John Swarbrooke Fine Art is delighted to announce an exhibition inspired by Sussex artist Edward Burra’s lifetime fascination with the macabre.
The otherworldliness of Burra’s pictures provides the starting point for this exhibition, which features a century of paintings, drawings, sculpture and ceramics exploring the subject.
Artists include Edward Burra, John Minton, Graham Sutherland, Elizabeth Frink, Paula Rego, Grayson Perry, Gilbert & George, and Damien Hirst amongst others.
To request availability of the below works, please click here.
Edward Burra CBE (1905-1976)
The Torturers, 1935
initialled lower right B
pencil, ink, watercolour and gouache on paper
77.1 x 56.5 cm. (30⅜ x 22¼ in.)
Provenance:
Alex Reid & Lefevre Ltd.
Sir John Rothenstein, CBE.
Private Collection, UK.
Literature:
J. Rothenstein, The Penguin Modern Painters: Edward Burra, Penguin Books, Middlesex, 1945, n.p. (illus. plate 3).
Study for an Exhibition of Violence in Contemporary Art, exh. cat., Institute of Contemporary Art, London, 1964, cat. no. 49 (not illus.). Edward Burra, exh. cat., The Tate Gallery, London, 1973, cat. no. 52 (not illus.).
A Memorial Exhibition of Works by Edward Burra 1905-1976, exh. cat., Lefevre Gallery, London, 1977, cat. no. 7 (illus. p. 13).
Edward Burra, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1985, cat. no. 87 (illus. p. 115). Edward Burra, exh. cat., Centro Cultural Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico, 1987, n.p. (illus.).
Exhibited:
London, Institute of Contemporary Art, Study for an Exhibition of Violence in Contemporary Art, February - March 1964.
London, The Tate Gallery, Edward Burra, May 1973.
London, Lefevre Gallery, A Memorial Exhibition of Works by Edward Burra 1905-1976, 19 May - 2 July 1977.
London, Hayward Gallery, Edward Burra, 1 August - 29 September 1985; Southampton Art Gallery, 19 October - 24 October 1985; Leeds City Art Gallery, 4 December-12 January 1986; Norwich Castle Museum, 22 January - 23 February 1986.
Mexico, Centro Cultural Arte Contemporaneo, Edward Burra, February - May 1987.
Brimming with baroque exuberance, The Torturers, 1935 is one of Edward Burra's most overtly macabre paintings, exemplifying his dark and “sensationally original vision.”
Burra suffered from chronic arthritis and a blood condition, which brought an early end to his formal education. This was hugely significant to his development as an artist, enabling him, from the age of fourteen, to devote his time to drawing and painting and “the enlargement of his imaginative experience.” He developed a love for horror movies and Gothic novels like Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, 1764, William Harrison Ainsworth's The Tower of London, 1840, and John Marston's The Scourge of Villanie, 1599, as well as science fiction books by H.P. Lovecraft, which blended horror with fantasy. He was fascinated by the popular nineteenth-century villain 'Fantômas', created by French writers Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, who (wearing a mask) carried out particularly imaginative, gruesome acts purely for the thrill. The year before he made the present work, in 1934 Burra had a Chinese mask and dagger tattooed on his left shoulder. Associated with the criminal underworld and sailors, this tattoo underscored his preoccupation with the more disreputable side of society.
Burra was born in London and studied at the Chelsea School of Art (1921-23) and the Royal College of Art (1923-24). Burra’s preferred medium was watercolour, inspired by his preference for the brushless effects of the medium but also often prescribed to his physical frailty. Despite being confined to his home in Playden near Rye, Sussex, Burra managed to travel extensively - indeed more so than many of his artist contemporaries. He was drawn to the underbelly of society which came alive at night and so racy scenes of the bars, cafes, music halls and strip clubs in Paris, Marseille, New York, Spain and even Mexico, Here we are confronted by a far more sinister image, which saw the artist relish the 'dark side' of humanity.
His work would later be celebrated by Paula Rego, who championed his ‘extremely original vision’.
POA
Edward Burra standing in front of Opium Den and The Torturers, 1935, photograph, March 1937. (c) Tate Galleries
Edward Burra CBE (1905-1976)
Sketch of a Woman
signed lower right E J Burra
pen and ink on paper
25.5 x 20.5 cm. (10 x 8⅛ in.)
£9,500 + ARR
Edward Burra CBE (1905-1976)
Costume design;
verso Costume design for Oriana, Angelica and Urganda - Don Quixote, 1950
signed on the verso E. J. Burra
watercolour over pencil on paper; verso watercolour on paper
51 x 51 cm. (20⅛ x 20⅛ in.); verso 49 x 46.5 cm. (19¼ x 18¼ in.)
£5,750 + ARR
Graham Sutherland OM (1903-1980)
Teeming Pit, 1941
charcoal, black ink, watercolour, gouache and pastel on paper, laid down on board
51 x 38.5 cm. (20⅛ x 15⅛ in.)
Literature:
R. Tassi, Sutherland: The wartime drawings, Milan, 1979, p. 127, fig. 122 (with incorrect dimensions).
Great British Drawings, exh. cat., Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, 2015, p. 258, no. 100, note 3.
In 1938 Graham Sutherland’s friend and mentor Sir Kenneth Clark was appointed head of the War Artists Advisory Committee, and he engaged Sutherland as an official War Artist from 1940 to 1945. Sutherland first depicted scenes of bomb damage in London, then turned his attention to studies of industrial production on the home front; tin mining in Cornwall, blast furnaces in South Wales, open cast coal mining and limestone quarrying. Most of his works from this period were acquired by the War Artist’s Advisory Commission and presented to museums around the country.
At the end of September 1941 Sutherland was sent to make drawings of the large blast furnaces at the Guest, Keen and Baldwin Steel Works in Cardiff. The artist was fascinated by the almost alchemical processes in steel manufacturing, and by the huge furnaces and crucibles, the molten steel and the red and yellow glow of the huge flames. As Malcolm Yorke has noted, “Now all his sunset colours could be deployed again in the flow of molten iron, flames belching from furnace doors, glowing crusts of slag and the plop and seeth of boiling metal...In this dramatic black and red inferno the steel-men risked their lives teeming super-heated metals, feeding the voracious furnaces and tapping the outflow.” Executed in a rich combination of different media and techniques, this vibrant drawing depicts the process of ‘teeming’ in steel manufacture, namely, the pouring of molten steel into ingot moulds.
£80,000 + ARR
Graham Sutherland OM (1903-1980)
Green Tree Form
signed and dated lower right Sutherland, 62
gouache on paper
23 x 15.5 cm. (9 x 6⅛in.)
£18,500 + ARR
Prunella Clough (1919-1999)
Dark Flower, 1997
oil on canvas
30.5 x 35 cm. (12 x 13¾ in.)
£12,500 + ARR
Sir Grayson Perry CBE RA Hon FRIBA (b.1960)
Grotesque Devil Head, 1988
glazed stoneware
29.3 x 16 x 29.5 cm. (11½ x 6¼ x 11⅜ in.)
Sold
Sir Grayson Perry CBE RA Hon FRIBA (b.1960)
Goblet, 1987
Raku ceramic
19 cm. (7½ in.)
£75,000 + ARR
Dame Paula Rego DBE RA (1935-2022)
Dame with Goat’s Foot 1 (Undressing the Divine Lady), 2011-12
pastel on paper
137 x 102 cm. (54 x 40⅛ in.)
Provenance:
Private Collection.
Literature:
Paula Rego: Dame with the Goat’s Foot and Other Stories, exh. cat., Marlborough Gallery, London, 2013, cat. no. 1 (illus., also shown in an installation photograph of the artist’s studio).
Exhibited:
Cascais, Portugal, Casas das Historias Paula Rego, Paula Rego and Adriana Molder: A Dama Pé-de-Cabra, 7 July – 28 October 2012.
London, Marlborough Gallery, Paula Rego: Dame with the Goat’s Foot and Other Stories, 25 January – 1 March 2013.
Dame with Goat’s Foot 1 (Undressing the Divine Lady), 2011–12, belongs to an important body of work that takes inspiration from and is a visual retelling of A Dama Pé-de-Cabra, a nineteenth-century story by the Portuguese novelist and historian Alexandre Herculano. In Herculano’s tale, the goat-footed protagonist is the Devil in disguise, determined to seduce and destroy the man who will become her husband. Rego, liberating the character from the male fantasy of a devilishly seductive villain, reimagines the story as part of a broader narrative about the dynamics of relationships – mindful that tragedy translates in ancient Greek as ‘goat-song’.
Writing about the series, the American art critic and historian Donald Kuspit notes, “In Rego’s Undressing the Goat-Feet Lady she sits enthroned above Diogo. He sits at her feet, his right hand pointing to her lap – her genital area – his left hand holding her left goat foot, inviting us to compare human hand and goat foot, suggesting their bizarre affinity. He stares at us with melancholy desperation, suggesting his unhappiness at discovering that his wife is a devil, and drawing us into the picture as though we also are devil-worshippers. Her right hand holds an upright guitar, suggestive of her shapely body, and, more to the point, her affinity with the ancient sirens whose song drove men mad, as Homer tells us in Odysseus.”
POA
Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956)
Palimpsest
inscribed and dated on the verso P / A. O. SPARE / “Palimpsest” / 6-2=143
pencil and watercolour on board
49 x 30.8 cm. (19¼ x 12⅛ in.)
£35,000 + ARR
Michael Ayrton (1921-1975)
Untitled, 1952
signed and dated lower left Michael Ayrton 52
charcoal, pencil and chalk on paper
60.5 x 40.5 cm. (23⅞ x 16 in.)
£3,750 + ARR
Gilbert Spencer RA (1892-1979)
A Sudden Return Home, 1946
signed and dated lower left G Spencer 1946
oil over pencil on canvas
46 x 35.5 cm. (18 x 14 in.)
£9,500 + ARR
Gilbert & George (b. 1943; 1942)
Bone View, 2022
mixed media
151 x 127 cm. (59½ x 50 in.)
Not Available
Dame Elisabeth Frink CH DBE RA (1930-1993)
Bird, 1959
signed on base
bronze
height: 38.1 cm. (15 in.)
edition of 6
Provenance:
Beaux Arts Gallery, London.
Jean Marsden, UK, acquired from the above in June 1997; and
thence by descent to
Private Collection, UK.
Literature:
E. Mullins, The Art of Elisabeth Frink, 1972, no. 19 (another cast illus.).
B. Robertson, Elisabeth Frink Sculpture: Catalogue Raisonné, 1984, pp. 148-49, no. 56 (another cast
illus.).
Elisabeth Frink: Sculpture and Drawings 1952-1984, exh. cat., Royal Academy, London, 1985, pp. 12 & 50, no. 12.
A. Ratuszniak, Frink Catalogue Raisonné: Sculpture 1947-93, 2013, p. 66, no. FCR67 (another cast illus.).
C. Winner, Frink: Humans and other Animals, The Sainsbury Centre, UEA, 2018, p. 106 (another cast illus.).
Exhibited:
New York, The Bertha Schaefer Gallery, Elisabeth Frink, 1959 (another cast exh.).
London, Royal Academy, Frink, 1985 (another cast exh.).
The beak of the present bird has strong claims to be the most formidable beak in all of Frink’s representations of the subject. Complete with carrion the bird radiates aggression and belligerence - the head and neck of the present sculpture being compared with the “nose of a fighter plane” (op. cit., B. Robertson, p. 56). Sarah Kent in the introduction to the RA Exhibition in 1985 writes that “the first hint of real aggression comes with Bird 1959, his head and body a taut horizontal bar ready, at a moment’s notice, to lunge and strike without mercy…”
“In the emphasis on beak, claws and wings…they were really vehicles for strong feelings of panic, tension, aggression and predatoriness,” Frink wrote, but cautioned “that they were not surrogates for human beings or states of being.”
£60,000 + ARR
John Minton (1917-1957)
Figure in a Deserted Landscape, 1942
initialled and dated lower right J. M. 1942
gouache, ink and oil on board
50.8 x 71.1 cm. (20 x 28 in.)
£38,000 + ARR
Tristram Hillier RA (1905-1983)
Trouvaille, 1962
signed lower right Hillier and titled and dated on the verso TROUVAILLE 1962
oil on panel
18 x 25.5 cm. (7 x 10 in.)
£28,000 + ARR
Graham Vivian SUTHERLAND (1903 – 1980)
Cockerel, 1961
signed and dated lower left Sutherland 10.6.61
ink on paper, on octagonal cut sheet
image: 17.2 x 16 cm. (6.8 x 6.3 in.)
£4,500 + ARR
John Minton (1917-1957)
Figures in a landscape
signed lower left John Minton
pen and ink on paper
24 by 31 cm. (9 1/2 x 12 1/5 in.)
£4,500 + ARR
Damien Hirst (b.1965)
Abacus – The Dream is Dead, 2007
incised, titled and numbered on the verso Abacus Damien Hirst The Dream is dead 2/12 and hallmarked on the lower jaw
silver
14.5 x 14 x 21 cm. (5¾ x 5½ x 8¼ in.)
edition 2 of 12
$85,000 USD + ARR
‘Every work that has ever interested me is about death... I used to think that decoration was something negative in art: something that I always wanted to avoid…But when you are dealing with death, decoration is a humble thing – it works really well. So I started thinking about decoration and death. Decorating something you don’t understand is a great way of coming to terms with it.’
— Damien Hirst
Keith Vaughan (1912-1977)
Youth with Outstretched Arms, c. 1950
studio stamped on the verso
pencil on paper
25 x 19.5 cm. (10 x 7¾ in.)
£4,250 + ARR
Mat Collishaw Hon. FRPS (b. 1966)
Ultraviolet Angel, 1993
steel, UV bulb, paper, UV sensitive ink and wire
36.2 x 27.3 cm. (14 1/4 x 10 3/4 in.)
£10,000 + ARR
Andy Warhol (1928-1987)
Self Portrait with Fright Wig, 1986
unique polaroid print
10.8 x 8.9 cm. (4¼ x 3½ in.)
£32,000