Edward Burra – an 'electrifying' exhibition at Tate Britain

Edward Burra was a trailblazer, said Nancy Durrant in The Times. Whether painting the "Bright Young Things" of the 1920s, or scenes from the Spanish Civil War, Burra (1905- 1976) was "as acute an observer as any journalist", capturing all he saw in expressive, louche and bawdy scenes mostly painted from memory.

A notable "boozehound" and an obsessive jazz lover, he painted "pubs, clubs and cabarets", "shops, speakeasies and seedy streets". Born to a wealthy family in west London, he was disabled from childhood, suffering from chronic rheumatoid arthritis and anaemia; he spent most of his life with his parents in Rye, East Sussex.

Nevertheless, he travelled widely, recording everything with the same photographic eye for the low life – whether in London, Barcelona, Marseille or Harlem. This retrospective at Tate Britain, his first in London for 40 years, presents him as "one of the most distinctive yet overlooked artists of the 20th century". Bringing together dozens of pictures created throughout his career, it tells his story "through his travels and the art forms that influenced him".

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Burra was "an odd, cussed, unique figure", said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. Inspired equally by Hogarth and European modernism, he was a consummate social satirist. His 1929 picture "The Tea Shop", for instance, sees two "prudishly polite women" gazing back at us, somehow ignoring the fact that the waiting staff behind the counter are largely naked.

His pictures of nightlife in 1920s Paris are "wondrously hedonistic": he seems "amazed and delighted" by France's freedoms. Yet Burra was also a "reactionary": he sympathised with the fascist cause during Spain's Civil War. His "big, busy, booming watercolours" of the conflict treat it "as a gaudy spectacle" and parrot the Francoist propaganda line that the Republicans were destroying churches and killing the clergy. For some reason, the Tate never acknowledges this. Here, we get a sanitised version of the artist, supposedly a champion of "queer culture" – when his sexuality was "mysterious", and his art was complex and "ambivalent".

Burra's pictures are "electrifying" nonetheless, said Mark Hudson in The Independent. Wherever the artist roamed, his works captured "an atmosphere of tumultuous, slightly sinister hedonism", bolstered by meticulous details of any given social milieu.

"Savoy Ballroom, Harlem (1934), for example, documents his "sense of wonder" on visiting the centre of African-American life in New York, "without a trace of exoticising distance". Closer to home, we get suggestions of his (possibly) closeted sexuality: "Soldiers at Rye" (1941), for example, imagines the conscripts stationed in his hometown erupting into "a homoerotic bacchanal". Burra was "one of the great mavericks" of 20th century British art – and this show is a must.

Tate Britain, London SW1. Until 19 October