In the 1950s Burra moved away from the often dark and menacing figurative scenes, which preoccupied his early career and adopted a new genre: the still life. These richly coloured, bountiful pictures, which echoed the more hopeful epoch of the 1950s proved popular and sold consistently well through his London dealers. Burra exclaimed, 'I seem to be having quite a little success with flower paintings and my little success has not gone to my head as they say in the song. I suppose they don't frighten people’.

Although, true to Burra’s character, his still lifes were not merely decorative. As always, there remained an underlying menace and an element of the sinister in these works. This sense of drama and theatricality was noted by David Sylvester in his review of Burra’s 1957 exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery, in which Tulips in a Yellow Pot was exhibited. He argued that these works were, 'perhaps the most pungent things Burra has ever given us, because they are more subtle pictorially than the subject pictures: they are also more vividly, more intensely, striking and disturbing, precisely because they need nothing other than their spiky shapes and clashing colours to make them so’ (D. Sylvester, 25 May 1957, quoted in A. Causey, Edward Burra: The Complete Catalogue, Oxford, 1985, p. 73).

The subject of the still life served as a vehicle through which Burra could further explore the imaginative and disturbing narratives that had previously occupied him. John Rothenstein recalled his friends bleak outlook, remembering Burra’s words, "Everything," he said to me, "looks menacing; I'm always expecting something calamitous to happen”’ (J. Rothenstein, exhibition catalogue, Edward Burra, London, Tate Gallery, 1973, p. 35). This sense of menace can be seen in Tulips in a Yellow Pot in the spiky forms of the bright flowers and the dark inky background of furled leaves surrounding them, which appear to speak of death and decay and threaten to engulf them. Here Burra’s still life takes on an animate and almost human quality. Simon Martin explains, ‘In the late 1950s and early 1960s Burra returned to the still life with a series of paintings of flowers, such as Tulips in a Yellow Pot in which the flowers have an almost human presence, so that the flower heads appear like eyes looking out’ (S. Martin, ‘The Danse Macabre: Burra’s Dark Side’, in exhibition catalogue, Edward Burra, Chichester, Pallant House Gallery, 2011, p. 102). This connection was previously recongised by Rothenstein, who in 1973 observed, ‘So highly evolved has become his power of endowing inanimate objects with the quality of mysterious threat that human beings have become less and less necessary features of his art’ (J. Rothenstein, quoted in ibid., p. 102).

We are very grateful to Professor Jane Stevenson for her assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.

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