Meat is murder … With her makeup, bobbed hair and baubles, the thoroughly modern woman in The Snack Bar from 1930 is likely meant to be a prostitute. The painting is full of innuendo and violent undertones: mouths, furs, servings of meat. There are castration anxieties aplenty, from the barman slicing off a phallic strip of ham, to the confident dame’s bared teeth about to bite down.
Night in the city … The buzzing cafe decor and groceries, the blaring bulbs and luminous signs in the street outside all announce the noise and non-stop nocturnal life of the city.
Pulp fictions … Burra defied chronic illness to forge a career as an artist, travelling through Europe to observe metropolitan scenes, from dock sides to jazz bars. He loved lowbrow cinema, the murderers and floozies of pulp fiction, and George Grosz’s scathing brothel scenes, all of which inform this, one of his best-known works.
My kind of town … This is more playful than Grosz’s relentlessly dark vision, however, embracing the energy of a seedy urban world.
Included in Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One, Tate Britain, SW1, to 23 Sep
