Burra revealed

The last major show of paintings by Edward Burra (1905–76) was at the Hayward Gallery in 1985 and I remember visiting it with a painter friend who was rather critical of what she called Burra’s woodenness and lack of movement. At the time, I was impressed by her criticisms, but now they rather seem to miss the point. Burra made highly stylised images of people (often actually in movement) which are mostly about the darker side of humanity and the ways in which we distract and amuse ourselves in the face of despair. What might have been dreary little genre pictures he painted with such wit and humour and generosity of spirit, with such a richness of colour and complexity of pattern-making, that the oddness of his subjects is caught up and translated into something much larger: in fact, into art. And the wonder of it is that he painted almost entirely in what so many dismiss as the maiden aunt’s medium — watercolour.

Since that 1985 exhibition, Burra’s fortunes have sunk somewhat, and his work has been little in evidence in museums and galleries. It wasn’t until a single-room display at the Tate in 2008, of his paintings of black people in Harlem, that a wider audience was given a real taste of what Burra could do as an image-maker. Meanwhile, his prices in the auction rooms began to take off, and have subsequently risen into the millions. Burra was evidently catching the attention of collectors and museum curators once again, so it was only a matter of time before the public would be allowed proper access to his work.