In this early watercolor, "Landscape with Orange Sun,” 1916, Burchfield inserted a bright orange sun to bring a touch of bleak poetry to the stark architecture of a played-out Ohio town. DC Moore Gallery, New York City.
:Those who knew him said Charles Burchfield looked like an unassuming, reticent small-town bookkeeper or accountant. Indeed, he held down mundane jobs for years until he became a wallpaper designer and eventually a full-time artist.
In reality, Burchfield (1893–1967) was one of America's most original artists and a premier Twentieth Century watercolorist. He gained fame for colorful, romantic, fantastic explorations of childhood memories and of nature, such as "Insect Chorus," 1917. He had an uncanny ability to turn an ordinary scene, say, a house across the street or a backyard garden, into an otherworldly dreamscape largely detached from reality, like his expressionist take on a Salem church, "Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night," 1917. His was a special style of watercolor painting that reflected distinctly American subjects — he never left the United States — and profound respect for the natural world.
Most of Burchfield's watercolors reflect fantasy interpretations of his childhood dreams and adult visions. The major exception started around 1918–1920, when he applied his knowledge of European Modernist strategies to reduce his compositions to simplified components, and painted more abstractly with flattened space and arbitrary colors. The result was a series of austere architectural vignettes that reflected a skeptical native's interpretation of the vernacular structures in and around small Midwestern towns — stark houses and industrial landscapes, stylized puffs of smoke, mines, railroad yards and barren trees. These innovative explorations of regional subjects tied in with the emerging American Scene painting movement, most prominently associated with Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood.
Mirroring Burchfield's interest in smoke-belching plants and those who work there, in "Factory and Houses,” circa 1920, he depicted a smoky factory looming over modest workers' houses. The scene suggests the circumscribed world of small-town factory employees. C.E. Burchfield Foundation stamp no. B-149, lower right.
The evolution of this new aesthetic is documented in the first exhibition on this period in the artist's life, "Charles Burchfield, 1920: The Architecture of Painting," on view at the Burchfield Penney Art Center at Buffalo State College through November 29.
Burchfield and his four siblings were raised by a single mother in a lower-middle-class neighborhood of Salem, Ohio. Today, the house at 867 East Fourth Street is maintained much as it looked in Burchfield's day and in a virtually intact neighborhood from which the embryonic artist drew inspiration. Restored for public visitation by the Burchfield Homestead Society, a local grassroots organization, the modest, two-story structure contains original furnishings, reproductions of Burchfield watercolors in rooms they depict or from which they were painted and a revived garden out back. Visiting the homestead is much like being there in 1911 when Burchfield was finishing high school as class valedictorian, and during the period he worked in Salem until 1921.
The Weaver house, maintained next door as a visitors center, was depicted from Burchfield's bedroom window in "Night Wind," 1918. Dramatic and expressive, the low-slung structure looks agitated in the face of a howling, wintry wind, with ghostly forms — one with yellow eyes — looming overhead. "House in November Evening," 1919, offers a more realistic view of the simplified vernacular architecture of the brown one-story cottage, lights ablaze inside.
The series featuring the next-door Weaver house reflects "Burchfield's intimate knowledge and observation of his surroundings and the personal, emotional resonance they had for him," write the show's curator, Nannette V. Maciejunes, executive director of the Columbus Museum, and art historian Karli R. Wurzelbacher.
