Trio of artists who captured the dark clouds gathering over Europe
Hastings Contemporary The Age of Turmoil: Burra, Spencer, Sutherland
While lunching with friends on a fine Madrid day in 1936, the British painter Edward Burra inquired about palls of smoke he saw drifting past. “Oh it’s nothing. It’s only a church being burnt,” his companions responded dismissively. Burra later recalled, “Everybody knew that something appalling was about to happen.”
Ominous clouds brew across a number of the paintings in this small, intriguing exhibition of three British artists who worked during the turbulent period between the Depression and the post-war years of austerity. It was, of course, the worst of times, with global conflict, rising populism and economic stagnation accompanied by fear and pessimism.
In Graham Sutherland’s Welsh
Landscape with Yellow Lane (19391940), a gathering black mass threatens to obscure the sun, while plumes of smoke rise beyond the horizon. The sense of anxiety is palpable.
The Spanish Civil War eclipsed Burra’s previously vibrant vision. Out went his wry observations of a raucous humanity at play in Harlem jazz clubs or at the Folies-bergère in Paris. In their wake rose nightmarish works that resemble surrealist stage sets. In War in
the Sun (1938), for instance, muscular conquistadors posture around an armoured vehicle, while commedia dell’arte characters hunch in the shadows of buildings pockmarked by war. A curtain is drawn back, revealing a truck heading off to a pastoral landscape. Perhaps refugees are being transported to safety? Or is Burra anticipating the conflict reaching his own East Sussex doorstep?
Sutherland, meanwhile, painted the shattered remains of blitzed Britain. His elusive Armoured Form (1950) rises sentinel-like over a twisted city, casting a dark shadow, perhaps of a disabled war veteran. Profoundly disturbed by photographs of Holocaust victims, Sutherland read them as “figures deposed from crosses”.
His disfigured Crucifixion (1947) became a symbol of the “continuing beastliness and cruelty of mankind amounting at times to madness”.
As an official war artist in Port Glasgow, Stanley Spencer had an epiphany witnessing the shipbuilders’ single purpose. In The Resurrection with the Raising of Jairus’s Daughter (1947), a commotion erupts around the dead emerging from under the pavement of Spencer’s hometown of Cookham, while the living embrace those returning.
Resurrection, whether biblical or symbolic, seems to have preoccupied all three of these painters, who appear to be clinging on to a fragile faith in the hope of reunion with loved ones, or the healing power of nature.
This exhibition suggests that people’s concerns during this period mirror those of our present age. A different, or expanded, selection of images may have made more of such similarities.
As it stands, it offers a welcome taste of the works of three highly individualistic painters whose lives coincided with, and were shaped and overshadowed by, the age of turmoil.
‘The Spanish Civil War turned Burra from a painter of Harlem clubs into a nightmarish surrealist’