Hot grotesque summer

From Edward Burra to Jenny Saville, sweaty London is luxuriating

Edward Burra, Minuit Chanson, 1931. © The estate of Edward Burra, courtesy Lefevre Fine Art, London/Bridgeman Images

Edward Burra has long been one of my favourite painters, and I’m always surprised by how few people know his work. I’m rather hoping this Tate Britain exhibition will do something about that.

What I’ve seen

Burra is a fascinating artist and character (read all about him in my feature in The Times, here). Born in 1905, he lived through two World Wars, the Spanish Civil War and a good chunk of the Cold War, the era of the Bright Young Things (of which he was one), the jazz age and the rise of disco. He suffered from chronic illness all his life, but was intrepid in his travelling and a voracious reader and music lover, which inspired his work.

He would often embark on a long trip (to France, or America – to collect jazz records and hang out in Harlem’s music venues during its Renaissance – Mexico and Spain) without bothering to tell anyone, leaving his family to wonder where he’d gone, sometimes for several months.

Despite being in almost constant pain, he’d seek out the seedy and insalubrious parts of town and listen to music, admire the sailors, watch the couples and drink heavily, then simply translate his acute observations onto canvas when back in his studio at his parents’ house in Sussex.

I love his work. It is pleasingly, uniquely weird, often carrying an undercurrent of threat, and a whiff of the grotesque. The detail is extraordinary, and though they are fairly reasonable in scale, and look like oils, they’re nearly all watercolour, because early in his career he realised he found it physically less taxing to paint flat on a table than standing at an easel for long periods. They’re remarkable. I would urge everyone to go – the show runs to October 19.

The exhibition shares a ticket with a second show (a new innovation by Tate, I wonder whether it will work) on the artist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun, which I found less engaging, though I did bother to go round it, which I probably wouldn’t have done if I didn’t already have the ticket, so in that respect I suppose it does work.

I did like some of the early paintings, and what is probably her best work, a canvas called Scylla, which is both witty and clever. Mostly my memory of the show is of an awful lot of images resembling vaginas, and why not.