Spit & Polish

There was always something odd about Edward John Burra. His classmates laughed when they caught him daubing red paint on the noses of classical plaster casts at art school, but they watched in awed wonder when he took to drinking champagne out of ashtrays and washing his face in film developer. When Burra's health forced him to quit school and moderate his prankish ways, he retired to his parents' house in Rye, on England's South Coast, made a studio of his old top-floor nursery and settled down to work while gradually transforming the place into a fluttery nest of picture postcards, tabloid shock photos, scraps of comic strips and reproductions of such artists as Goya, George Grosz and Gustave Dore.

Burra's fifth one-man show, opening in London's Leicester Galleries last week. made suitably weird use of such source materials. His thick-painted water colors ("I mix my paints with spit, mostly") represent public places from Mexico City and Harlem to Limerick and Toulon, all swarming with grinning monsters from every age. Peering happily at one representative specimen, the pale little painter with the pointed nose giggled: "Isn't that horrible? It gives me a turn. I thoroughly like it!"

Burra is Britain's most successfully shocking surrealist. At 44, he has done the sets and costumes for four ballets and an opera, consistently delighted his tight, bright circle of admirers with such fantasies as Procession (see cut), in which evil red eyes peep from a paraded kettle. "See?" Burra says, "It's going to boil over and swamp them all. The beggar is getting out of the way--he hasn't a chance."

What does the picture mean? Says Burra: "Bring in a psychoanalyst and we'll find out."

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