Charles Burchfield in New York (2nd review)

The American landscape painter Charles Burchfield (1893-1967) received plenty of recognition in his lifetime but never quite won the repute of his elder contemporaries, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, and Georgia O'Keeffe. A show of 150 of his works at the Whitney Museum, and 50 more at the just-concluded show at the D. C. Moore Gallery in Manhattan, offer a good opportunity to reconsider him.

Burchfield worked mostly in watercolor when oil painting was still king. He lived hard by Niagara Falls for much of his adult life but never depicted it. Like Robert Frost, he took his inspiration from modest, unspectacular landscapes: the fields and woods around his home.

This approach didn't mean his ambition was small, but it did work from humble materials. Georgia O'Keeffe could find a ready-made sublime in the New Mexico landscape, but Burchfield pieced his together from thousands of patient observations—and literally pieced many of his larger works together from individual sheets of paper, sometimes separated by decades, to create a composite whole.

In the 1940s, this practice brought his palette and his sense of form curiously close to Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock, artists with whom (as far as I know) he had no contact except as the Zeitgeist blows. Like Gorky and Pollock in those years, he seemed to be trembling on the verge of a vision that never quite realized itself.

Hints of mental instability

Burchfield was born in rural Ohio. He grew up poor, and without much formal training. He sensed his vocation early, however, and absorbed modernist influences. There are traces both of Decadence and Expressionism in an early sketch series to which he gave rather lurid titles— Dangerous Brooding; Fear, Morbidness, and Melancholy; Insanity; Fascination of Evil; and so forth. There wasn't much to back them up, except the suggestion of a gaping mouth with woodchuck teeth in Dangerous Brooding.

Burchfield's journals, too, hinted of mental instability. "I do not," he wrote in a 1916 entry, "wander the woods free of superstition…. Flowers have faces but they are not always pleasant." There's a suggestion of a pose in this comment, but in a much darker entry two decades later Burchfield described a "depraved self" full of "bestial impulses" that he contained only with the greatest difficulty.

We can only speculate about the way this mindset may have driven Burchfield's art toward the sense of imminent vision and ecstatic release that characterized his late and in many ways most important work, but there is a genuine (as well as jokey) spookiness about some of his early landscapes, where faces do seem to thrive in the underbrush or ride the storms he loved to depict.

Not so primitive

These works often contain a direct quality that seems almost primitive, but at the same time they are far from unsophisticated. Burchfield possessed an extraordinary command of color from the beginning, and a sense of landscape as throbbingly vital. This sense may have come in part from what appears to have been a form of synesthesia, in which color tones are related to sound.

Certainly Burchfield spoke often enough of trying to get bird and insect sound into his compositions; and the arrowy forms he often employed do suggest audible vibrations. He heard as much as he saw.

Burchfield had a large family to support, and often complained of money woes. In the 1920s he designed wallpaper (both the Moore and Whitney shows displayed samples), and later he produced Christmas cards. He even designed a Johnnie Walker ad at one point.

In the 1930s, he was associated with the American Regionalists, whose leading figure was Thomas Hart Benton. Burchfield's paintings of Depression-blighted towns and wastescapes won him particular acclaim, although this was later costly when the Regionalists lost their cachet. Burchfield suffered a mid-career crisis in the later 1930s, but recovered in the 1940s, when he revisited his earliest work for inspiration, sometimes directly incorporating it into new compositions.

Childish wonder

Burchfield's work had always displayed a child's sense of wonder—wonder that the world should be there at all, and that it should be so various and new. In returning to his artistic beginnings, he seemed to have recaptured this sense afresh, and driven it towards a new synthesis.

"My mind is on fire now," Burchfield said when he had passed 70, and indeed he showed no sense of flagging to the end. Some of the last works in the Whitney show were left unfinished, with fully worked sections pasted on blank ones just sketched out in drawing.

They don't seem incomplete, though. More and more, the last works seemed to move toward a central impulse of light, where blankness would be a logical conclusion. These areas are often framed, cathedral-like, by a fringe of trees, and their burden is clearly religious. Yet Burchfield remains rooted in the phenomenal world, and his foregrounds are occupied by dense grasses and clusters of wildflower, as if to affirm that even transcendent experience must be rooted in minutely observed particulars.

Burchfield was, in short, a Romantic, and his antecedents must include such painters as the Englishman Samuel Palmer. Like Palmer, his mysticism is reticent, as if it were best to approach revelation from the side. He felt his powers grandly, but used them humbly. It was an example that some of American art's larger egos might have heeded with some profit.♦


To read another review by Andrew Mangravite, click here.