The name of Edward Burra may be unfamiliar now but his paintings will still strike a chord with anyone interested in both the art and the social history of Britain in the 20th century. Burra's work shows the influence of many of the artistic movements of the 20th century - German expressionism, surrealism and vorticism; and yet he is still very much his own man, a painter of quirky individualism with a gimlet eye for seediness both lonely and liberating, for the all-night bar, for spivs in shiny suits and prostitutes in cheap furs.
Burra produced some memorable set and costume designs for ballets choreographed by Frederick Ashton. In later years, he turned his attention, and his inimitable talent for startling perspectives, to landscape, painting wonderful pictures of the English countryside and the agents of its destruction: the relentless traffic and the beautiful but sinister and threatening debris of motorways, supermarkets and machinery.
Yet the artist cuts a curious figure. He was small and frail, having been afflicted by rheumatoid arthritis since childhood. He could only stand for short periods, sometimes only a few minutes. He was a dandy, taking a keen interest in costume and colour, but as he was also irredeemably resistant to washing, he was usually dirty and unkempt. Celibate and apparently asexual, he was drawn to men who were physically fit and virile in a way that he himself would never be. He affected a high, whining Mayfair cockney drawl, which comes over vividly in thousands of letters: "Aye have quayte a social layfe in may fashion, dearie." The letters were calculated to repel real intimacy, but they give a clue to the vast range of his interests, among them picture postcards, particularly of Victorian vaudeville stars, Jacobean revenge tragedies, gory crime stories found in the Police Illustrated News, Elizabethan poetry, William Harrison Ainsworth novels and gossip.
He enjoyed foraging for objects on the beach and in the junk shops of the south coast; he was a prodigious drinker; he read voraciously: in 1927, it was Ulysses about which he wrote to a friend: "Oh my dear never have aye read such a cess pool as 'Ulysses' ho! reely words fail me, I adored it, though I do think the last chapter was a bit unnessecary, in parts."
Above all, Burra was a worker. Everything was organised to facilitate his painting. He lived virtually all his life in Rye, Kent, for much of it with his parents in the large house where he was born. It was low life and bohemia on trips to London, but it was the comfortable affluence of Springfield House that made it possible to paint without distractions. He nonetheless travelled widely: in the south of France, to New York (where he painted some marvellous images of Harlem) and, particularly, in Spain. He enjoyed gardening and growing vegetables - and in later life he was a keen if eccentric cook.
Burra, who took such pains to keep his privacy, would be relieved by how little we learn of him in this voluminous biography. The light, clear, witty introduction to this book suggests that Stevenson would have done better to have written a long essay. In the chapters that follow, her prose style is baggy and verbose; she over embellishes and overexplains.
Though clearly an admirer of his work, Stevenson is keen to stress the importance of Burra's social circle, at the expense of any real examination of his paintings - particularly in the early years. (Extraordinarily, apart from two youthful sketches, not a single work is reproduced in this book.) Most of Burra's closest friendships were formed in the 1920s and the gang grew old together. Clover, Olivia, Bar, Bumble, Irene and Billy Chappell flit through the 500-odd pages of this book - having love affairs, marrying, divorcing, drinking, partying. By contrast, the rest of English society is a lumpen, monolithic entity, dismissed as "conventional" or "ultra-establishment". Yet the avant-garde has its own conventions.
The most revealing moments in the book are those in which Stevenson quotes from the re collections of those who knew Burra. Anthony Powell, for example, remembered that "he spoke rarely but with devastating aptness". To these perceptive and subtle pencil sketches, Stevenson adds little but reams of extraneous facts and interpolations.
