![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
|||
Burchfield's earliest paintings, many of them painted on weekends and during his lunch breaks from the wallpaper factory, are technically unsteady but often show an extraordinary visual imagination. Decorative Landscape, Shadow (Willows on Vine Street) (1916, 50x35cm; in the collection of the Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Museum, Utica, NY) is a perceptual puzzle and a poem of transfiguration. In 1917 Burchfield experienced some kind of mental crisis or spiritual event that entirely transformed his painting style. He developed a detailed system of personal signs, linear forms rather like letters or alchemical signs, that denoted basic emotions such as fear or despair and that could be woven into his pictures as decorative patterns or the outlines of everyday objects. He also settled on a variety of everyday symbols birds, stars, sunlight, moonlight, trees, flowers, dark pools of water to represent aspects of himself, his body, his spiritual yearnings and emotional states. In this early mature style, natural forms are rendered with abstract, nervous outlines more suitable to a wood block print or an ikat rug from Tashkent; the colors are flat, without nuanced washes or diffuse shadows. Some paintings even record the tapping of woodpeckers or the chirping of crickets as synesthesic vibrating lines and auras. |
|
||||||
After a decade of painting in this vatic style (as well as in a lyrical realism of small town buildings and country nature views), in the late 1920's Burchfield changed again into a kind of "American Scene" realism that I find dreary and dispiriting. It seems Burchfield was intentionally capitalizing on the fashion in "regionalist" painters in the late 1920's and 1930's, bringing his style toward something more comprehensible and appealing to art critics and collectors: he had a family to support and was determined to make a decent living with his art. It worked perhaps too well. He achieved wide notice as the "Sinclair Lewis of the paintbrush," and was lauded as an exponent of a uniquely American art, and to my eye never painted anything that showed a glimmer of joy or humor. But in 1943 with his family raised, his success assured, newly elected to the National Academy and feeling the willful liberty of late middle age Burchfield had another revelatory episode that turned him back to his youthful style, his old symbols and signs, and his nature animism. Burchfield is among the most difficult 20th century American painters to approach intimately. It is tempting to cast his paintings as the work of a provincial, quirky and sometimes mentally disturbed talent following its own inclinations. But this ignores Burchfield's attentive response to contemporary art trends, his rewriting and manipulated release of his diaries to fabricate a public artistic persona, and his obvious ambition and hard work. Burchfield may have capitulated to art trends in his "regionalist" paintings, but his early and late works show a brilliant visual imagination restlessly seeking the artistic equivalents for a transcendental and highly individual vision of the natural world.
There is no comprehensive reference to Burchfield's work, which is scattered across many collections and has not yet been definitively catalogued. The Paintings of Charles Burchfield: North by Midwest by Nannette Maciejunes & Michael Hall (Harry Abrams, 1997) contains a large selection of paintings and 9 essays by art scholars, and is probably the best single introduction to his range. Charles Burchfield by Matthew Baigell (Watson-Guptill, 1976), now out of print, is an interesting survey and appreciation of Burchfield's work, marred by the large number of black-and-white reproductions and a superficial grasp of the paintings. The Whitney Museum's Charles Burchfield, the catalog to its 1956 retrospective exhibit, is a brief overview and appreciation of his work while he was still alive again with too many black-and-white reproductions. |
|||||||