Page 55 - Studio International - July August 1973

George Grosz or the French-occupied (especially cheap and fancy the negative qualities of abstraction, in the display windows of American
Spain of Goya, although Burra's style clothing) and in his treatment of the in that his treatment of the objects banks and mortgage companies in
owes something to both these artists. human subjects of his painting, depicted deprives them of their order to negate the complicated
During the 1930's and under the whether they repel or delight him object-connotations. emotional responses which matters of
aegis of Surrealism, Burra depicted as unreal components of some When he is not using simple finance would otherwise provoke. Its
religious subjects which were brutal spectacle. Burra's morality is that of a patterns, as of wallpaper or railings of effect in Caulfield's work is to negate
parodies of Renaissance masterpieces, theatre-goer, and it is not black an iron fence, his chosen subjects are all normal responses to the subject-
in which the cosmic order of sixteenth- humour which informs his vision but traditional compositions in which the matter while leaving nothing of
century art is mocked in terrifying and the simple expectation of the good simplifying of the technique acts to interest in its place.
sadistic caricatures of Romans and performance. demystify the objects. In some cases Jeremy Moon's paintings might be a
Jews, where classically beautiful The idea of a print retrospective no this results in caricature, as in his fly's view of Caulfield's work. The
bodies perform atrocities and noble longer provokes the kind of heartless Portrait of a Frenchman ,who is a scale of the flat simple patterns is
courtiers maintain their Academy mirth it ought to. Indeed, Patrick joke Gaul or his Two Jugs, larger, and they seem to relate to no
poses while disporting themselves in Caulfield is an established artist and which are fat and friendly little pots of object ; they have edges and gaps
orgies. Throughout the thirties and his print-making is a simple (and the sort used in tales to put children which indicate Moon's continuing
forties Burra also painted his bizarre successful )commercial enterprise. to sleep. This style of abstracting has interest in the relation between flat
beaked men both as soldiers and But 'retrospective' is a grand word other commercial uses than those to surfaces and three-dimensional
(implicitly) as sexual animals, as in for the opportunity of getting together which Caulfield puts it, and can be objects. This is the case both in his
his several pictures of Birdmen and a collection of back numbers for a seen across the road at Ireland wall pieces such as No. 3173. where a
Pots, where beaks and vessels recur spring sale. It implies the occasion House, where pictures of sea- band of paint juts out to become a
in menacing erotic images. for a radical rethink of Caulfield's crossings and flights of airplanes slab of painted board, and in his
But on either side of this period of oeuvre over the last six years, and as show air- and sea-waves as harmless, elegant floor piece where individual,
work are paintings of great gentleness such seems too hasty. Caulfield's cheery things unlikely to frighten the odd-shaped sections are composed in
and gaiety. Like Thersites at Troy work always seemed to me to have all prospective traveller. It is a style used an identical pattern to the coloured
Burra was for most of his life kept out
of the action by physical weakness Edward Burra The Two Sisters 1929. Oil, 23½ x 19½in.
and left to observe from the sidelines.
But the things which he observed, the
markets, bars and ballrooms of
Harlem, café life in the South of
France ,weddings and cabarets in
London, were things which delighted
and entertained him. Like Toulouse-
Lautrec he was neither born to nor
able to participate in the 'low life' he
depicted, and his distance from his
subject-matter enabled him to mock
or admire without resorting to moral
judgment. His twenties paintings of
blacks are evidence not of the fine
social conscience he has been
accused of but, as with his use of the
colours of Haitian and Mexican folk
painting, of an interest in the
primitive which he shared with
various 'modernist' artists and
writers, among them Wyndham Lewis,
Vachel Lindsay (of 'Boomalay
boomalay, boomalay, boom' fame),
Gertrude Stein (as in her all-black
production of 'Four Saints in Three
Acts' and her story 'As Fine As
Melanctha'), and Marc Connally
(Green Pastures). As Katherine
Mansfield, Middleton Murry and
Gaudier-Brzeska, among others,
believed, all art was a question of
rhythm, and blacks, as everyone
knows, have a great sense of rhythm.
Primitive colour, rhythm and drama
are the essentials of Burra's painting :
dancing, the movement of crowds,
the performance of violent rituals, are
constant subjects of his work, but
his characteristic distance enabled
him to watch these and other goings-
on with the unaffected pleasure of a
child at a circus, He is a cartoonist or a
story-teller, not a moralist, and his
natural passivity enables him to find
the comic or dramatic in whatever he
observes, whether a café scene, a
Sussex landscape or a table setting.
His later flower pictures and the
extraordinary group of still lifes he
painted in 1957 (precursors of the
work of the neo-realists in their
obsessive attentionto prosaic detail)
indicate a profound materialism
which runs throughout his work, both
in terms of his love of objects
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