Edward Burra at Tate Britain

Born in London in 1905, the British artist Edward Burra suffered from acute rheumatoid arthritis and pernicious anemia from a young age. He travelled regularly, with a special fondness for Paris and New York. In photographs, though, he appears dour, studious and sickly. Most of the paintings that line the walls of his latest retrospective at the Tate couldn't be further from this image.
In its first room, paintings on paper depict bars, cafés, weddings and cabaret shows, replete with voluptuous and lively characters. Though relatively small in scale, each sheet contains multiple scenes that unfold at once. Burra collapses our sense of perspective, stacking his subjects vertically to fit as much action as he can into each image. Each shape is impossibly smooth and rendered so precisely as to look airbrushed.
In these works, painted during visits to France early in Burra's career, everything is voluminous. It's not just biceps, breasts and bottoms that bulge; at Burra's hand, pillars, plant pots, light fittings and fruits become equally taut, fleshy affairs. A dainty champagne coup sits in the foreground of Le Bal (1928), dwarfed by the monuments that surround it – from the tubular streamers that hang from the ceiling to the room's many animated revellers. In their curvaceousness and volume, Burra's subjects convey a playful sense of abundance that borders on kitsch. In today's context, where distorted figuration is the order of the day, it's a style that feels a little hackneyed. Remembering that these paintings are close to a century old makes them feel incredibly fresh.
In Three Sailors at the Bar (1930), a casual drink with three uniformed friends becomes a dizzying, almost erotic arrangement of shapes and patterns (apparently, Burra and his friends would blow kisses to sailors on the street). Burra's France is a trip that brings to mind the swirling casino carpets of Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Subsequent rooms contain later works where many of the 20th century's cultural and historical moments are described in Burra's unique language. The Harlem Renaissance, Spanish Civil War and Second World War all get the treatment, the latter two demonstrating that a world of blobs and bulges isn't always a light hearted one.
During more traumatic times, Burra's paintings become increasingly fragmented. Camouflage (1938), for example, is a composite image covering a number of pasted-together sheets. At first, it's difficult to make sense of what's happening in it, but using its globular shapes as a starting point helps. Two of them turn out to be the buttocks of a soldier laying on his side as he fixes a military vehicle. While Burra's style is a natural fit for the Roaring Twenties in France, it feels incongruous in this context. The result is a confusing, though still formally impressive, group of paintings.
The show loses momentum somewhat with a room focussed on Burra's work as a costume and set-designer. Here, his wings appear to have been clipped and he paints naturalistically for the first time. After seeing the artist at his most bulbous, these works feel impoverished.
The final room doubles down on this to devastating effect. Burra spent his final years painting English landscapes, sometimes dotted with figures who appear slender and glum. In Landscape, Cornwall, with Figures and Tin Mine (1975), painted the year before Burra's death, they stand against a bleak, grey sky; suits crumpled, faces severe, eyes pointed downwards. The buffet of ripe and inviting objects and forms that this show starts with are routinely undermined as it continues, Burra willingly disrupting his own light-hearted style to allude to grim realities and a sense of existential anguish. Only when it's snatched away do we come to understand the optimism of Burra's early vision.

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