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Edward Burra: The Twentieth-Century Eye

Sinister levity of an all-seeing spider

Jane Stevenson
Cape, 496pp, £30,

Richard Shone

Wednesday, 28th November 2007

Richard Shone

As an an outstanding English painter and a delectable personality, Edward Burra deserves this entertaining biography. It should be admitted, however, that because Burra was a letter writer of great verve and individuality, half Jane Stevenson’s battle is won: the quotations flare up from the page. Luckily, they do not destroy the surrounding narrative, for Stevenson too can be stylish and sharp. Anyone who knows the engrossing volume of Burra’s letters Well, Dearie!, edited by his lifelong friend William Chappell, will surely pounce on this new book to reacquaint themselves with those letters already published and laugh aloud at extracts that will be new to them. A Burra letter is a joy forever: droll, delicately malicious, irrepressibly camp, full of forensic observations. For the most part unpunctuated, their stream of consciousness transmutes from stage cockney to ‘refained’ Rye (where he lived all his life), threaded through with Burra’s sinister levity that only rarely turns savage (‘I’m taking up my pen for Sunday venom, dearie, it relieves me’). They read as though The Dog Beneath the Skin had been rewritten by Ronald Firbank. The letters from abroad show Burra at his best, particularly from his visits to New York in the early 1930s. Here he is in a Harlem drag club observing ‘Gloria Swanson’ (né Winston, Stevenson informs us) bringing a personal interpretation to ‘Stormy Weather’:

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Rex Valentine

December 11th, 2007 3:14pm

I entirely agree there should be colour plates. Without these or any other books showing his work, at £30 this book is overpriced. We see little enough of this important and completely original painter whose work is so international and has none of the weaknesses usually associated with 20th cent English art, and for that reason does not even look English. We need a major Tate retrospective of this artist, although many of his works are small and being watercolours more difficult to preserve, so were William Blake's. I make a plea for a magor exhibition and book of Burra's works.

Petra Jonassen

April 29th, 2008 8:43pm

A continuation of debate on this subject, to which the author has contributed, can be found on http://tinyurl.com/6gm5zd

The power of the evasive word

Michael Howard

The Economist Book of Obituaries, by Keith Colquhoun and Ann Wroe

Deadlier than the male

Andrew Taylor

When does a novel stop being a novel and become a crime story? It’s often assumed that there is an unbridgeable gap between them, but that’s not necessarily so.