Landscape with Wheels

Referring to Burra's return to landscape painting towards the end of the 1930s, Andrew Causey (op. cit. pp.66-67) comments on the present work: 'For Magnasco, as for the Neapolitan Salvator Rosa in the previous generation, whom Burra also admired, landscape was a major element in his painting, and the natural counterpart of the wild and undisciplined human existence he portrayed. Burra's turn to urban subject matter in the twenties had implied support for a classical ideal that saw urban civilization as an expression of cultural achievement and nature by contrast as raw and unformed. In 1937 Burra had taken up landscape again alongside his war pictures in which ruins register the collapse of this urban ideal. Though nature was not yet the dominant force in his painting, it was gradually to become so, and already provides a habitat, as in the work of Magnasco and Rosa for the alienated gipsyish figures of Cat.142 [the present work]'.