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Time Out
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
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.
Business Insider
30-05-2025
- Business Insider
In my 20s, I dreamed of a wild weekend in Vegas. Instead, I went as a sober mom in my 30s.
In my younger years, I dreamt of hitting Sin City for a hedonistic weekend that could only be remembered via poorly scribbled notes written in an inebriated haze. Like many would-be writers, I longed to recreate Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing" firsthand. Las Vegas has a reputation, after all, for being the sort of place one goes to make endless mistakes in, hopefully, enjoyable ways. As a lower-income lush in my 20s, the trip never happened. Back then, it felt most important to invoke my inner Don Draper and sip Manhattans at local bars in my hometown of Miami or occasionally slip into harder habits. I was, what you might call, an experimental gal. This meant I never had much more than $100 to my name. The long and short of it is I had not only a drinking habit, but a drinking problem. Luckily, things change. I changed. The long and short of it is I got pregnant and quit drinking, lost the baby, and binged one final time. After I realized it wasn't going to fix my trauma, I stopped drinking. Now, roughly a decade later, I do, on rare occasions, nurse a low ABV beer during a meal out with friends, but for the most part, those days are long behind me, and I'm grateful for it. Over the years, I became a journalist, a wife, and a mother. I left Florida behind and built a new life in Colorado — hundreds of miles away from where I started, and from my best friend. No longer someone who was getting blackout drunk on the regular, I also finally had enough money to go on a girls' trip. So I asked my BFF to meet me in Vegas so we could paint the town red, in our own way. Booze-free days in Vegas As I arrived in Las Vegas a few hours before my friend did, and a few hours before check-in, I got into my own form of trouble. No, I didn't hit a bar. I picked up some goodies from the Hello Kitty Cafe, and then went and got a massage. When my friend finally arrived, we both checked into our shared room at the Park MGM — which is the only non-smoking hotel on the Strip. I had developed an aversion to the smell of cigs in recent years, and was pleased to find out they don't even allow smoking in the casino. I'll admit that seeing the glittering lights of the Strip at night and seeing all the folks dressed up for the clubs and casinos did give me a pang of FOMO. But that feeling went away once I woke up the next day sans hangover and ready for more adventures. While I immediately recognized Las Vegas' potential for being a blast on psychedelics, it was still plenty of fun without. We visited Wink World, rode the Haley's Comet zipline, and explored immersive art at Meow Wolf's Omega Mart. Drink-less nights in Vegas In the evenings, we found ways to have fun that didn't involve getting plastered while talking to strangers and making regrettable decisions. One night, we sat near the front row for "Kà," which is exactly the way you want to enjoy a Cirque du Soleil show, where people are flying over you. Another night, we went to the Neon Museum to check out their "boneyard" — a collection of retired neon signs, all lit up like they were in their prime. We even ventured into the casino and quickly played, and lost, a few bucks playing blackjack and roulette. But we still managed to make it back to our rooms with enough time to catch an episode of "SVU" and fall asleep without the aid of booze. Leaving town, my wallet didn't hurt, nor did my head. No regrettable calls made, no regrettable actions taken. If I'd gone to Vegas in my 20s, it's possible I might've had more fun in certain ways, but I likely wouldn't remember much of it. I felt good about the fact that nothing I did in Vegas had to stay in Vegas.
