Charles Burchfield

AS HOPPER was a portraitist of the East, Charles Burchfield was an interpreter of that section of the Middle West where he has lived all his life. Born in Ashtabula, Ohio, in 1893, he spent his youth in Salem, Ohio, and studied at the Cleveland Museum School of Art. Since 1921 his home has been Buffalo, N. Y., and the nearby suburb of Gardenville. His subjects have been drawn almost entirely from this region--a rolling countryside of great distances and wide skies, dotted with small towns and grim industrial cities.

Burchfield began as a romantic. In his early twenties, 1916 to 1918, he painted a series of remarkable imaginative watercolors expressing a highly personal nature poetry. Based partly on childhood memories, they recreated a child's delights and fears. They gave a soul to inanimate things, showing houses like human beings, storm-clouds like monsters; they even visualized sensations of sound and heat. Their style was free and bold in its linear rhythms and strong decorative patterns. At this time Burchfield had seen no modern European art, and his expressionism was an original invention.

This phase lasted only a few years. From subjectiveism Burchfield turned to realistic portrayal of the world around him -- dreary streets of unpainted wooden houses with false fronts, monstrous mansions of the Garfield era, gray rows of identical workers' homes-the Mid-West country and what man has made of it. But beneath his realism was still the romantic, now in revolt against the ugliness of his environment. His satire was mingled with a compelling expression of mood and a dramatic sense that often approached tragedy. And always he remained aware of nature; even in the drab towns he was alive to the season, the weather, the time of day. He saw a melancholy poetry in wintry cities with soft-coal smoke and dirty snow--a stir of joy in February thaws, with puddles in the mean streets heralding the approach of spring. His style, with all its realistic power, was essentially baroque, full of movement, delighting in the ornate and complex. Using watercolor almost entirely, he achieved a scale and completeness equal to oil, enormously increasing the range of the medium.

In 1943 began a third phase in Burchfield's development: an abrupt return to the fantasy, of his early work, but now on a much larger scale. Again his dominant theme has become the life in nature--the cycle of the seasons, the drama of death and renewal, the miracle of growth, the moving pageant of weather, light and hour. Pervaded by a mystical pantheism, his art has become an ecstatic praise of God in nature. Movement fills the whole picture: wind blows, rain pelts, snow swirls, light breaks through clouds. This sense of life expands into all nature's myriad forms, down to the smallest--leaf and flower, bird and insect. In these compositions, the imaginative poetry which first appeared in his youth now expresses itself with the mature power of realization developed in his middle period. In their wealth of imagery, their dynamism, their baroque profusion, they are among the most remarkable products of the romantic imagination in our time.

Burchfield : To pursue beauty self-consciously seems to me to miss the whole point in expressing life; beauty, if it happens, must be a by-product, not an aim. Nothing in the world is commonplace. An artist should have an innocent eye, to which nothing is either beautiful or ugly but full of interest and worthy of recording.

Much has been said about an artist expressing the age he lives in. To me this is the ultimate fallacy. An artist must be a leader who will show his fellow-men a more noble world, which, if it never exists anywhere but in the mind, is the only one worth pursuing.

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