Skull in a Landscape

image: A ghoulish, skeletal figure wearing a British steel helmet, stalks a featureless landscape against a red sky. The skull-like head has large black eye sockets and a fleshy nose. Its mouth, seen in profile, is the shape of a fish head and spine. The waving skeletal fingers have long talons.

Skulls and skeletons appeared often in Burra's work in the 1930s, and can be traced to his friendship with the American poet Conrad Aiken. Burra illustrated a de luxe edition of his poem John Deth in 1931. He was also strongly drawn to the macabre and was especially interested in the work of the Belgian artists James Ensor (1860-1949) and Felicien Rops (1833-98). Burra was appalled by the cruelty of war and saw it as descent into barbarism. In this work the grinning skull appears to mock humanity, who has brought about his own destruction. The blood red sky can be taken to symbolise death wrought by the Second World War and the flat brown landscape recalls the desolation caused by the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Edward Burra was an unconventional artist, well known for his distinctive individual style. Educated at the Chelsea School of Art and the Royal Academy of Art, Burra rose to prominence in 1929 with his first one-man exhibition. In the 1930s he was influenced by the avant-garde movements of Surrealism and abstraction without being fully integrated into either. Burra tended to work in watercolour, his style often sardonic and with macabre overtones, frequently exploring scenes of violence and destruction. This is true of Skull in a Landscape, which demonstrates Burra’s regular use of skulls and skeletons. The steel helmet of the dead man and the flat brown landscape are suggestive of the Western Front of the First World War. Simultaneously the lurid blood red sky appears to refer to the nuclear weaponry so devastatingly implemented in Japan in 1945. The grinning skull almost mocks humankind and its collective failure to prevent a second world conflict.