeating.

And I think that idea of history as a trap, of war as a trap,

is conveyed expressively by the almost theatrical

prison architecture of this scene.

Have a look at all these heavy grilles, heavy bars.

These people are trapped in a tragedy

that perhaps they don't fully understand.

But for me, the strangest, most surreal,

and disquieting detail of all

is up here,

where we've got a convoy of troops,

heading away from this Spanish,

sunlit scene,

towards what seems like an English house and an English landscape.

Is that Burra's way of asking himself whether this violence,

this atrocity, may not actually remain restricted to Spain?

Perhaps the violence will spread, even reach his beloved England?

Within three years, the prophecy in the painting came true

and Britain was plunged into the violence of World War II.

What was Burra's experience of the Second World War?

I think it made him feel ever more aware of being trapped

in this fragile, recalcitrant body, watching helplessly

as the world descended into atrocity.

After all, here in Rye,

he was at the front line of the Battle of Britain.

German planes sweeping across the Channel in waves,

on their way to London.

All Burra can do is look up, helplessly.

He's a bystander. What does he do?

He tends his parents' garden,

he helps to care for a family of refugees that they've taken in.

And we know, in a rather sad note from one of his letters,

that he buys up the town's entire supply of aspirin.

It's the only painkiller he can find

for his inflamed joints.

Burra was still only in his 30s,

but increasingly incapacitated by chronic illness.

So, here we have a photograph of Edward Burra as a young man.

And he's holding a paintbrush here, and this hand here,

is absolutely typical for someone with active,

already fairly advanced rheumatoid arthritis.

You can see swelling of the joints along here,

and swelling of the other joints and his fingers, and some wasting

of the muscles in his hand, and some deformity of his wrist.

So, this indicates active, almost certainly very painful disease.

The other condition he had was hereditary spherocytosis,

which is a genetic condition

causing a change in the shape of red cells.

Basically, it causes an anaemia, which can cause tiredness.

His mother seems to have had the same condition, so he probably inherited it from her.

During the Second World War, during the Battle of Britain,

in his lonely solitude, Burra went deeper and deeper

into this new art of darkness.

He created a whole succession of chilling images,

such as Soldiers At Rye of 1941, in which the soldiers of the title

wear these rather horrible Venetian, carnival-esque masks, bird masks,

which I think was Burra's surreal way

of suggesting that war simultaneously

depersonalises us and turns us into these predatory creatures.

There's something horribly claustrophobic

about the whole image,

the way the bodies seem almost to mesh and overlap with each other,

like pieces of machinery on this flat expanse of paper.

These pictures were gathered together with others,

such as the Medusa, Beelzebub,

a whole host of Burra's new and seriously dark art,

and they were put on display at the Redfern Gallery in London.

The response of the critics was immediate and very strong.

Osbert Lancaster wrote in the Observer,

"Edward Burra is a serious artist working with serious themes.

"What Burra is trying to do, unless I'm very much mistaken,

"is not to select and record some single aspect of the modern tragedy,

"but to digest it whole

"and transform it into something of permanent aesthetic significance."

With the war, Burra's sensibility seems to have gone permanently awry.

He lost the ability to laugh at the world, and the amused lightness

of his earlier work more or less disappeared. Someone asked him

why he no longer painted

light-hearted satires of modern life.

He replied, "What can a satirist do with Auschwitz?"

But after the war, thanks to his friendship with Billy Chappell

and brilliant dancer-choreographer Frederick Ashton,

there was one place where Burra preserved

something of his earlier playfulness and joie de vivre.

Designs for the ballet.

'James Gordon has spent the best part of the last 20 years

'collecting Burra's ballet designs.'

-It's certainly a theatrical space!

-It is.

-Wow! How many Burras have you got?

-I think there's 70 or 80.

What do you think of his colour?

I'm always struck by its un-English sense.

His English colour is so reticent.

And these are all full of colour.

I think that is just...fantastic.

-That is...

-Lovely drawing.

-That really is good.

He was very into combs and hair.

You can almost feel the brilliantine sticking to the forehead.

-And there's the nose!

-Her nose, yeah, her nose is great, isn't it?

I think that's really good.

Being Burra, of course, he painted something on the back, as well.

Mrs Ashton!

Is that Freddie Ashton as a sort of homme fatal?

It was actually a take-off of Mussolini, making a fool of him.

That's a caricature of Freddie Ashton as Mussolini?

That's gold dust!

-So you get two for the price of one as a Burra collector!

-Yes.

-Does that happen often?

-Quite often.

It's disappointing to look behind and there's nothing!

I don't look at these as stage designs. They're works of art.

'Much of this art, some of Burra's most vibrant, intoxicating work,

'would have been lost if it hadn't been for James' avid collecting.

'Even today, Burra's theatrical designs are greatly undervalued.

'Away from his designs for the ballet, from the start of the '50s,

'Burra embarked on a period of restless experiment.

'He painted a number of religious pictures,

'in particular this phantasmagorical scene,

'The Expulsion Of The Moneychangers.

'A dream, perhaps, of a world being purged from evil,

'but one that still has the texture of a nightmare.

'The vengeful Christ half hidden at the back,

'the foreground dominated by wailing figures and lost souls.

'He also painted a series of compelling,

'explosive flower pictures.

'Were these Burra's way of finding life,

'colour and vigour after all the death of war?

'Were they his bouquets for those who'd died?

'They seem poised between celebration

'and something more sinister.

'Strange details lurk, staring eyes,

'and the flowers themselves

'seem almost predatory.

'Nothing is straightforward in Burra's later work.'

I don't remember them, the paintings. I don't remember when I did them.

People are always asking about the date.

I never can remember, not the right dates, you know?

And I've never written the date on, or hardly ever.

'I think Burra in his later years did his very best work of all.

'But because it's so slippery and because he was so secretive

'about its meanings,

'you won't find it in mainstream museums of textbooks.

'You have to seek it out in the collections of private individuals,

'people drawn to the Burra mystery. Men like Frank Cohen.'

The thing about Burra that you've got to understand,

some things are factual and easy to look at,

and other things are not so easy to look at.

I'd love to be able to explain that.

These look like bodies that are melting, or something.

He creates a kind of symbolic language in this post-war art.

There are the factory chimneys,

which brings one to mind of things like Auschwitz, maybe?

He'd probably shudder and say, "Oh, dearie, don't be so specific."

You can depict it any way you want.

'As well as the enigmatically-titled It's All Boiling Up,

'Frank owns a host of other late Burras,

'including this disconcerting painting, Sugar Beet, East Anglia,

'where all the figures have been painted as though transparent.'

When you get older, in my opinion, I think you can see through people.

They become vacant. I think they're just looking through people

and seeing how phoney the whole thing is. That's the way I see it.

'And as a self-made man who started life

'in the markets of the north-west,

'Frank's particularly fascinated by this picture of 1949, The Market.'

Look, she's bare-chested, that one, so what's all that about?

She's topless and she's being handed a plate of fish!

The more you look, the more unreal it becomes!

And look at that one there, something's going on

in the background there, in the room. It looks like a brothel or something.

Can you see that? There's a girl dancing.

You can spend an hour and a half looking at these!

Do you like that about Burra,

that he was so reticent about talking of his work

that he left it to us to guess, so each picture's

a sort of enigma that we try and fill in the gaps ourselves?

I doubt very much if you ever spoke to him in his life,

he would actually explain what the work was about.

-He refused to.

-He never spoke to anyone about it.

-Not about meaning.

He wasn't interested in talking about his work.

A turning point came in 1957, with the death of Burra's father.

As he had watched when Betsy died, so now he watched once again,

but this time the sense of loss was tempered with resignation.

"The dying didn't seem to unduly put out Father.

"I stayed up from about two on his last night,

"and he had some trouble breathing, and had some whisky,

"and all his wits about him. Became unconscious at about 9:30 or so

"and didn't really know anybody, breathing quite peaceful,

"and died at 2:15.

"It was as if bubbles rose from a stagnant pond.

"I was dreading the funeral, but it went off very nicely.

"As I'd had four double whiskeys,

"I couldn't think why everybody looked so glum."

Burra faltered into the 1960s,

but still pursued his idiosyncratic course through life,

supported by close friend and dealer Gerald Corcoran,

who'd been showing his work ever since the war.

When we came back to London from Yorkshire,

where my father was stationed,

he became part of our lives, part of my life,

for as long as I can remember.

He didn't really like to talk about himself.

He was much more keen to talk about the movies

or the latest science-fantasy book.

He stayed with a group of different people when he came to London,

and each group was always worried

about how drunk he got with the other group.

They were all worried about his health all the time,

which was pretty awful.

What do you talk about to your friends?

We talk about cooking and we talk about other friends

and we talk about books occasionally,

and we talk about the cinema

and the theatre, and we talk about how terrible actors are,

and we talk about...

Oh, all kinds of things.

You know? Very little about art.

'I just had this picture of him,

'perched on the sofa with pungent cigarettes'

and a glass of whisky, and he had huge, thick socks for some reason,

cos I think his feet hurt, and big shoes.

I was quite in awe of him

because you got a sense that he was very, very observant

and knew exactly what was going on and noticing everything.

Also, because he was so fragile too,

you felt he had to be careful.

The other place I used to see him a lot was at Bumble Dawson.

She was one of his early friends from art school.

There was one evening when a friend of mine who was a great hippie,

gave him a great big joint and he loved it.

I think it took him back to his youth, because in the Twenties,

when there was that gang of them,

from art school, there's nothing they didn't get up to.

They tried absolutely everything, so he was completely unshockable.

One radical change that was sweeping across the face of Britain

did test Burra's unshockabilty.

NEWSREEL: Let us get on with the job of building another motorway,

having done everything humanly possible

to ensure we have got things right in the beginning.

'Do you think the countryside has changed much in England?'

I think the countryside in this part of the country

is distinctly changed, especially along main roads.

Towards the end of his life, Burra became much preoccupied by the notion that mankind,

with its obsession with fossil fuels, energy, modernity, machines,

was almost raping the landscape that he loved

and I think this image, called Picking a Quarrel,

is perhaps the image that goes to the centre of all those concerns.

Man himself has become a kind of oil stain on the landscape

and in the centre of the image,

we've got these bright yellow dumper trucks and cranes.

And the cranes, which are scooping up slag,

seem almost to be dripping it out of their mouths like blood.

They're almost like automated versions

of the figure of Beelzebub that he had created

to emblematise the Spanish Civil War.

This is another kind of civil war in which mankind is killing itself

with its addiction to petrol, to fuel, to coal.

Burra's landscapes are evidence

of his prescient environmental awareness,

But they also express more complicated emotions

than a simple, sentimental love of nature.

His version of the natural world

is a metamorphic, shape-shifting place.

Hills and valleys swell and heave like living forms.

The clefts made by paths or streams

often resemble the orifices or declivities of a body.

Skies pulse with ominous energy.

Clouds haunt the land like spirits.

Here, at last, Burra uses watercolour as watercolour,

painting in washes and veils to suggest transience.

But I also think that Burra's late landscapes, for the first time,

present you with a world

in which the artist himself is immersed.

He's not that perpetual onlooker, somehow separated from what he sees.

He is plunging himself into the landscape.

It's as if, for one last time,

he wants to connect with something bigger than himself.

Burra did still travel but his journeys were increasingly internal.

He took to going on driving holidays to the north of England

with his sister, Ann.

Increasingly, he turned to just one subject,

the countryside that unfolded before him through the windscreen.

'I think he knew that time was running out.

'In 1973, the Tate would stage a retrospective of his work.

'Burra, engrossed in his landscape preoccupations,

'was noticeably absent from the private views.

'A year before, he had agreed to be filmed

'but he was the most reluctant of interviewees.'

You never go to your gallery openings, I know that,

but could you tell us why you don't go?

No, I shan't dream of telling you why I don't go.

'She comes face-to-face with Edward Burra'

and it's like coming face-to-face with a blank

or face-to-face with a Samuel Beckett character

who is trapped in his own end game. He just doesn't want to tell you

what he's thinking, or feeling.

I think this was Burra's most defiant way

of saying, "If you want to know about my art, don't ask me about it.

"Look at the art."

I never tell anybody anything.

So they just make it up.

I don't see that it matters.

It's at this point that she asks him what does matter.

I think this is one of the very few moments in the interview

where you just glimpse into the...

..rather nihilistic darkness behind those eyes.

'What does matter?

'Nothing.'

There you have it. What matters? Nothing.

Burra's very last landscapes turn increasingly morbid,

as if its subject is no longer nature itself,

but his sense that his own journey through the world

is nearing its end.

These paintings are full of a sense of passage, emblems and symbols

that seem to suggest the transition from one place or state to another.

Boats leaving for some other place, some unknown country.

Cars crossing a suspension bridge, travelling to who knows where.

They're very moving pictures but in them,

I feel Burra was finally confronting his sense of his own mortality.

I think Burra's sense of nature towards the end of his life

is deeply romantic, in the sense that he's not painting

a stretch of the Northumberland landscape, he's painting his sense

of his own impending death.

The landscape resembles a woman

and at the centre of it, there's this womb-like enclosure.

The eye is drawn to it,

As I feel Burra felt himself drawn to it. He's envisaged death

with a wonderful poetic sense, I think,

as a form of reverse birth.

He'll be drawn back into this womb, into this world of nature.

And he accepts it.

It is a picture that is full of resignation,

full of beauty and, for me, also full of a kind of heroism.

On 22nd October 1976, Edward Burra died

after a short illness.

He was 71.

So, who was Edward Burra?

First and foremost, for a man of such extreme fragility,

he was someone who packed a lot in. Think of all he'd seen,

responded to and depicted in the course of his life.

He'd been a twentieth-century eye,

he'd been there in Paris in the Twenties and depicted that.

He had been to Harlem in the Thirties and caught its energy.

He then experienced the Spanish Civil War

and from the lonely prospective of Rye, the Second World War.

I think those experiences deepened and darkened

the nature of his vision.

He probably would have said, "Oh, I'm just a miserable old bugger!"

But he was more than that too.

Right at the end of his life, in these extraordinary landscapes,

for the first time, having so long felt

that he was on the outside looking in.

with the late landscapes, I don't feel that anymore.

He's there, he's in nature,

in the middle of it all.

Of course, he's not only in that

he's also in the process of his own death,

a process every human being has to go through.

He went through it and depicted his own sense of going through it

with such purity, such intensity

and such bravery.

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