Edward Burra

Alex Reid & Lefevre, London
Sir John Rothenstein and thence by descent to the present owner

London, Alex Reid & Lefevre, Edward Burra, April 1955, cat. no.14;
London, Tate Gallery, Edward Burra, May - July 1973, cat. no.95, where lent by the Lefevre Gallery.

Andrew Causey, Edward Burra: Complete Catalogue, Phaidon, Oxford, 1985, cat. no.220, illustrated.

The present condition report has been prepared by Jane McAusland FIIC, Conservator and Restorer of Art on paper; Nether Hall Barn, Old Newton, Nr. Stowmarket, Suffold, IP14 4PP. Support: Burra has used a sheet of handmade paper which shows the TH SAUNDERS watermark at the top edge. At present it is fully laid down onto a board of poor quality, this is slightly warping. Otherwise the condition is very good. Medium: The colours in this work are extremely vibrant and bright, showing no signs of fading and therefore should be considered to be in a very good condition. Conservation Note: As the backing board to this work on paper is warping in a convex fashion it might be sensible to manually remove it from this board, which also is not of a good quality. Note: This work was viewed outside studio conditions. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present lot.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

It would be a commonplace to say that the work of Edward Burra is strongly defined by his sense of strangeness. The figures, the places, the objects, the colours, all are imbued with an otherness, an element beyond the usual and real, almost a view into the inner life of each part of the painting. However, he often demonstrates an ability to go even further, by conjuring up strangeness of the highest order, and yet presenting it in a way that one does not immediately realise it is there.

So it is with The Elephant Lady. So captivated and intrigued are we by the extreme oddness of the huge, black, feathered figures that stand on the right of the painting, that we have to remind ourselves that the protagonist of the title is herself somewhat unusual. Given an undeniably gypsy air, with her flowing skirt and hooped earrings, she very much resembles the Spanish figures so often seen in Burra’s work, the flamenco dancers, the duennas, the women seen in the street, café and town square. Formal yet fiery, Burra clearly loved such characters. So far, so good. Yet, here, and this is where we find ourselves looking again and then registering the oddness, she has the head of an elephant, and is indeed grey, like an elephant. With an unmistakeable gleam in her eye and a triumphant smile on her lips, she is in the process of drenching our strange bird-figure with a jet of water from her trunk as potent as a riot policeman’s water-cannon, his talons scratching at the dust for purchase. She stands there with all the force of a Mae West, one hand on her hips, the other behind her head, the undoubted diva of the scene.

So dominant is this little scenario in front of us, and so luscious the painting of it and the colours Burra uses, that it takes us a while to look beyond them to see what else is going on. Over to the right, in the far distance, stands a framework of some sort, atop which sit more of the black and feathered figures. Behind and around our Elephant Lady are cheering figures, their faces reminiscent of Breugel’s peasant crowds. The painting is filled with such oppositions, even to the sky itself where dark and lowering clouds are juxtaposed against a blue sky tinged with a rosy evening glow.

Like many of Burra’s paintings, the meanings are almost wilfully obscure. Reticent in the extreme when it came to discussing his work, we have no guidance from the artist to fall back on. Spain had been a major influence on his imagery since the 1930s, and in 1950 he had designed the décor and costumes for Ninette de Valois’ production of the ballet Don Quixote at Covent Garden. This period of Burra’s work, whilst perhaps less well-known than the Harlem paintings of the 1930s, does in fact include some of his most powerful imagery, and indeed some of the most fantastical. The breadth of imagination that these paintings place before us is formidable, be that the darkly humorous It’s All Boiling Up, the growling menace of the crowds in Riot, or the unmitigated fantasy of The Opening of the Hunting Season (Private Collections). Burra suggests to us a world within a world, one that is like the one we inhabit but which shows those things we routinely keep hidden, the violence, horror and fear of the darker side of the human condition. Whilst in some paintings we see this darkness appearing to gain ground, and we should remember that at this time Burra’s own life was becoming much more isolated and reclusive than before, in The Elephant Lady we feel there is a rather positive message here. There is no doubting that the Elephant Lady is here on the side of good, and her presumably rather damp adversary in the opposite camp. There is something rather heroic about her, something we warm to, a complete contrast to the intense blackness and indefinability of the recipient of her blast, and it is perhaps this simple sense of goodness amidst oddness to which we are responding.