Edward Burra

(British, 1905-1976)

Dr Fu Manchu 61 x 48.9 cm. (24 x 19 1/4 in.) Executed in 1931

Footnotes

Provenance
With The Lefevre Gallery, London, where acquired by the family of the present owner
Thence by descent
Private Collection, U.K.

Literature
Andrew Causey, Edward Burra: Complete Catalogue, Phaidon, Oxford, 1985, cat.no.80 (ill.b&w)

A fictional character from a series of novels by English author Sax Rohmer, Dr. Fu Manchu is characterized by his goal to conquer the Western world using his hordes of henchmen and collection of mysterious tools. First appearing in The Insidious Dr Fu-Manchu in 1912, he was featured in cinema, television, radio, comic strips and books for over 90 years, becoming an archetype of the evil, criminal genius. A number of novels were produced until 1917 when the character took a fourteen-year absence before re-emerging with a vengeance in The Daughter of Fu-Manchu in 1931, the same year the present work was painted.

As a voracious enthusiast of popular culture, Burra would have been very familiar with the character of Fu Manchu and it is likely the figure portrayed here depicts (or rather, in Burra's inimitable manner, partly suggests) one of his female conspirators. The original story details how Fu Manchu sent a woman to check if his target had been successfully murdered and she is described as 'A girl wrapped in a hooded opera-cloak stood at my elbow, and, as she glanced up at me, I thought that I never had seen a face so seductively lovely nor of so unusual a type. With the skin of a perfect blonde, she had eyes and lashes as black as a Creole's, which, together with her full red lips, told me that this beautiful stranger, whose touch had so startled me, was not a child of our northern shores.' The author further recounts her 'slim hand with jewelled fingers', 'big questioning eyes' and the 'bloom of her red lips, due to art not to nature'. Burra, perhaps more so than any other artist, is a master of the strange and the sinister and here is our accomplice, complete with the aforementioned wide eyes and ruby red painted mouth set against lurid green skin in the artist's typically grotesque fashion. Surrounding her is the evidence of her labour – a bloodied knife and even severed body parts such as eyes and ears can be located nestling amongst cheering imagery such as fruit, bright blooms and even pastoral animals. This combination of the malignant with the benign is signature Burra and leads to an overall strangeness in keeping with Surrealist affinities.

Painted in the early 1930s during the artist's most critically successful period, a Surrealist influence is clear to see in Dr Fu Manchu through the skewed perspective, heightened palette and unnerving portraits (both recto and verso) and it is easy to understand how, with Burra's love of theatre and the macabre, the subject appealed.