Skip to main content

Back to Burra

A second visit to the Edward Burra exhibition at the Pallant Gallery in Chichester and a simple question from my companion as to which picture (or period) I preferred.

Today I plumped for the 30s pictures of the French cities,  shows, streets and bars and one in particular, that I cannot find an internet image for, 'The Nitpickers'.

Here a group of off-duty prostitutes gather in the street of a Marseilles or Toulon and the heavy framed woman in the foreground address one of the hazards of her life, scratching her head to expel (or find relief from) 'nits'. Behind a half-opened screen you see her bed, crumpled, waiting and a lamp above the doorway, presumably the archetypal 'red lamp'. Around her, resting, smoking, pondering nothing in particular, are other women and the narrow street stretches back and out towards the blue of the sky (and sea).

It is a picture of pause, of rest, of ordinariness. The prostitutes are neither exalted nor eroticized nor judged. This is what people do, have done, will do. The first response must be to see them in the round, the full range of who they are, and see them in disinterested but engaging compassion. This is what Edward Burra does, and reminds us that though there are many harsher hazards of 'being on the game' many of them are ordinary, inconvenient, shorn of condemnation (and of glamour).

It is unusual to think of Burra as a Christian painter - though his explicitly religious paintings are very powerful, they are small in number and like most of his work little commented upon by him - but I think of this painting (and many like them) as those works that T.S. Eliot would call implicitly Christian. They ask us to see the 'others' (of disapproved occupation or despised race) as human, ordinarily human, just like us, immersed in the multi-coloured pattern of good, evil and the uncanny, in which we all live and navigate our way.

I think there is a quiet assumption amongst the clean living of proper morals (as defined by themselves) that Jesus preferred the company of 'sinners' because he was on a mission to clean them up and make them like 'us', packed away in tidy moral boxes, but I expect that he preferred them because they were more honest, more able to recognize their own shadows, and more limited in projecting those shadows on others.



It was not the prostitutes who killed Christ or turned on his own cross to recognize Him, it was the 'good' citizens whose 'ideals' he had betrayed.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age

Searching for paradise in the hidden Himalayas

At moments of dislocation and intense social uncertainty people will appear offering the possibility of another land where people will be blessed, liberated and genuinely at home. In this case, it was not 'Brexit' but a hidden land of actual immortality, enfolded within the mountain ranges around Mt Kanchenjunga on the Nepalese/Sikkim border. Unlike Shangri-la, Beyul Demoshong was not simply a physical space, carefully hidden (as imagined in Hilton's Lost Horizon) but an occulted place spiritually hidden. The person offering this journey and opening the way to it was the 'crazy lama', Tulshuk Lingpa. Lingpa was a 'terton' a finder of 'terma' which were texts magically hidden until discovered at the right moment for them to be of maximum usefulness to people's spiritual development. They were often hidden by Padmasambhava, the robust wonder-working bringer of Buddhism to Tibet; and, Tibetan Buddhism is alive with such discoveries (though und

Parzival and the neutral angels

Fresh from contemplating 'Lost Christianity', I read Lindsay Clarke's fabulous re-telling of Wolfram von Eschenbach's poem, 'Parzival and the Stone from Heaven' from which 'Christendom' is lost! Von Eschenbach was a sacred poet but one of ecumenical sympathies where not only is Parzival's final battle (unknowingly) with his brother, the piebald Saracen, Feirefiz, essential to his self-discovery but the two of them enter the Grail castle together and are granted together a vision of the 'stone' that is the Grail. When Feirefiz asks whether it is permitted to see this Christian  mystery, Parzival answers (in Clarke's version) yes for, "all Nature's increase is there, so I think that this stone from Heaven must be a living emblem of the earth itself, which is mother and father to us all." There are knights, ladies, sorcerers, hermits and wise old hags abounding in Eschenbach's world but interestingly for a mediev