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Lot Essay
Dating from 1942-3, Ropes and Lorries belongs to Burra's series of war pictures, which preoccupied him from the mid-1930s. They were influenced by his reactions to the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War.
Burra had travelled to Spain on several occasions during the 1930s and witnessed the escalating unrest in a country for which he felt a deep affection. The pictures he painted fuse his sense of the theatrical, heightened by the influence of Spanish art, which he discovered firsthand at the Prado, with his obvious horror of the atrocities of a civil war. Like Dali's sickeningly vicious creatures in Autumn Cannibalism, 1936, Burra favours neither side of such self-perpetuating destruction and does not rely on contemporary documentary detail to highlight the atrocities of war.
Andrew Causey comments, 'Though Burra's pictures of soldiers include tanks and trucks, and are full of menace, in most there is very little of the actual grime and carnage of war ... [they] do not make their impact through immediacy or evident truth to conditions as the First World War pictures of Nash and Nevinson had; they show awareness of historical precedents and artistic conventions, possessing the bright colours and sharply defined forms of heraldry, and part of their artistic ancestry is in such paintings as Uccello's Rout of San Romano ... When Burra showed his pictures of the war in 1942 it was with the early eighteenth-century Genoese painter Alessandro Magnasco, in particular, that he felt comparison was due. Magnasco's interests lay on the margins of society in groups of bandits, beggars and gipsies, monks and soldiers - leaderless rabbles rather than organised military troupes. Like Burra's, Magnasco's subjects were alternately febrile and manic; paintings of enervated soldiery contrast with others of monks in frenzied self-mortification. His figures may be war-weary and disenchanted with life, but they exist in a world in which religion was obviously still a driving force, though, as with Burra, true faith borders both on sorcery and empty ritual' (op. cit., pp. 65-6).
In Ropes and Lorries, Burra depicts a landscape that is dominated by the mechanics of war, portrayed through the cluster of camouflaged trucks that fill the composition. These vehicles overwhelm human life and take centre stage. In comparison to the detailed and naturalistic representation of the trucks, human faces are not fully revealed and bodies only partly seen; one of the figures is submerged beneath the wheels of a lorry, only his legs remain visible. The presence of wheels is a contant theme in Burra's work, he saw them as emblematic of the dynamism of modern and urban life and they are a point of focus in Landscape with Wheels, circa 1937-9 (sold in these rooms, 5 March 1999, lot 183).
The degree of realism present in Ropes and Lorries marks it out as a Second World War picture, partly based on Burra's observations of the garrisons stationed near his hometown of Rye, which was then a restricted military area. The realism is conveyed through the chaos of trucks signifying modern warfare, the earthy colours that Burra has used and the identifiable local Rye landscape. There are also surreal elements included. In the present work an unusual childlike figure is portrayed in the forground, dressed in brightly coloured clothes and clutching onto two ropes. It appears as if he might be seated on a swing, which may account for the title, 'Lorries and swing', that the work was exhibited with in 1970. In Death and the Soldiers (sold Sotheby's, London, 3 July 2002, lot 59) a supplicant figure dominates the foreground: 'The great hooded figure of death, descended from those in Spanish war pictures, is an intrusion into this "normal" scene' (exhibition catalogue, London, Hayward Gallery, Edward Burra, 1985, p. 120).
It is this fusing of differing sources that typifies Burra's work. His war pictures are universal as they reference different times and shifting circumstances. In them men are surrounded by the trappings of war, but often depicted in a moment of rest, not locked in combat, but nevertheless hemmed in by the paraphernalia of death. They may have survived so far, but they have sacrificed their individuality to the conflict: in the background of Ropes and Lorries, two camouflaged soldiers stand, their overly-exaggerated muscular bodies betraying their lost identities. Causey comments, 'he [Burra] had never wanted to be an official war artist, and his war pictures reflect the tragedy of the human condition rather than having any partisan, propagandist function. They have a restrained passivity that allows that landscape may be an ultimate resting place for the dispossessed, as it was in Magnasco, but not that it is necessarily friendly or reassuring' (op. cit., p. 69).
The joined sheets of paper, apparent in Ropes and Lorries, is typical of Burra's working method. Anthony Powell commented, 'What was always an immensely complicated design would be begun in the bottom right-hand corner of a large square of paper; from that angle moving in a diagonal sweep upward and leftward across the surface of the sheet, until the whole was covered with an intricate pattern of background and figures. If not large enough, the first piece of paper would be tacked onto the second one - in fact would almost certainly be joined to several more - the final work made up of perhaps three or four of these attached sections' (Messenger of the Day, London, 1977).
Burra had travelled to Spain on several occasions during the 1930s and witnessed the escalating unrest in a country for which he felt a deep affection. The pictures he painted fuse his sense of the theatrical, heightened by the influence of Spanish art, which he discovered firsthand at the Prado, with his obvious horror of the atrocities of a civil war. Like Dali's sickeningly vicious creatures in Autumn Cannibalism, 1936, Burra favours neither side of such self-perpetuating destruction and does not rely on contemporary documentary detail to highlight the atrocities of war.
Andrew Causey comments, 'Though Burra's pictures of soldiers include tanks and trucks, and are full of menace, in most there is very little of the actual grime and carnage of war ... [they] do not make their impact through immediacy or evident truth to conditions as the First World War pictures of Nash and Nevinson had; they show awareness of historical precedents and artistic conventions, possessing the bright colours and sharply defined forms of heraldry, and part of their artistic ancestry is in such paintings as Uccello's Rout of San Romano ... When Burra showed his pictures of the war in 1942 it was with the early eighteenth-century Genoese painter Alessandro Magnasco, in particular, that he felt comparison was due. Magnasco's interests lay on the margins of society in groups of bandits, beggars and gipsies, monks and soldiers - leaderless rabbles rather than organised military troupes. Like Burra's, Magnasco's subjects were alternately febrile and manic; paintings of enervated soldiery contrast with others of monks in frenzied self-mortification. His figures may be war-weary and disenchanted with life, but they exist in a world in which religion was obviously still a driving force, though, as with Burra, true faith borders both on sorcery and empty ritual' (op. cit., pp. 65-6).
In Ropes and Lorries, Burra depicts a landscape that is dominated by the mechanics of war, portrayed through the cluster of camouflaged trucks that fill the composition. These vehicles overwhelm human life and take centre stage. In comparison to the detailed and naturalistic representation of the trucks, human faces are not fully revealed and bodies only partly seen; one of the figures is submerged beneath the wheels of a lorry, only his legs remain visible. The presence of wheels is a contant theme in Burra's work, he saw them as emblematic of the dynamism of modern and urban life and they are a point of focus in Landscape with Wheels, circa 1937-9 (sold in these rooms, 5 March 1999, lot 183).
The degree of realism present in Ropes and Lorries marks it out as a Second World War picture, partly based on Burra's observations of the garrisons stationed near his hometown of Rye, which was then a restricted military area. The realism is conveyed through the chaos of trucks signifying modern warfare, the earthy colours that Burra has used and the identifiable local Rye landscape. There are also surreal elements included. In the present work an unusual childlike figure is portrayed in the forground, dressed in brightly coloured clothes and clutching onto two ropes. It appears as if he might be seated on a swing, which may account for the title, 'Lorries and swing', that the work was exhibited with in 1970. In Death and the Soldiers (sold Sotheby's, London, 3 July 2002, lot 59) a supplicant figure dominates the foreground: 'The great hooded figure of death, descended from those in Spanish war pictures, is an intrusion into this "normal" scene' (exhibition catalogue, London, Hayward Gallery, Edward Burra, 1985, p. 120).
It is this fusing of differing sources that typifies Burra's work. His war pictures are universal as they reference different times and shifting circumstances. In them men are surrounded by the trappings of war, but often depicted in a moment of rest, not locked in combat, but nevertheless hemmed in by the paraphernalia of death. They may have survived so far, but they have sacrificed their individuality to the conflict: in the background of Ropes and Lorries, two camouflaged soldiers stand, their overly-exaggerated muscular bodies betraying their lost identities. Causey comments, 'he [Burra] had never wanted to be an official war artist, and his war pictures reflect the tragedy of the human condition rather than having any partisan, propagandist function. They have a restrained passivity that allows that landscape may be an ultimate resting place for the dispossessed, as it was in Magnasco, but not that it is necessarily friendly or reassuring' (op. cit., p. 69).
The joined sheets of paper, apparent in Ropes and Lorries, is typical of Burra's working method. Anthony Powell commented, 'What was always an immensely complicated design would be begun in the bottom right-hand corner of a large square of paper; from that angle moving in a diagonal sweep upward and leftward across the surface of the sheet, until the whole was covered with an intricate pattern of background and figures. If not large enough, the first piece of paper would be tacked onto the second one - in fact would almost certainly be joined to several more - the final work made up of perhaps three or four of these attached sections' (Messenger of the Day, London, 1977).