Charles Burchfield
Charles Burchfield
1893 - 1967
American painter. At five Burchfield moved with his family to Salem, OH, where he spent his youth. From 1912 to 1916 he studied at the Cleveland School of Art, OH. He was awarded a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, where he went in October 1916 but left after one day of classes. He returned to Salem in November, where he supported himself by working at a local metal-fabricating plant, and painted during his lunch-hours and at weekends.
Between 1915 and 1918 Burchfield painted small watercolours marked by their fantasy and arbitrary colour. In these he often painted either visual equivalents of sounds in nature, as in The Insect Chorus (1917; Utica, NY, Munson–Williams–Proctor Inst.), or re-created childhood emotions, such as fear of the dark in Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night (1917; Cleveland, OH, Mus. A.). For these works he invented symbols in a sketchbook entitled Conventions for Abstract Thoughts (New York, Kennedy Gals) in which he identified his motifs with such labels as ‘Fear’, ‘Dangerous Brooding’ and ‘Fascination of Evil’. Other watercolours from this period reflect his deep love of nature, as in Dandelion Seed Balls and Trees (1917; New York, Met.). All Burchfield’s early watercolours have a strong decorative quality derived in part from oriental art, which he had admired at the Cleveland Museum of Art during his student days. However his use of expressive colour and distortion of form were achieved independently of the example of European modernism, with which he was not familiar until much later.
In July 1918 Burchfield was drafted into the US Army, from which he was released in January 1919. In 1921 he became a designer for the wallpaper firm of M. H. Birge & Sons in Buffalo, NY, and in 1922 he married Bertha L. Kenreich. In 1925 he moved to a small house in Gardenville, a suburb of Buffalo, where he spent the rest of his life. In 1929 he left Birge to paint full time. The period 1919 to 1929 was an interlude of experiment and change in Burchfield’s work. In 1924 Guy Pène du Bois referred to Burchfield as depicting ‘the American scene’ in his paintings of provincial America (see AMERICAN SCENE PAINTING). From 1929 to 1943 he developed a predominantly realist style, in which he largely abandoned fantasy and concentrated on urban subjects. The paintings were larger in scale and more realistically handled than his earlier works on paper. He occasionally painted in oil, for example Old House by Creek (1932–8; New York, Whitney), but his preferred medium was always watercolour. He developed a distinctive watercolour technique using heavy, overlapping brushstrokes that gave the medium a notable weight and density rather than its customary transparency and sparkle. His subject-matter was the architecture and industry of Buffalo: its grim Victorian houses, the façades of which he painted to evoke faces of corresponding mood, for example Rainy Night (1929–30; San Diego, CA, Mus. A.); its industrial scenes, such as Black Iron (1935; New York, Mrs John D. Rockefeller III priv. col.); and its piles of rusty debris, which can be seen in Scrap Iron (1929; Lockport, NY, Charles Rand Penney priv. col.). Between 1936 and 1937 Fortune magazine commissioned him to paint railway yards in Pennsylvania and coal-mines in Texas and West Virginia. By 1943 Burchfield felt he had exhausted this style and made a conscious effort to revive the imaginative quality of his early work on a larger scale.
Burchfield’s late, expressionist period lasted from 1943 to 1967. He enlarged some early watercolours by pasting strips of paper around them in a style consistent with their fantasy, for example Sun and Rocks (1918, enlarged 1950; Buffalo, NY, Albright-Knox A.G.). Other watercolours followed that were not reconstructions but the result of a direct approach to nature. In these, he adapted the broad, solid technique of his middle period to expressionist rather than realist ends. By freely distorting form and colour he interpreted the moods he felt in all the changing aspects of the landscape in different seasons, light and weather. The large watercolours of this last period (often over 1.25 m wide) were the clearest expression of his faith in the ultimate spiritual meaning of nature. Outstanding examples are An April Mood (1946–55; New York, Whitney), Arctic Owl and Winter Moon (1960; Montgomery, AL, Blount Col.), Orion in Winter (1962; Lugano, Col. Thyssen–Bornemisza), and Dandelion Seed Heads and the Moon (1961–5; Wayne, NJ, Irwin Goldstein priv. col., see Trovato, p. 311). In these Burchfield affirmed unmistakably the pantheism that had informed so much of his work. He was one of the last of many American pantheists and belonged to a tradition that began in the 19th century with writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and painters of the Hudson River school, and that later embraced the Luminists and even natural historians, including John Burroughs (1837–1921) and John Muir (1838–1914). [John I. H. Baur. "Burchfield, Charles." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 4, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T012337.]
Person TypeIndividual
Terms
French, 1864 - 1901
