Personal Blogs

A queer approach to sexual preference labelling in art-history: looking at case studies in British mid-twentieth century art: 6. Reflecting on Edward Burra through new material from Minton

The aim of this group of blogs is to look critically at some of the publications relating to gay male artists in the mid-twentieth century. This is in part to begin trawling for a dissertation topic for my MA in Art History. My initial thoughts relate to focusing on one of these artists, although their contexts include each other, their treatment of male nudes in relation to the iconographic, contextual and stylistic features which propose such a subject for art (for some of the choices this will include photography as well as painting) and ‘queer theory’. This will look at the issue of labelling of course, particularly at the important terminology of ‘homosexuality’, which dominated the period. My hypothesis will probably be that such a term was, and remains, a means of marginalising, even to the point of negation, of such art. This blog looks at some reflections on

Reading this by Minton pulled me up short:

For that is at the heart of a problem to explore. For Minton, being a ‘homosexual’ was the cause of his failure to produce great art and is here made equivalent to the same kinds of reason to which his suicide is sometimes (wrongly, I believe) attributed. The question should not be one of identity but of labelling and of the constraints in self-definition and self-expression this involves. For Minton, language being what it is, this state of weakness was equated with the word ‘queer’ too, used as a word of labelling Abuse.

Queer theory attempts to look at ways in which destabilised norms (not just sexual ones) allows open up our assumptions about the normal and fracture the ideological glue that holds them together. It may be that, for Minton, holding notions of self that inbuilt weakness were precisely the source of his indecisive ambiguities, in that he saw them not as a strength that exposed the constructions of the symbolic world but as a characterisation of self as other, weak to its strong stability. That Minton could be a wonderful painter, worthy of survival is shown I think when he began to paint men of other cultures. Simon Faulkner (cited Martin 201b[2]:63) argues that these images succeed because of the painter’s ‘avoidance of the overt queering of the black male body’. In fact Minton did not overtly queer any other male bodies, although, of course Burra did do so with all the bodies in his early art. Minton’s is in producing images of desire that queer his entire picture – that stop us making easy assumptions about identity or relationship in his most successful (and some less so) male figures and opening up potential.

So perhaps we need to look briefly at Burra via Martin (2011)[3]. Although it is true that there is overt queering of the white and black body in Burra, it is not always straightforward in its picture of desire – nor do I think it makes a virtue of labelling its figures or overall meaning ‘homosexual’. His great picture The Straw Man (1963) surely shows this, in ways it would be difficult to explain in few words, so I’ll use that as an excuse to leave it there.

The Straw Man (1963) Pallant House Gallery (on loan from private collection). Available at: http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/painting-and-drawing/art366630

In less great pictures, there may be a case for seeing ‘overt queering’, often using very obvious stereotypes, such as the sailor (see Three Sailors at the Bar 1930 & Dockside Café 1929). Yet even here there are complexities in which turn some signs of homosexuality (such as rings or the colour ‘pink’ in the 1929 painting) in on themselves in my view. These points need arguing but this is not the point of the blog per se. That is, to say that the weakness of ‘queer’ figurative art and the association of its key figures with suicide are not symptoms of ‘homosexuality’ (whether that oppressive term is considered as a medical-disease terminology or not in any part of its recent history) but of the norms, whose power queer art at its most successful overturns – both in its mimetic representations and compositional character. Let’s say it, Straw Man is a picture about liminality – desire turned violent in which the aesthetic, the meanings and the limbs of figures are all queered by contradictions and uncertainties. I think this is true of the early art but also true of the later non-figurative landscapes in which boundaries take on liminality and no road is ever ‘straight’ nor its determination known. 

My first Burra painting (in terms of seeing an original) was the haunting Near Whitby, Yorkshire (1972), where meaning, shape and colour are all queered in ways in which destabilises (most gratifyingly) that most ideological of terminologies -  of ‘nature’ and the ‘natural’.  This is done too in in his 1971 pointing Snowdonia No.2 where forms themselves are liminal between mist and apparition too, but too obviously and pointedly. The Near Whitby painting just ‘haunts’ and is more successfully Gothic than any of his less satisfying (excluding his wonderful Don Quixote set sketches and theatre furniture) fantasies from the 1940s.

In truth, Burra too is about unpacking and then discarding the term ‘homosexual’. It is too queer to be about such a dangerous and endangering stereotype of self as ‘the homosexual’. Only the latter is on the side of suicide – the former is about creative relief from norms that fail to either offer mimesis or vital internally conflictual art forms.

All the best

Steve