Charles Burchfield at the Whitney in New York (1st review)

"The subconscious mind seemed to be in complete control—and I did unpremeditated things which later turned out to exactly right."
—Charles Burchfield, 1952.


Like the English Romantic artist Samuel Palmer, the American watercolorist Charles Burchfield seems to have experienced a mysterious short-lived creativity-burst that totally transformed each man's perception of the world and his place in it. It also transformed the artwork wrought by their hands. Both were painter's solitaries, not clubmen or "joiners," and in both cases they were religious enough that what might have been a simple transformation of technique became the formation of an intense mystical experience.

Now, there has been no shortage of bogus mystics and papier-mâché mysticism in American culture. But Charles Burchfield (1893-1967) proved in his art and in his writings— 72 handwritten diaries covering his life from his teenage years up to his death at age 74— that his was "the real deal."

You might think that this religiosity-shading-over-into-mysticism would have rendered Charles Burchfield a lonely anachronism in the hectic years following the conclusion of World War I that gave birth to Modernism in the American arts. But you would be wrong.

His golden year reborn

Like the composer Carl Ruggles, Burchfield had it both ways. He was an intensely private small-town type of fellow whose art was at the vanguard of a sea change in the way that American artists chose to represent reality. (In fact, Burchfield was quite upset with any critic who dared to call his paintings of small-town life examples of Regionalism. He saw his work as a personal statement of his beliefs.)

But being mistaken for a simple (and perhaps, simple-minded) bard of the midlands wasn't the great artistic struggle in Burchfield's life.

As he grew farther away from his annus mirabilis— the year 1917— Burchfield felt that the inner truth of his work was ebbing away. The publishers of Fortune magazine might pay him well for painting industrial scenes, and the decorating form of M.H. Birge & Sons Co. might commission him to design original wallpapers for their offices, but the artist felt that something was missing. Moving into middle age, Burchfield desperately wanted to recapture the glow of his youth— like Palmer, he longed to see the angels walking the streets of Shoreham.

Decades in the making

But can a man be born again? Burchfield knew that he couldn't, so he found a way, both artless and ingenious, of recovering the vital spark of his youthful revelations. Taking a watercolor executed in 1917, he mounted it, surrounded by blank sheets of paper, often more than doubling the size of the original. Then he extended his original concept into the blank spaces, first drawing in pencil or charcoal, later going over the new areas in watercolor.

Working in this fashion, Burchfield might take as long as several decades to transform the 1917 work into something new. But transform it he did.

In some cases the changes were simply enlargements of the original concept. But sometimes vital new elements were added. A 1918 watercolor, The Red Pool, demonstrates that Burchfield's original concept was curiously truncated— more like a snapshot than a fully thought out visual composition. As the Whtney show's curator, Robert Gober, points out, Burchfield's re-imagined concept— which he never lived to complete— would have shown an entire industrial landscape surrounding the reddish pool of run-off water. (Of course, like all of the American Modernist generation, Burchfield was aware of Japanese art, and the isolated "snapshot" effect may have been what he intended to convey.) Since he never lived to complete the enlargement, we can't know whether this would have improved upon the original or lessened his strange visual impact.

Beating Van Gogh

When I wrote about Burchfield in July, before this show opened, I made some general comments on his stylistic range and on the impact Burchfield's work has exerted on me personally. This show has only deepened my regard for the man.

Who but Burchfield could depict wind literally warping the lines of the buildings it enfolds? Or the rainstorm that seems to be melting away the wooden sides of the houses as though they were made from sugar?

A work like Song of the Telegraph, executed between the years 1917 and 1952, quite beats Van Gogh at his own game, setting all of nature in motion as the artist envisions the invisible energy passing through the telegraph lines relaying itself to poles, trees, even the land itself, which seems to rise and fall in an endless series of electronic impulses.

Here is the country boy's awe at progress writ large. But at the same time, a solitary bird sits beatific on a fence post, immune to the forces man has wrought.

What an artist this Burchfield is! There are still a few weeks left— see this show!♦


To read another review by Robert Zaller,click here.