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拍品专文
Much of Burra's work from the mid-1930s to mid-1940s was influenced by his reactions to the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Burra had travelled to Spain on several occasions during the 1930s and witnessed the escalating unrest in a country for which he felt a deep affection, and the pictures that he painted at this time fused his sense of the theatrical, heightened by the influence of Spanish art, with his obvious horror at the atrocities of a civil war. Although initially there does not appear to be a direct war reference in Landscape with Red Wheels there is an overall feeling of unease and menace reinforced by the strange cloaked figure and barren trees. Burra commented to John Rothenstein, 'Everything looks menacing; I'm always expecting something calamitous to happen' (see exhibition catalogue, Edward Burra, London, Tate Gallery, 1973, p. 35).
The presence of discarded and broken wheels became a recurrent theme in Burra's work and they also feature in the foreground of Landscape with Wheels, 1937-9 (originally also owned by J.C. Thomson and sold in these rooms, 5 March 1999, lot 183, private collection). Andrew Causey comments, 'In 1937 Burra had taken up landscape again alongside his war pictures in which ruins register the collapse of this urban ideal. Though nature was not yet the dominant force in his painting, it was gradually to become so, and already provides a habitat, as in the work of Magnasco and Rosa, for the alienated gipsyish figures of Landscape with Wheels (op. cit, pp. 66-7).
The presence of discarded and broken wheels became a recurrent theme in Burra's work and they also feature in the foreground of Landscape with Wheels, 1937-9 (originally also owned by J.C. Thomson and sold in these rooms, 5 March 1999, lot 183, private collection). Andrew Causey comments, 'In 1937 Burra had taken up landscape again alongside his war pictures in which ruins register the collapse of this urban ideal. Though nature was not yet the dominant force in his painting, it was gradually to become so, and already provides a habitat, as in the work of Magnasco and Rosa, for the alienated gipsyish figures of Landscape with Wheels (op. cit, pp. 66-7).