I Never Tell Anybody Anything The Life and Art of Edward Burra

this is a film about the most intriguing 20th century artist and you may never have heard of at least I hope it's a film about him rather than one that just goes in search of him because above all he's an enigma his name Edward burrow is character diffident self-contained no wonder perhaps he spent his life trapped inside a crippled body for him I think there were only two escapes painting and travel he loved Paris and France and came here often and if you know where to look you can still find echoes of the city he knew and loved the schaeffler music of it the part anglais eco-tv VDC dollies and Eva ready gone where shikaka lame a book cool a big bands mercy fitting Edward burrow would have been very happy here it's the Barra rhythm his name may not be familiar but Edward burrow is one of the overlooked geniuses of British art and one of the most acute chroniclers of the 20th century although his is definitely not the official version of history he painted humanity's dark side it's war mongers lowlifes and outsiders illuminating dark and murky corners wherever he went his idiosyncratic tour of the 20th century is strange unsettling and always compelling I would burrow died in 1976 I never met him and I'm not sure how well even his very best friends really knew him certainly I'm not sure how much they ever knew about his art because burrow was quite possibly the single most elusive British artist of the 20th century he very very rarely talked about his enigmatic images in fact he was so reticent that he didn't even like to give them titles and he only ever gave one interview to the media and that was a filmed interview that he conducted towards the end of his life it's rare footage not very often seen and they keep it here in the archive of the British Film Institute here it is recorded for years before his death the interview shows an artist deeply uncomfortable about revealing anything of himself or his art a man who hated being interviewed who would much rather be doing what he does best I'm just bored I don't know what to do what would you be doing everyone here painting born in 1905 burrow was a delicate and sickly child plagued by illness from a very young age he suffered from chronic debilitating arthritis his joints began visibly to deform from the age of five or six and the pain never left him for the rest of his life his one buffer against the hand fated dealt him was prosperity he was the son of a rich lawyer bara would never need to earn a living he was born in this house Springfield near rye and would spend much of his life living here with his mother and his father a semi permanent invalid always forced to return to this his refuge and main painting space the window is one of Burroughs earliest pictures painted when he was still a teenager like many of his works its whereabouts is uncertain and it's known only in black and white reproduction it's an image that reveals his sense of his own predicament with piercing clarity an ambiguous figure sits on this side of the window not wheelchair-bound but certainly chair bound while outside life in all its vigor goes on two girls can be seen through the window perhaps his sister's little Betsy and Anne but the central figure borrows alter ego remains fixed and frozen in place it's as if there would always be a sheet of glass between him and the world he could look but not touch throughout his childhood burro escaped the limits of his own body through painting and drawing art had become the most important thing in his life and at the young age of 15 in 1921 he decided to escape rai for the Chelsea College of Art in London he loved London's spirit of limitless possibility but it was the hidden darker side of the city that he caricatured in many of his early drawings borough received a fairly straightforward art education by the standards of the early 1920s with a very strong emphasis on draftsmanship which perhaps helps to explain his very confident and strong sense of line but equally important to him were the friends he made at art school lifelong friends clover Pritchard the future photographer Barbara Cosima and the future ballet dancer Billy Chapel what they had in common was a great sense of fun and as burrow later said essentially frivolity we spent all our time going to the cinema and reading Vogue magazine and I think those things too filtered straight through into his art burro developed a lifelong love of the cinema especially B movies and cheap serials which he could enjoy while he was sitting down one of the few positions in which he was comfortable what Barra took from the cinema was his sense of composition he was always very fond of extreme close ups or plunging vertiginous perspectives or close cropping he goes for these heavily made-up faces with Cupid's bow lips and other exaggerated expressions just as you see them in the old silent movies films like the hazards of Helen also hinted at the darker sides of human nature they're full of undercurrents of sex and violence and crime and right through to the end of his life burro would retain a deep affection for shock horror trashy movies as well as going to the movies the young burro went to galleries of Modern Art absorbing the new languages of cubism collage and abstraction a mix of influences soon to be reflected in his own work the snack bar is unusual for burro in that it's one of his very rare oil paintings and yet I think it is a classic burro image and it gives us a wonderful snapshot of where he's at as an artist in his early maturity he's clearly fascinated by leche by Picasso by painting the modern world as a kind of collage of startling detail the wood grain of a door the tiling of a floor the texture of a bar counter but I think what makes it quintessentially burro esque is the sense that underneath the apparently innocent surface of the scene all kinds of rather disturbing currents seem to be running the young woman shoveling what George Melly once called a distinctly phallic sandwich into her mouth whereas the clothes and makeup of a cheap [ __ ] the blank faced young food monger seems to be cutting into that piece of sausage with disturbing relish could he be dreamin the dark thoughts of Ashlock horror sex murderer in 1925 bara had traveled to Paris to see the great city of Modern Art and modern life at first hand the arrival in Paris was at its peak as a center for the avant-garde and the city would change borough forever borough loved the energy and the dynamism of Paris and he particularly loved the city at night my more my way to one of his favorite haunts one of the most famous places in all of Paris there it is the fully bearshare with its orange neon sign and right in the middle you can see this huge frieze showing a cavorting dancer with her pneumatic limbs and her short bob the classic image of the 20s flapper and that image of a dancing woman letting all her inhibitions go that will come to occupy center stage and Edward burrows imagination they fully de Belleville is borough in the first flush of his love affair with Paris but what an ambiguous love affair right have staged a cross-legged dancer her modesty protected by a piece of diamante the size of a postage stamp stares out at the audience with fierce in passivity her trailing hand reaches out towards the phallic dagger thrust nonchalantly into the black dancers loincloth this is the spectacle of sex the promise of sex without the slightest prospect of sex all-sec could ever be Edward burrow his own predicament mind in the harsh angular forms of a stage show I met Sean dream voila an expert on Parisian popular entertainment backstage at another famous night spot of the 20s the Music Hall - Jose DZ so here we are one of Burroughs favorite Paris hangouts and I get the feeling that it probably hasn't changed that much since you say it hasn't changed since the 1925 when la hoja name actually oh so this is how it would have been when Josephine Baker was dancing for the sassy and bourgeois when she appeared there was like a huge scream people who work up smack imagine the effect on the male audience except poor Attenborough he said he only had one erection in his whole life watching Mae West in the movies maybe there was a tremor when he saw Josephine Baker Josephine Baker really epitomized the new style of a woman showing her body not having a corset anymore having short hair so she's really the modern woman what's behind this embrace of black culture and American culture there is a real appetite for pleasure people won't really put behind them the trauma of the First World War and people who can afford to go to night clubs and cabarets come here to have fun you call that the Roaring Twenties we call them Lee Xenophon the crazy dis Church the party after the trauma absolutely the straitjacket that has held the continent for four long tragic years is loosened and Paris the heart of the continent but through self go post-war Paris really was a party town the streets of Europe's major cities were full of reminders of the brutality of World War one crippled bodies of young soldiers who'd been literally dismembered by shrapnel and machine-gun fire so no wonder there was such an appetite in the nightclubs for the spectacle of young unblemished dancing bodies barra loved the UM English exuberance of Paris he sketched the dances of the Chorus Line advancing on the audience like a New Model Army stormtroopers of liberating decadence by day he went to the record shops where you could buy the soundtrack to this new era of social and sexual freedom the new music known in Paris as llege as or the blues and he painted the favorite of his hangouts a store on the boulevard Clichy called ming-lee shots all midnight song it's glorious he wrote to his friend and fellow painter Paul Nash you put bits in the slot and listen to gramophone records clientele is enough to frighten you a little bit what with listening with one ear and looking at the intrigues going on elsewhere the people are glorious such tarts all crumbling and all sexes and colors as well as record shops and Music Hall entertainments are allowed to paint Paris's bars and cafes dwelling on the my new shy of their cheap decor brightly patterned tile floors gleaming chrome counters steaming coffee machines and it was fascinated by their ever-changing clientele the whole city was for him an unfolding entertainment a kind of living cinema Mara also traveled to the South of France where he was drawn to the seamier port towns like Marseille with their air of abject poverty their picturesque shabby us in his dockside cafe there's a palpable sense of boredom and seediness men hanging around with no real place to go and maybe there's more going on up the counter between the greasy matte low and the fanged barmaids than the mere purchase of a cup of coffee as in Paris Perrault was drawn to the nightlife of the port towns in particular their Spanish style of flamenco establishments here in a painting called flamenco dancer I think he's compressed a whole lot of different memories of the things he experienced on his travels it's an image of a sexual predator burro has depicted her as a cross between a fan fatale and a dangerous insect he's made her train resemble the sting of a scorpion her male victims completely entranced and for once you get the sense that burro the sexual outside of the man on the outside of life is quite glad to be there he's watching what's going on and feels he's happy he's not part of it over here as often again in burro you get this huge foreground detail perhaps she's the next flamenco dancer to perform and perhaps she's wondering if she can live up to the example of her rival it's a picture full of hallucinatory details and look at this on this storybook image of a boat under the moonlight I don't think anyone experienced inspired this image I think it's an example of exactly what burro did with the excitement of all that he'd seen abroad compressed it into a single image full of color light vigour and sexual energy Mira's art isn't the only record of his youthful peregrinations across France he was also a prolific letter writer I've come to the Tate archive to meet Jane Stevenson his biographer to see whether his letters might add more pieces to the puzzle of the man Jane how much time did you spend here in the borough archive at the tape it's hard to remember now but the main point was it was such fun I mean just went I get the feeling sometimes that he was a man who almost lived through his correspondence that he did because he was so disabled he must have written at least one letter a day for his whole life so and at the very least he thought it was worth it I think he wrote the way he drew which is actually by holding the pen or brush estatic and really moving from the shoulder how much of his personality do you think is reflected in these letters well what you get from the letters really is the observation this one known listen that's fantastic he loved this sort of distinction between people trying to be smart and cool and what they actually looked like would you get the sense from that don't you if this appetitive eye that he's sort of eating the world up with his eyes yes and then writing it down and then transforming it into these cartoons which is seen through this rather camp caricatural and yet somehow also affectionate sensibility would that be fair to say yes do you think there's a sense in which he sees life as a kind of theater yes um what we have is the important question of whether their mutual friend Billy has or has not lost his virginity Billy Chapel yeah dancer and pray dear from whom did you hear that our little pox had been had I must try and find out um as far as love of gossip that's far as love of gossip all right and they'd have loved text messages barýþ life as an artist fell into an unusual pattern forced on him by his illness exciting bursts of foreign travel would be followed by long periods of enforced rest back with his parents in Sussex I think Edward burrow was a complicated mixture of the Bohemian and the conservative and nowhere is that encapsulated more than in his attitude to his hometown rye where he was born and where he would die on the one hand he loved to complain about it to mock what he saw as its aura of suffocating gentility it's tea shop coziness he called it Tinker Bell town but on the other hand he needed it this was his recuperation zone he'd come back here after his adventures overseas with his store of images and memories this was where he would actually create the vast body of his work Burroughs method was idiosyncratic he'd form a picture in his mind and then simply paint it from left to right as if rolling it out of his imagination you can see the process very clearly in this unfinished landscape from the end of his life IRAs arthritic hands were too weak to hold anything except watercolor brushes so almost all his works however large were carried out in watercolor but watercolor used thick and heavy like oil paint or gouache to give as much density and substance to every image in one of his most playful paintings the tea shop done just a year after Lee folly de Belleville he imagined the scantily-clad dancers of the Parisian nightclub scene descending on some stayed tea shop in Rye serving tea and cakes to a thoroughly bemused clientele of bowler hatted newspaper reading repressed Englishmen and blue rinsed ladies of a certain age one of whom to her astonishment as having a pot of tea poured over her head by none other than a smirking vision of Josephine Baker herself but if his art was meticulous and carefully constructed real life was not so obliging because of his personal fragility I think bara always had a very keen sense of mortality but death actually entered his life for the first time with the passing away of his maternal grandmother they were very fond of each other and burro was particularly horrified he kept the image with him until the end of his life he was horrified by how long it took them to lower her coffin into the seemingly bottomless pit of the grave but while the death of his grandmother was sad it wasn't entirely unexpected she'd lived a long life but a genuine tragedy would very shortly afterwards befall the burro family it was here at Springfield in 1929 that real tragedy befell the Boro family his younger sister Betsy with whom Edward was very close fell mortally ill with meningitis Betsy's bedroom was just off the landing at the top of these stairs and at the very end burro spent his sister's last day watching her die and that night he stayed with her keeping a long vigil i think it's as if this man who spent so much of his life living through his eyes wanted to drink her in one last time wanted to fix her image on his retina preserve her at least as a memory that could never be obliterated he hasn't got a vocabulary to handle it he and his friends are busy being smart at each other and with he and observant so there isn't room in that world for genuine tragedy the most significant thing to me is a long letter is mostly about other subjects Brenda Dean Paul skinny-dipping sort of idiot things are Latin and he's obviously written this and then looked at looked at the letter and he ends up writing in the margin at the bottom believe me I feel her death very much Burroughs responds to sadness at least in early life was never to dwell on the pain and during the decade that followed Betsy's death he seems to have been even more determined to escape his troubles by traveling to foreign cultures none more so than America for Barra America had an attraction unlike any other country in the world he journeyed there many times in his imagination through the jazz and cinema that he loved when he finally visited in 1933 age 28 he stayed in Harlem which had a profound impact on him he loved the style and attitude of black New Yorkers the rhythm of the streets he was having the best time when his in New York I think he was really enjoying himself if any of the work can be joyful and not light it's never lies but that's him feeling um he's it in a place he wants to be I think he's having a good time the vibrancy and color of the place are vividly conveyed in his pictures of Harlem Street life they instantly evoke an extraordinary time and place the birth of America's first genuinely confident exuberant black culture when borough was on hand to record it all not just the brash Street fashions but the importance of pose and gesture just by the way he stands and holds his cigarette a man can embody the hip and the core but as in Paris it was New York by night that really captured Burroughs imagination the bars the nightclubs we went to the Savoy dance hall the other night bar wrote about his time in Harlem you would go mad I've never in my life seen such a display and the women had to be twirled around ten times it's most extraordinary borough himself couldn't dance he could barely walk but in these pictures of his favorite Harlem club he managed something very much like dancing with the paintbrush there's a tremendous giddy energy about this panoramic watercolor of the Savoy dance hall it's a pictorial fantasy of being thrust into a mass of writhing cavorting bodies Beres art mirrored the world that he was observing burlesque shows in Paris [ __ ] and metallo's in Marseille and dancing black couples in New York his eye was drawn to them all I have the feeling the one place he was desperately trying not to look was within but no one can avoid confronting reality forever how do you pay do you make notes or what would you do I've gained its trade on a piece of paper and the experience of travelling to one particular place perhaps his favorite place of all would force Baro to face the world in a far more naked and serious way that place with Spain borrow troubled light he didn't plan his journeys he himself it seems sometimes didn't know if he was going to go away for a week or for six months his mum once famously said on I don't know if Edwards gone out for a packet of cigarettes or if he's gone for a journey across Spain he wouldn't tell anybody where he was going what he was doing and unlike most English travelers to Spain borough really knew Spanish culture really had a feeling for it he could speak Spanish he could read Spanish and in fact one of his favorite quotes almost his motto came from the Spanish poet gongura whenever burro had been away he'd been on one of his journeys and if someone was quizzing him about what he'd been doing where he'd been who he'd been talking to and perhaps he didn't like that person you take this quote from gongura threatened their face I miss olive daddy's voy de me Soledad his finger to my solitudes I go from my solitude I come keep your nose out of my business in other words burro traveled to Spain many times during his youth particularly in the 1930s the journey there was much less arduous than that to America yet in just a few days he could get as far away as possible from the terribly enclosed world of his home in Rye borough was part of an entire generation of post-war Englishmen who were determined to travel to escape the monotony the dreariness the grayness of what they saw as safe old England as another member of this generation Norman Douglas wrote the monotony of a nation intent upon respecting laws and customs horror of the tangent the extreme the unconventional god save the king travel was a way out they wanted to escape into sunshine into colour into freedom Burroughs great friend Billy Chapel captured the earlier Spain held for the artist Spain possessed every element that was most pleasing to Edwards senses satisfying his eyes his ears his nose his emotions and his taste buds the fabric of Spanish life might have been specially designed for his pleasure I don't want to leave Spain he'd written to Chapel not til I must above all burl of Spain's rawness its roughness the way everything seemed a bit seedy R and C Mia and rough around the edges even than in places like Marseilles he loved the fact that the flamenco dancers in Spain were often rather past their prime but still going strong this is one of them madam historia preserved forever by Edward burrow what he loved about her I think was her brilliant proud brashness a determination to embody joy and song and sexiness despite advancing years I can't up wondering if he didn't see in her an emblem of his own determination to embrace life despite his wasting illness and even today when you walk in Burroughs footsteps through a town like Granada you still catch glimpses of his Spain in fact you can even find people who look as if they've walked or danced straight out of one of his paintings Madame Pastore I might be dead but no live lapel burro's spirits were lifted by all aspects of Spanish culture and for him even the bullfight was really just a piece of light theater the death of the animal an occasion for mass excitement I went to a bullfight last Sunday my dear he wrote in a letter it's gorgeous all the bulls gore everybody do the Bulls bleed yes sir do the audience roar with laughter the costumes are lovely my favorite costumes Vermillion trimmed with black lace the bullfight shows burro drinking in the spectacle but painting it all without any great sense of horror looking at it I can't help thinking that he'd managed to turn himself into such a disengaged wire but there was a risk of him becoming a merely superficial artist unlikely caricatural rather inconsequential painter of life under the Mediterranean Sun but then came this the greatest shift in his art and his life it's a nightmare vision of a modern Medusa a blanket of dead bodies draped over her shoulder a sudden turned to darkness nightmare a terrible sense of man's inhumanity to man and then there's Beelzebub the devil dripping blood from a weapon over a world in ruins it's as if something had broken in his mind what happened what turn Deadwood burro to understand that I'm on my way to a town just north of Zaragoza or what's left of it burro had arrived in Spain just before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War as he later said one day when I was lunching with some Spanish friends smoke kept blowing by the restaurant window I asked where it came from oh it's nothing someone answered with a shade of impatience it's only a church being burned that made me feel sick when burro came to Spain in 1936 he found he'd stumbled into a world that was on the brink of tearing itself apart and when the Spanish Civil War broke out the level of atrocities committed on both sides was truly horrific during the first few days of the war over 50,000 people lost their lives and the way in which they did so was peculiarly horrible it was called the Paseo the promenade with grim irony and what happened was that up to a thousand people 2,000 people at a time if they happen to be in the wrong place on the wrong side would simply be taken out of town and shot dead that's very hard in modern Spain to get a sense of the terrible violence that ripped this society apart but here you still can because this is the town of belch it a it was torn apart by an exceptionally violent conflict between the Republicans and the Nationalists but they preserved the whole of this ruined city as a memorial to an atrocious time that must never be forgotten the battle for Bell cheat a ripped the heart out of the town among stairs caught up in the conflict was Maria who was then just a child poor dog una cosa porque pero la gente joven she pressed a say cuidado en la cabeza pero Mia poured over Sante si la puedo camisa llevar una mi padre yeah no Lobos mess y lo tienen la carte Elinor Daz dysplasia no sabemos Eurovision condense a pass eran las cosas local trauma sin UN refugio que non or donate any amo Suwannee beam Nia Nate Nepali nada por que estaba las curvas yamaganda la havas / - mo SI vionnet's yer destiny amo mucho miedo how do you feel when you return yo vengo picasso Nastase meteora lobo cuando mi padre cuando se mueva rome mi padre dos hermanos de mi madre juntos euro matado lo siento the fascists won the battle for bail cheetah and the town was abandoned but what's left behind is a stark reminder of the disasters of war and it was from this rubble that burrows new art would emerge in this one bombed-out structure you can feel a thousand years of Spanish culture just going up in smoke in a flash and when you stand here I think you can really sense what it was that's so shocked burro about this collective descend into a kind of Spanish insanity you know how could our people abolish their own past destroy their own history a thousand years of it in the single flash of an exploding bomb war in the Sun is Burroughs most solemn meditation on the Spanish Civil War it's a picture full of a sense of menace and foreboding everywhere you look you see details of modern warfare tank a number 26 with its caterpillar track and a cap gun thrust up to the sky shrapnel scarred masonry and yet the picture also is very puzzling because within this modern scene of modern warfare burro has introduced all these characters in what seems to be a form of renaissance costume these figures also suggests to me that Burroughs trying to evoke memories of the era of the Spanish conquest adores that time when the Spanish raped Latin America and I think through this layering of past and present Barra is trying to suggest that mankind is hardwired to violence we've always gone to war we always will go to war history is one mistake after another but we can't help repeating and I think that idea of history as a trap as war as a trap is conveyed expressively by the almost theatrical prison architecture of the scene with all these heavy grills heavy bars these people are trapped in a tragedy that perhaps they don't even fully understand but for me the strangest most surreal and disquieting detail of all is up here where we've got a convoy of troops heading away from this Spanish sunlit scene towards what seems like an English house and an English landscape is that burrows way of asking himself whether this violence this atrocity may not actually remain restricted to Spain that perhaps the violence will spread elsewhere perhaps even reach his beloved England within three years the prophecy in the painting came true and Britain was plunged into the violence of World War two what was Burroughs experience of the Second World War I think it made him feel ever more aware of being trapped in this fragile recalcitrant body watching helplessly as the world descended into atrocity after all here in Rye he was at the frontline of the Battle of Britain German planes sweeping across the channel in waves on their way to London all borough can do is look up helplessly he's a bystander what does he do he tends his parents garden he helps to care for a family of refugees that they've taken in and we know in a rather sad note from one of his letters as he buys up the town's entire supply of aspirin it's the only painkiller he can find for his inflamed joints burro was still only in his thirties but increasingly incapacitated by chronic illness so here we have a photograph of Edward burrow as a young man and he's holding a paintbrush here and this hand here is absolutely typical for somebody with active already fairly advanced rheumatoid arthritis we can see swelling of these joints along here and swelling of the other joints in his fingers and some wasting of the muscles in his hand and send a formative his wrist so this indicates active almost certainly very painful disease the other condition he had was something called hereditary spherocytosis which is a genetic condition causing a change in the shape of red cells and basically it causes an anemia which can cause a tiredness in fact his mother appears to have the same condition so she he probably inherited you from her during the Second World War during the Battle of Britain in his lonely solitude burrow went deeper and deeper into this new art of darkness he created a whole succession of chilling images such as soldiers a try of 1941 in which the soldiers of the title where these were the horrible venetian carnival s masks bird masks which I think was burrows surreal way of suggesting that war simultaneously D personalizes us and turns us into these predatory creatures there's something horribly claustrophobic about the whole image the way that the bodies seemed almost to mesh and overlap with each other like pieces of machinery on this flat expanse of paper these pictures were gathered together with others such as the Medusa Beelzebub a whole host of burrows new and seriously dark art and they were put on display at the Redfern gallery in London the response of the critics was immediate and very strong Osbert lancaster wrote in the observer edward burrow as a serious artist working with serious themes what burro is trying to do unless I'm very much mistaken 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 when the war borrows sensibility seems to have gone permanently awry he lost the ability to laugh at the world and the amused lightness of his earlier work more or less disappeared someone asked him why he no longer painted light-hearted satires of modern life and he replied what can a satirist do with a schvitz but after the war thanks to his friendship with Billy Chapel and the brilliant dancer choreographer Frederick Ashton there was one place where Barra preserved something of his earlier playfulness and joie de vivre designs for the ballet and James Gordon has spent the best part of the last 20 years collecting Burroughs ballet designs it's certainly a theatrical space it is wow how many bars have you got added a 70 radium what do you think of a sense of color because I'm always straddie as one by Barros uh Ning glish yeah color his function Ella is so and reticent yeah you know and these are all full of color I think that is just fantastic that that is some love is drawing that really as good as vein to combs and hair you can almost feel the brilliant I'm sticking to the air for it and I must die from the Sun oh yeah this is great isn't it I think that's really good for being bar across he printed something on the back of that mrs. Ashton fantastic is that Freddie Ashley as a sort of um fatale ization takeoff over Mussolini making a fool of him that's a caricature of Freddie Ashton has resonated that's good dust so you get two for the price of one as a borough collector but yes does that happen quite often quite often but it's always disappointing you look behind there's nothing it's I just look at his stage designs they're the works of art but much of this art some of burrows most vibrant intoxicating work would have been lost if it hadn't been for James's avid collecting even today Burroughs theatrical designs are greatly undervalued away from his designs for the ballet from the start of the 50s barra embarked on a period of restless experiment he painted a number of religious pictures in particular this phantasmagoric scene the expulsion of the moneychangers a dream perhaps of a world being purged from evil but one that still has the texture of a nightmare the vengeful Christ half hidden at the back the foreground dominated by wailing figures and lost souls he also painted a series of compelling explosives flower pictures were these burrows way of finding life color and vigor after all the death of war were they has bouquets for those who died they seemed poised between celebration and something more sinister strange details lurk staring eyes and the flowers themselves seem almost predatory nothing is straightforward in burrows later work and it remember the paintings I don't remember when I did them you were always asking in a date I never than the men but not the right date you know and I've never written a day down earlier I think burrow in his later years did his very best work of all but because it's so slippery and because he was so secretive about its meanings you won't find it in mainstream museums or text books you have to seek it out in the collections of private individuals and citizens people drawn to the borough mystery men like Frank Cohen the thing about bullit are you going to understand some things that are factual and easy to look at and other things are not so easy to look at I'd love to be able to explain that I mean these look like bodies that are melting or something it's sort of creating a kind of symbolic language in this post-war art isn't it there's that there are the factory chimneys which brings one to mind things like Auschwitz maybe you'd probably shudder and so dearie don't be so specific you can depict it anywhere you want as well as the enigmatic Li titled it's all boiling up Frank owns a host of other late Burroughs including this disconcerting painting sugarbeet East Anglia where all the figures have been painted as though transparent when you get older in my opinion I think you can see through people I mean they come vacant and I think they're just looking through people and saying our phone in the whole bloody thing is that's the way I see it and as a self-made man who started life in the markets of the Northwest Frank's particularly fascinated by this picture of 1949 the market look she's bare chested that one so what's all that about she's like I mean you know she's topless and she's been hanging on a plate of fish the more you look the more unreal well I mean you know look at that one there something's going on in the background there in the room it looks like a brothel or something you see like it's a girl dancing I mean he you can spend now in the half looking at these do you like that about borough that he was so reticent about talking of his work that he left it to us guess well so he picks as a sort of enigma that we try and fill in the gaps I doubt very much if he ever spoke to him in his life he would actually explain what the work was having refused to hear food he never spoke to anyone not a lot not a bad meaning it wasn't interested in talking about his work a turning point came in 1957 with the death of Burroughs father as he had watched when Betsy died so now he watched once again but this time the sense of loss was tempered by resignation the dying didn't seem unduly to put out further I stayed up from about 2:00 on his last night and he had some trouble breathing and had some whiskey and all his wits about him became unconscious at about 9:30 or so and didn't really know anybody breathing quite peaceful and died 2:15 It was as if bubbles rose from a stagnant pond I was dreading the funeral but it went off very nicely as I'd had four double whiskey's I couldn't think why everybody looked so glum Aurra faltered into the 1960s but still pursued his idiosyncratic course through life supported by close friend and dealer Gerald Corcoran who'd been showing his work ever since the war when we came back to London New York showing my father the station he became part of our lives about my life for as long as I can remember he didn't really like to talk about himself he was much more keen to talk about the movies or the latest science fantasy book he used to stay with a group of different people when he came to London and each group was always worried about how drunk he got with the other group it all worried about his health all the time which was pretty awful what do you talk about his friends we talk about cocking in which all about other friends and we talk about books okay and we tell about the ten inanimate the theater terrible actors uh we talk about all kinds of things no never a very little about our I just had this picture of him perched on the sofa with pungent cigarettes and a glass of whiskey and he had huge thick socks for some reasons I think his feet hurt and big shoes and I was quite in awe of him because you've got a sense that he was very very observant and knew exactly what was going on and noticing everything and also because he was so fragile do have you felt you had to be careful the other place I used to see him a lot was at bumble Dawson who and she was one of his early friends from art school and there was one evening when a friend of mine who was a great hippie gave him a great big joint and he loved it I think he took him back to his youth because in the 20s when there was that gang of them from art school I mean there's nothing they didn't get up to they tried absolutely everything so he was completely sore unshockable but one radical change that was sweeping across the face of Britain did test Burroughs unshockable 'ti let us get on with the job of building another motorway having done everything humanly possible to ensure that we have got things right in the beginning you need the countryside to change much in England I think the countryside in this part of the country is distinctly changed especially along main roads towards the end of his life bara became not preoccupied by the notion that mankind with its obsession with fossil fuels energy modernity machines was almost raping the landscape that he loved and I think this image called picking a quarrel is perhaps the image that goes to the center of all those concerns man himself has become a kind of oil stain on the landscape and in the centre of the image we've got these bright yellow dumper trucks and cranes and the cranes which are scooping up slag seem almost to be dripping it out of their mouths like blood they're almost like automated versions of the figure of Beelzebub that he'd created to emblem attires the Spanish Civil War this is another kind of civil war in which mankind is killing itself with its addiction to petrol to fuel to coal burrows landscapes are evidence of his prescient environmental awareness but they also expressed more complicated emotions than a simple sentimental love of nature his version of the natural world is a metamorphic shape-shifting place hills and valleys swell and heave like living forms the clefts made by paths or streams often resemble the orifices or declivity z' of a body skies pulse with ominous energy clouds hold the land like spirits and here at last burrow uses water color as watercolor painting in washes and veils to suggest transient but I also think that Burroughs late landscapes for the first time presents you with a world in which the artist himself is immersed he's not that perpetual onlooker somehow separated from what he sees he's blanching himself into the landscape as if one last time he wants to connect with something bigger than himself burro did still travel but his journeys were increasingly internal he took to going on driving holidays to the north of England with his sister Ann and increasingly turned to just one subject the countryside that unfolded before him through the windscreen I think he knew that time was running out in 1973 the Tate would stage a retrospective of his work bara engrossed in his landscape preoccupations was noticeably absent from the private views a year before he had agreed to be filmed but he was the most reluctant of interviewees and you never got your gallery openings I know that but could you tell us why you don't go no I shan't dream tell me why limbo she comes face to face with a Berber it's like coming face to face with a blank or face to face with a Samuel Beckett character who's trapped in his own end game and just doesn't want to tell you what he's thinking what he's feeling I think I think this was burrows most defiant way of saying look if you want to know about my art don't ask me about it look at the art I never tell anybody anything so they just make it up I don't see that it matters it's at this point that she asks him what does matter and I think this is one of the very few moments in the interview where you just glimpse into the into the rather nihilistic darkness behind those eyes what does nothing you know there you have it what matters nothing burro's very last landscapes turn increasingly morbid as if his subject is no longer nature itself but his sense that his own journey through the world is nearing its end these paintings are full of a sense of passage full of emblems and symbols that seem to suggest the transition from one place or state to another boats leaving for some other place some unknown country cars crossing a suspension bridge traveling to who knows where they're very moving pictures but in the my feel Bora was finally confronting his sense of his own mortality I think Burroughs sense of nature towards the end of his life is deeply romantic in the sense that was not painting stretch of the Northumberland landscape he's painting his sense of his own impending death the landscape resembles a woman and at the center of it there's this womb-like enclosure the eye is drawn to it as I feel borough felt himself drawn to it he's envisage death with a wonderful poetic sense I think as a form of reverse birth he will be drawn back into this womb into this world of nature and he accepts it it's a picture that's full of resignation full of beauty and famille so full of a kind of heroism on the 22nd of October 1976 Edward bara died after a short illness he was 71 so who was Edward borough well first and foremost for a man of such extreme fragility he was someone who packed a lot in think of all he'd seen responded to and depicted in the course of his life he'd been a kind of 20th century eye he'd been there in Paris in the 20s and depicted that he'd been to Harlem in the 30s and caught all of its energy he then experienced the Spanish Civil War and from the lonely perspective of Rai the Second World War and I think those experiences deepened and darkened the nature of his vision he probably would have said oh I'm just a miserable old bugger and he was more than that too and right at the end of his life in these extraordinary landscapes I think for the first time having so long felt that he was on the outside looking in for the first time with the late landscapes I don't feel that anymore he's there he's in nature in the middle of it all and of course he's not only in that he's also in the process of his own death process every human being has to go through and he went through it and depicted his own sense of going through it with such purity such intensity and such bravery

Channel: erasedculture

Views: 288,293

Rating: 4.910387 out of 5

Keywords: Edward, Burra, art, erasedculture

Id: 4BoLh8xgOdI

Length: 59min 31sec (3571 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 04 2012