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New York Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In a Passionate Composer's First Opera, Sex Flirts With Death
Toward the end of 'Lash,' a new opera by Rebecca Saunders, a vocal quartet of invites the listener to 'come to bed and die.' Saunders, 57, is a masterly composer whose recent music is becoming more passionate, expressive and lyrical than ever. An artist whose works are regularly performed throughout Europe, she has won many prizes, including the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at last year's Venice Music Biennale. Her subtle music has an unmistakable momentum. The text of the opera is by Ed Atkins, an artist and writer who often uses hyper-realistic C.G.I. video to unsettling effect. A critically acclaimed, career-spanning exhibition of his work is currently on show at Tate Britain in London, and his 'Old Food,' which featured sandwiches filled with uncannily modified bodies, was shown at the 2019 Venice Art Biennale. Like his video work, Atkins's prose is obsessed with the strangeness of sex and death. On Friday, 'Lash' will premiere at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. It is Saunders's first opera and Atkins's first libretto. Though Saunders wrote a piece based on words by Atkins, 'Us Dead Talk Love,' in 2021, 'Lash' is the first time the artists have shaped a piece together from the beginning. That relationship allowed Saunders to finally take on an opera. 'I didn't want to give a piece to somebody and just let go,' Saunders said. 'I wanted to find the author and the directors and the house who would enable us to work on a collaborative project.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New Statesman
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Edward Burra's tour of the 20th century
John Deth (Hommage a Conrad Aiken) by Edward Burra, 1931 The art of Edward Burra is also the art of popping up in unlikely places. He was in the audience in Paris when Josephine Baker made her debut at La Revue Nègre in 1925 and in New York during the Harlem Renaissance; he visited Mexico with Malcolm Lowry and was in Spain as tensions bubbled towards the Civil War; he lived in coastal England during the Second World War witnessing troops departing – and sometimes returning – from the continent and captured the incursion of A-roads and pylons into the ancient landscapes of Cornwall and Wales in the early 1970s. If Burra was Zelig with a paintbrush he was also part of a strand of eccentric English art that, had its origins in William Blake and ran through Richard Dadd, Aubrey Beardsley, Percy Wyndham Lewis and Stanley Spencer. He may have joined Unit One, Paul Nash's short-lived avant-garde gathering of British artists, sculptors and architects, and exhibited alongside Picasso, Miró and Magritte at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936, but he stood outside stylistic groupings. As he told one questioner: 'I didn't like being told what to think, dearie.' That hint of bloody-mindedness was also perhaps the result of lifelong ill health. Burra suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and anaemia and as a boy contracted both pneumonia and rheumatic fever: 'The only time I don't feel any pain,' he later wrote, 'is when I am working. I become completely unaware.' Physical discomfort was why he chose watercolour over oil paint for most of his work – bending over a sheet on a table was easier than standing at an easel. Burra was nevertheless a social creature; his friends included Anthony Powell and the choreographer Frederick Ashton as well as innumerable artists and flâneurs. He travelled widely in company, diving into both the glitter and the demi-monde of Paris, the cafés, sailor-filled dockside bars and clubs of Marseille and the dancehalls and striptease joints of Harlem, but lived and worked for most of his life at the well-appointed family home in Rye. There, as he painted, he would play the newest jazz bands from his capacious record collection. It was this mixture of circumstances and experience that resulted in some of the most distinctive art of the British 20th century. Burra's hard-to-categorise career is the subject of an immaculate and revealing new exhibition at Tate Britain. It shows a man whose art reflected a rare sense of engagement with his times, especially its queer fringes. The works of the 1920s and 1930s treat his experiences in France and New York and verge on both satire and caricature. Burra used watercolour almost as oil paint and built up layers to give unusual depth of colour and subtle gradations. It was a technique he employed in teeming images: tight-suited sailors at a bar ('Everyone was sailor mad,' said Ashton), burlesque reviews on stage and riotous Harlem ballrooms. Burra moved in a gay milieu and in such places he found a liberating sense of sexual freedom and cross-class slumming. The pictures are peopled with 'types', from heavy-on-the-make-up women and lascivious and sinister men to simple beefcakes and beauties. Some are white-eyed, as if the headiness of the bars and clubs were acting as a narcotic. It is as if Bruegel or Jan Steen had wandered from the Low Countries into seedier and more cacophonous climes. In these paintings he is the English equivalent of Otto Dix and George Grosz but without the bitter edge. If the Germans showed the inequality of the postwar years – fat and seedy plutocrats made rich by profiteering contrasted with mutilated army veterans – Burra was more interested in communities, whether dancers, musicians or trufflers after sex – licit or illicit. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Burra's style and subject matter changed with the onset of the Spanish Civil War. He travelled to Spain in 1933 in search of an Iberian version of Harlem, a place of music and dance and, while he found flamenco and colour, he also found burgeoning violence. Unlike so many other British artists and writers, however, he was no Republican sympathiser. His own politics were ambiguous at best, and in 1942 he told John Rothenstein, director of the Tate Gallery, that he was pro-Franco, although this may have been mere provocation. In fact, he seems to have disliked both fascists and communists equally. The paintings he started to make were larger – multiple sheets glued together – and stuffed with rippling and bulbous figures, cloaked and faceless figures among ruins. These were characters of some indeterminate medieval past rather than modern-day combatants, with the sinister mood of Goya's Los Caprichos etchings and the atrocities depicted in his Disasters of War prints transposed into a present that was nevertheless timeless. Indeed the melons-in-a-sack nature of his figures, where shoulders, buttocks and calves bulge alarmingly, are more akin to the Mannerist frescoes of Giulio Romano for the Palazzo del Te in Mantua from the 1530s than anything Burra's contemporaries were producing. The Estate Of Edward Burra, Courtesy Lefevre Fine Art, London / Bridgeman Images What war in Spain and then across Europe awoke in him was a generalised disgust at violence and destruction. Witnessing the soldiers massing at Rye to fight across the Channel unnerved him. Even as they climb into a troop lorry in Soldiers' Backs (1942) there is malignity in their movement, and when he painted Soldiers at Rye (1941), showing a troop dozing, he gave them beaked plague masks that make the men both theatrical and menacing. In 1945 he described to a friend (in prose that was as idiosyncratic as his pictures) the feelings the times released in him: 'The very sight of peoples faces sickens me I've got no pity it really is terrible sometimes ime quite frightened at myself I think such awful things I get in such paroxysms of impotent venom I feel it must poison the atmosphere.' The cartoonist and author Osbert Lancaster astutely observed that, 'What Burra is trying to do… 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'. Nevertheless, Burra's impotent venom stayed with him. Sometimes he found release from it in designing costumes and theatre sets for Carmen and Don Quixote for the Royal Opera House and Sadler's Wells, but it remained lurking. From the late 1930s into the 1970s Burra also painted rural scenes, spurred by a new interest in gardening and by the car trips he took around Britain. Some are pure landscapes, such as a bewitching view of clouded hilltops, Near Whitby, Yorkshire (1972), and some introduce folklore into real views, such as Landscape with Birdman Piper and Fisherwoman (1946). In others, however, he took aim at the encroachment of modernity: a man at a petrol station is enveloped in the coils of his fuel pipe that has turned into a snake, a stream of cars and lorries invades the countryside like an army, and in Skeleton Party (1952-54) a cluster of ghouls, fresh from Mexico's Día de los Muertos, make merry in an industrial landscape. Burra once responded to a question about his art by stating: 'I never tell anyone anything… I don't see that it matters.' He didn't need to: it seems clear that that joyous Harlem jazz had turned into a danse macabre. Edward Burra Tate Britain, London SW1 Until 19 October [See also: Jarvis Cocker at 61: Is this hardcore?] Related
Yahoo
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Edward Burra - Ithell Colquhoun: Tate's double-bill is a revelation
Tate Britain's latest offer? Two exhibitions for the price of one. For the first time since 2013's Gary Hume-Patrick Caulfield double-header, separate yet similarly engrossing shows occupy the lower-floor galleries at Millbank, accessed with a single ticket. (The order in which you see them is unimportant, but some stamina is required; allow a couple of hours.) The juxtaposition isn't obvious but neither is it forced: although it's unlikely they ever met, the 20th-century British artists Edward Burra and Ithell Colquhoun were born only a year apart, to upper-middle-class families, and were both associated with Surrealism. They also shared preoccupations, such as an interest in same-sex relationships and a concern for the British landscape – as well as (to varying degrees) the paranormal and the occult. A ramshackle, sickly character from Sussex, Burra (1905-76) specialised in stylised, graphic watercolours with a satirical edge, often depicting people on society's margins. (For the artist Paul Nash, a friend, he was a modern Hogarth.) In part because watercolour was his preferred medium – thanks to lifelong rheumatoid arthritis and anaemia, he found it easier than painting in oils at an easel – he's often considered an idiosyncratic, tangential figure within British visitors to Tate Britain may be familiar with his composition The Snack Bar (1930), in which a chalky-faced barman suggestively slices a firm, pink ham (it remains on display upstairs), but this show of more than 80 paintings – Burra's first London retrospective in 40 years – contains so many exhibits from private collections (almost 50) that it feels like a revelation. Accompanied by music drawn from his collection of 78rpm gramophone records (he was a big fan of American jazz, which inspired a trip to Harlem during the 1930s), the exhibition tautly traces Burra's career, from his teeming early pictures of bohemians and pert-bottomed sailors living it up in France – Le Bal (1928) is a standout – to his brooding post-war visions of an enchanted British countryside blighted by motorways and concrete. Each picture is a mini-world of incident and observation, often saturated with seediness and innuendo. The conflicts of the 1930s and 1940s cut Burra deeply, darkening an already dour disposition, and inspiring in his work a menacing new strain (sometimes charged with sadomasochism), as the flirting, gurning hedonists of his earlier paintings are replaced by hooded wraiths and sinister men in birdlike masks. Colquhoun (1906-88), an avowed occultist, was more interested in magic and the power of female sexuality than in macho menace; whereas Burra fetishised the male form, Colquhoun – who may have been bisexual, and was married only briefly, during the 1940s – painted imagery evoking impotence and castration. Who knew that a trimmed cucumber could be so troubling?This show, first seen earlier this year (at Tate St Ives) in Cornwall, where Colquhoun lived during her latter decades, takes her obsession with magic seriously – devoting space to diagrams of tesseracts and tarot-card designs, and teasing out impenetrable alchemical concepts such as the 'Divine Androgyne'.Don't let this put you off. Inspired by the crisp art of Salvador Dalí, which she encountered in London in 1936 (at an exhibition of Surrealist art in which Burra also participated), Colquhoun's mature paintings – often produced using 'automatic' techniques – have a flaming, dream-like intensity. In Dance of the Nine Opals (1942), a ring of opalescent rocks inspired by a Cornish stone circle appears to revolve around a golden tree of life before pink-tinged mountains. Fantastical pictures like this – like much of Burra's original output (which, although the shows aren't in competition, probably edges it) – deserve greater prominence in the history of 20th-century British art. From June 13;
Telegraph
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Edward Burra - Ithell Colquhoun: Tate's eccentric double-bill feels like a revelation
Tate Britain's latest offer? Two exhibitions for the price of one. For the first time since 2013's Gary Hume-Patrick Caulfield double-header, separate yet similarly engrossing shows occupy the lower-floor galleries at Millbank, accessed with a single ticket. (The order in which you see them is unimportant, but some stamina is required; allow a couple of hours.) The juxtaposition isn't obvious but neither is it forced: although it's unlikely they ever met, the 20th-century British artists Edward Burra and Ithell Colquhoun were born only a year apart, to upper-middle-class families, and were both associated with Surrealism. They also shared preoccupations, such as an interest in same-sex relationships and a concern for the British landscape – as well as (to varying degrees) the paranormal and the occult. A ramshackle, sickly character from Sussex, Burra (1905-76) specialised in stylised, graphic watercolours with a satirical edge, often depicting people on society's margins. (For the artist Paul Nash, a friend, he was a modern Hogarth.) In part because watercolour was his preferred medium – thanks to lifelong rheumatoid arthritis and anaemia, he found it easier than painting in oils at an easel – he's often considered an idiosyncratic, tangential figure within British modernism. Regular visitors to Tate Britain may be familiar with his composition The Snack Bar (1930), in which a chalky-faced barman suggestively slices a firm, pink ham (it remains on display upstairs), but this show of more than 80 paintings – Burra's first London retrospective in 40 years – contains so many exhibits from private collections (almost 50) that it feels like a revelation. Accompanied by music drawn from his collection of 78rpm gramophone records (he was a big fan of American jazz, which inspired a trip to Harlem during the 1930s), the exhibition tautly traces Burra's career, from his teeming early pictures of bohemians and pert-bottomed sailors living it up in France – Le Bal (1928) is a standout – to his brooding post-war visions of an enchanted British countryside blighted by motorways and concrete. Each picture is a mini-world of incident and observation, often saturated with seediness and innuendo. The conflicts of the 1930s and 1940s cut Burra deeply, darkening an already dour disposition, and inspiring in his work a menacing new strain (sometimes charged with sadomasochism), as the flirting, gurning hedonists of his earlier paintings are replaced by hooded wraiths and sinister men in birdlike masks. Colquhoun (1906-88), an avowed occultist, was more interested in magic and the power of female sexuality than in macho menace; whereas Burra fetishised the male form, Colquhoun – who may have been bisexual, and was married only briefly, during the 1940s – painted imagery evoking impotence and castration. Who knew that a trimmed cucumber could be so troubling? This show, first seen earlier this year (at Tate St Ives) in Cornwall, where Colquhoun lived during her latter decades, takes her obsession with magic seriously – devoting space to diagrams of tesseracts and tarot-card designs, and teasing out impenetrable alchemical concepts such as the 'Divine Androgyne'. Don't let this put you off. Inspired by the crisp art of Salvador Dalí, which she encountered in London in 1936 (at an exhibition of Surrealist art in which Burra also participated), Colquhoun's mature paintings – often produced using 'automatic' techniques – have a flaming, dream-like intensity. In Dance of the Nine Opals (1942), a ring of opalescent rocks inspired by a Cornish stone circle appears to revolve around a golden tree of life before pink-tinged mountains. Fantastical pictures like this – like much of Burra's original output (which, although the shows aren't in competition, probably edges it) – deserve greater prominence in the history of 20th-century British art.
The Guardian
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Edward Burra / Ithell Colquhoun review – sex, jazz, war and the occult, all confusingly jumbled
They make a truly odd couple. She's an occultist who once appeared on BBC television explaining to the nation how to make surrealist art at home. He's a jazz enthusiast whose slices of modern – and often queer - life are full of roly-poly grotesques. What on earth have Ithell Colquhoun and Edward Burra got in common, and why has Tate Britain handcuffed them together for an uncalled for, unneeded and ultimately baffling double header? I loved Colquhoun's exhibition at Tate St Ives when I reviewed it earlier this year, but this version of it is much more flatly laid out and her experiments in releasing the unconscious are shouted down by all the drunken, drugged, omnivorously shagging people in Burra's 1920s and 30s clubs and bars. Yet he also gets edited and reinvented in a way that left me largely cold. Burra was modern but reactionary, a brilliant social observer who also retreated into a private world in his hideaway in Rye, Sussex. This exhibition claims his art is largely about 'queer culture' yet his actual sexuality is mysterious – not that you'd know that from the show. He painted in watercolour, wildly stretching this medium's possibilities. He is an odd, cussed, unique figure. How reactionary? Well, he sympathised with General Franco's far-right forces in the Spanish civil war. He didn't share the widespread belief of his generation that the Spanish fight was a struggle for humanity's future against the rising forces of fascism. Yet Tate Britain puts Burra's Spanish civil war art at the heart of its fitful show without acknowledging his well-known position. In fact it goes further and tries to present him as a great artist of modern conflict. I don't see it. Burra's big, busy, booming watercolours seem to treat the war as a gaudy spectacle, a horrorshow ballet, and have more pity for broken architecture than slaughtered people. Harlequins and devils cavort in the ruins but there is no precision about the war's victims – look to Picasso's Guernica for them. In Burra's Beelzebub, a naked big-bummed devil presides with sensual joy over a nude battle of muscular erotic soldiers in a crumbling bombed-out cathedral: an emphasis on the destruction of churches and killing of clergy as supposed leftist atrocities was typical of pro-Franco imagery. A wall text quotes Burra on the eve of the war: 'It was terrifying: constant strikes, churches on fire, and pent up hatred everywhere.' It is the hatefulness he sees in the Spanish workers and Republicans he's condemning, with their strikes and anti-clericalism. Burra was out of his depth. He was a party animal not a political pundit. In its first couple of rooms, this show reveals how wondrously hedonistic he can be. In his depictions of Paris nightlife in the late 1920s he is amazed and delighted by French freedom. Women do naked erotic dances at the Folies de Belleville, men dance with men and women with women at a dance hall, and sailors chat each other up at a bar. The exhibition, structured as a series of highlights from his career, doesn't explain how Burra, born in 1905, came by his singular style, at once precise, comic, sensual and grotesque. But by the time he went to France it was fully formed. Hogarth was one source. The British tradition of caricature dynamises The Tea Shop, from 1929, in which two prudishly polite women in the foreground, one in spectacles that stress her myopia, look idiotically at us, unaware that the waiting staff behind them, male and female, are stark naked. They're a couple of squares who don't get the 20s scene. Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion Burra was plugged in to that scene, internationally. Though based in tranquil Rye and suffering with rheumatoid arthritis, he would go anywhere for fun. The jazz records he loved are on show – and playing distractingly – and in his paintings of New York and other US cities, jazz and queerness lead him to riotous venues where you might not have met many white Englishmen. In his 1937 picture Izzy Orts, he takes you to the heart of the night where a sailor stares at you with white, pupil-less eyes, as if in ecstasy. At the rear of the crowd you see Burra himself, his pupils also on the point of vanishing. You can hear the noise, smell the smoke, anticipate, as Burra seems to, the sex. Yet this exhibition insists on sentimentalising him. Burra's paintings of African Americans are presented as acts of allyship with the Harlem Renaissance, but he wasn't doing portraits of Langston Hughes or hanging out with Zora Neale Hurston. His Harlem scenes are Hogarthian city scenes bursting with raw reality and like any caricaturist he's ambivalent. Is he celebrating the tall, bandy legged man smoking in the street with a white eye showing under his green hat, or mocking him? The most pleasurable works in Burra's show are his late landscapes of green rolling Sussex hills which swallow you up. These paintings also depict petrol stations and other modern blights wrecking his beloved countryside, but it seems not just a stretch but nonsensical for a wall text to claim he was 'prescient' about the climate crisis. Was he an occultist like Colquhoun after all, gazing into his crystal ball? Tate Britain creates a fantasy version of Burra, removing his complexities, turning a genuinely important artist into a plastic fiction. Pity the museum that needs heroes. Edward Burra-Ithell Colquhoun is at Tate Britain, London, from 13 June to 19 October
