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‱967) 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‱920, 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.
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.
After studying at the Cleveland School of Art, 1912‱916, Burchfield returned to work for five years at W.H. Mullins Company, a local metal-fabricating factory. His pattern was to walk home on lunch breaks from his job to work on watercolors, and continue to paint at night and on weekends. He found subjects in his immediate surroundings †views from his windows, the family garden, houses and churches with personalities, including faces and raging snowstorms turning to slush on Salem’s streets.
Burchfield roamed around the countryside, recording farmhouses and rural scenes in a lush, idiosyncratic style that incorporated sounds of insects, vibrating telephone lines, deep ravines, pelting rainstorms and other sudden atmospheric changes. These watercolors were often flooded with highly expressionistic light, creating mystical and visionary experiences of nature. In 1917, which he called his “Golden Year,” Burchfield created numerous nature dreamscapes, including his family’s backyard garden in “Childhood’s Garden,” 1917.
In 1919, he was discharged from the US Army following a brief, unhappy stint in a camouflage unit. At age 25, armed with a new perspective on life and his career, Burchfield went through a period of introspection and experimentation. He read Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio , a novel that explored the loneliness and frustrations of Midwestern small-town life and other unsparing regionalist novels by Willa Cather and Sinclair Lewis. This exposure encouraged Burchfield to question whether he should continue basing his work on childhood memories, and to look more closely at the people and buildings in and around Salem.
Concluding that he had “run up a blind alley,” he decided to “look at life as an adult American of the present.” Some saw in the new direction of his art a hatred of Salem, which he vehemently denied. He acknowledged that “Much&⁉ hated justly and would go on hating to my last breath †modern industrialism, the deplorable condition in certain industrial fields, such as steel works and mining sections, American smugness and intolerance and conceited provincialism †to mention only a few of our major evils.”
Responding in his art, he said that “By instinct I adopted an anachronistic palette and a harsh stroke&•
In spite of his laundry list of things he disliked about Midwest American life, Burchfield also found “many things to love and admire or find poetry in&• He became interested in what he called “our tag-end pioneer days †the false front stores and wooden sidewalks, old frame houses and other buildings of former days&• Burchfield said that “what interested me about them was their picturesquesness, and in some cases, quaint humor and romance of days departed.” He added, “If I presented them in all their garish and crude primitiveness and unlovely decay, it was merely through a desire to be honest about them&⁁s far as possible I tried to let these buildings speak for themselves. In their own language, I being merely their interpreter.”
In his catalog essay, historian and artist Michael D. Hall posits that Burchfield was a smart and ambitious artist who employed his talents to achieve sustained success “within his cultural milieu.” The artist’s own copious journals document that he was a “student of the art of painting” who had the knowledge and inclination to experiment with Modernism as a means to “improve” his art.
As an artist “more strategic and culturally attuned than the furtive, Victorian autodidact” suggested by his journals, says Hall, “Burchfield deliberately applied Modernist motifs to a number of house pictures.” Continues Hall, “In an obvious effort to experiment with new ways of seeing, Burchfield set aside both his knowledge of traditional perspective and his youthful predilection for totally flat decorative design when he composed&⁛the] unique series of works” in the current exhibition.
Encouraging his stylistic experiments were likely his exposure to French artists Paul Gauguin and Paul Cezanne, who emphasized simplified forms, pictorial geometry and vibrant colors. Burchfield’s “Snow Patterns,” 1920, with its low perspective and snow-covered roofs, puts one in mind of Gauguin’s views of snow-covered Brittany houses.
Other American artists were incorporating Post-Impressionism, Cubism and other facets of European Modernism into their work during this period, notably Maurice Prendergast, who utilized stacked spaces in his shoreline scenes. Hall finds marked similarities between Prendergast’s pictures of people at leisure on New England beaches and Burchfield’s “Factory and Houses,” circa 1920.
Burchfield’s career-long sense of fantasy, augmented by his interest in primitive and folk art, contributed to some of the most compelling works of the 1918‱920 period. “New Moon in January,” 1918, for instance, features a brightly lit house whose roof appears about to collapse under the weight of a heavy snowfall. Two small figures within whet our appetite to know what they are up to.
“Corner House,” circa 1920, appears to droop and sway above slushy streets. The structure seems to quiver with mystery and the animation the artist often associated with structures in his home area. To some extent here, and more so in “February Thaw,” 1920, one wonders what secrets may be hidden behind the shrouded facades. Even after 1920, when Burchfield returned to fantastical scenes of nature, with few houses in sight, he retained a primitivist spirit in his work.
In the starkly simple “Two Houses,” circa 1920, Burchfield harked back to the modest, weathered houses he knew growing up in Salem. ‘”Two Houses’ reminds us,” writes Hall, “that patience, memory, experimentation and synthesis were as much a part of Charles Burchfield’s art-making process as were the brushes and paints that he kept on his work table.”
In “Houses in the Snow,” circa 1920, three dark brown/black houses are starkly outlined against the snow, while plumes of smoke rise from chimneys of two residences. These blue-collar structures, conveying a mysterious aura, prompt questions about what is going on inside.
In “Sleet Storm,” 1920, the modest house directly across the street from Buchfield’s place takes on an animated look amidst piles of snow and icicles and sleet accumulated on its façade. On the sidewalk out front a stooped, bundled up man, presumably a rent collector, slogs through the snow.
In “Red Buildings,” 1920, Burchfield focused on the severe geometry of a cluster of industrial structures replete with smokestacks and faceless windows. It is an exercise in Cubist spacing.
A formidable plant belching black smoke dominates the middle background of “Factory and Houses,” circa 1920, while two snow-covered houses, likely occupied by workers and their families, suggest the circumscribed, small-town life of their occupants. As Burchfield put it, he favored painting “portraits of individual houses designed to show just what sort of people lived in them.”
In another wintry composition, “Houses in a Snowy Winter Landscape,” circa 1920, two rows of modest one-story residences adjoin an empty train tunnel. The single track disappears into the spooky darkness of the tunnel headed toward a mysterious symbol that beckons the viewer in.
The most dramatic scenes from this period are Burchfield’s depictions of flaming coke ovens that operated outside Salem, such as “Star and Fires,” circa 1920, and “Coke Ovens At Night,” 1920, eruptions of orange, yellow and white, set against dark brown/black landscapes, suggest the artist’s concerns about the intrusions of modern industry into rural Ohio.
The exhibition underscores the importance of this period of regional Modernism and depiction of larger themes to the totality of Burchfield’s oeuvre. “In these pictures,” say Maciejunes and Wurzelbacher, “we see the introduction of the subject matter that would occupy him for the remainder of his life, as well as the deliberate development of a style that extends elements of his early approach and anchors the remainder of his production.” They conclude, “for Charles Burchfield, at least, Modernism and the American Scene are one in the same.”
Moving to Buffalo in 1921 to work as a wallpaper designer, Burchfield continued to create large watercolors that reflected his intense interest in nature and his mysterious, fantastic take on the subject.
The exhibition catalog contains thoughtful essays by Hall and by Maciejunes and Wurzelbacher. Published by DC Moore Gallery, it sells for $50.
Burchfield fans will also be interested in a comprehensive exhibition, “Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield,” on view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, October 4⁊anuary 3, and traveling to the Whitney Museum of American Art in the summer of 2010.
The Burchfield Penney Art Center, on the campus of Buffalo State College, is at 1300 Elmwood Avenue. For information, 716-878-6011 or www.BurchfieldPenney.org .
