Shock Dispenser

While still at art school in his native England, Edward John Burra gave evidence of a highly individualistic approach to life. He daubed the noses of classical casts with red paint, took to washing his face in film developer. He also made himself a first-rate draftsman and a master of watercolor. Thus equipped, he took to wandering like a self-propelled vacuum cleaner into ugly corners of the everyday world, sucking up sordid impressions to belch out as nightmare pictures. Burra's brush can turn a gin mill into an outpost of hell, a whore into a rapacious owl, a bottle into an imp with one malignant eye peering from the lip. Now a birdlike, tattered little man of 50, Burra rivals his compatriot Francis Bacon (TIME, Oct. 19, 1953) as a shock dispenser. His latest collection of watercolors, on view last week at Boston's Swetzoff Gallery, bowled over even the blase Brahmins of Beacon Hill and led the Boston Herald to call him "a poet of the underworld."

Burra works slowly (more than a month to a picture) at a table drawn up to the window of whatever room he happens to occupy. He uses the largest sheets of watercolor paper he can get, sometimes pastes four together. Starting with a light pencil sketch, he lays in his flat, thick colors layer on layer, while keeping the contours crisp. Burra's end results generally have the sharp complexity of cactus, and the effect of an unpleasant, totally unexpected laugh sounding from below the cellar stairs.

One picture in Burra's Boston exhibition gave promise of still better to come. He had not bothered to give it a title, but the subject was clearly Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane (see cut). Scores of old masters have given the scene more spiritual impact, yet few have conceived it any more compactly and dramatically than Burra has. As always with Burra, evil ruled the conception. But this time the evil was not the housebroken monster of a man fascinated by undigested fears. Burra's Gethsemane faced the onrushing moment of one of history's greatest--though necessary--evils from a very great distance, and showed it plain.

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