Nature, Up Close and Personal
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: June 24, 2010
Summer, which can be hard in the city, could be heaven to the painter Charles Burchfield, the 20th-century mystic of American light. Because he spent most of his time in a leafy suburb of Buffalo, to him the season meant trees aureoled in noonday sunshine, afterglow skies as cool as the song of a thrush and gardens pulsing with the music of crickets in moonlight.
Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Museum of Art
“The Insect Chorus” (1917), a Charles Burchfield
watercolor in which the vegetative world becomes an anthropomorphic
force. More Photos »
Multimedia
Albright-Knox Art Gallery
Burchfield’s “Sun and Rocks,” a 1918 image of
geologic upheaval, was transformed in 1950, with a cruciform star, into a
scene of mystical visitation. More Photos »
Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
“The Four Seasons” (1949-60), a watercolor by Charles Burchfield. More Photos »
A mood-swing dynamic seems pronounced in the survey called “Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, maybe in part because the show was organized by Robert Gober, the contemporary American artist whose own work mines the neurotic underside of the American psyche. Yet even while emphasizing certain aspects of Burchfield’s career, Mr. Gober gives us nothing but Burchfield himself. The peaks and valleys are all right there in the art.
Born in Ohio in 1893, Burchfield, as early as he could remember, was acutely responsive to nature, in part as a substitute for a lost religious faith. His father, the son of a Methodist minister, had angrily renounced orthodoxy. And when later Burchfield’s mother felt shut out from a local congregation, he rejected religion completely.
He spent four years in art school in Cleveland, absorbed in the thinking of the artist and philosopher Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922), who taught that nature should be depicted not realistically but as graphic patterns. In 1916 Burchfield left for New York City with a scholarship to study at the National Academy of Design, but once there he balked and dropped out after a single afternoon. He managed to land a solo show in a bookstore-gallery in Manhattan before heading, desperately homesick, back to Ohio.
By then he was already doing interesting things.
He had settled on watercolor — technically demanding, almost entirely about luminosity — as his primary medium and on landscape, both observed and imagined, as his subject. He was pulling aesthetic stimuli from everywhere: childhood nature books, Japanese prints, Chinese scrolls, Arthur Rackham’s Wagner illustrations, Léon Bakst’s sets for the Ballets Russes, and painting by Romantic artists like William Blake and, surely, Samuel Palmer.
In 1917, which Burchfield would call his “golden year,” this eclectic mélange generated some of his best-known images.
In one titled “The Insect Chorus” the vegetative world becomes a keyed-up anthropomorphic force, with trees rendered as jazzy swirls of bumblebee yellow and black, and the buzz of cicadas notated as clusters of dotted lines.
The same natural energy becomes crushing and funereal in “Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night,” a picture of a steeple looming like a great bug-eyed bird over a squat town as black rain pours down. To Burchfield, at that point simultaneously agnostic and terrified of damnation, the painting expressed the dread that religion instilled in him.
It also incorporated one of his most distinctive conceptual innovations, a lexicon of some two dozen semiabstract designs meant to symbolize negative emotions. These “conventions for abstract thought,” as he called them, include a gaping mouth to stand for “dangerous brooding,” a pair of blank eyes for “imbecility” and two black whirlpools to represent fear.
He planted these elements in his paintings — the fear symbol dominates the church picture — to give his decorative patterns an expressive personal subtext. Mr. Gober has installed the initial 1917 drawings of these forms at the very beginning of the show, as if to suggest that the art that follows should be read in their light. Much of it can be, but not all.
In 1921 Burchfield moved to Buffalo, married and worked as a designer in a wallpaper company, transferring his nature imagery to a commercial medium. Meanwhile his career as an artist was building, with gallery solos leading, in 1930, to a show of his “golden year” paintings at the fledgling Museum of Modern Art.
Feeling trapped in a job that left him little energy for painting, Burchfield quit commercial work in 1929 only to land in a different trap. He was now painting full time, but the pictures people wanted were of American industry and small-town life, popular subjects during the Great Depression. It was hard for him to say no. Magazine commissions kept coming, and they were turning him into a celebrity.
Again the art he really cared about seemed out of reach or only peripherally in his life — mainly through his habit, which had the character of a compulsion, of drawing wild, sensuous semiabstract designs on stray scraps of paper: telephone notes, shopping lists, card-game score sheets. He dismissively called the sketches “doodles” but pasted thousands of them into albums for safekeeping.
Then in 1944, after his first career retrospective at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, he decided to do what he had always longed to do, get back to the beginning, to where he had started in his art. He retrieved paintings from around 1917 and began to study and change them. He enlarged their surfaces by adding strips of paper, then reworked and expanded the original images.
One small painting, “The Sphinx and the Milky Way,” became an entirely new work at three times its original size, a rapturously spooky fairy-tale version of van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” A gnarly little 1918 image of geologic upheaval called “Sun and Rocks” was transformed in 1950, after the addition of a cruciform star, into a scene of mystical visitation.
By that point Burchfield had made his peace with religion, joined a church and returned, refreshed, to the subjects he loved: nature and light. As a consequence the work in the show’s final section, which Mr. Gober has labeled “Great Art and Death,” has a mood of holiday euphoria.
In “Clover Field in June” (1947) sunlight falls like a snow of gold pollen over a world seen from the perspective of a bee on a flower. In “Midsummer in the Woods” (1951-59) a fir tree levitates in a misted clearing. And in “The Four Seasons” (1949-1960) winter, spring, summer and fall recede sequentially into the distance like a succession of brilliantly colored stage flats.
“The Four Seasons” is equal parts Christmas card (Burchfield designed many), Gothic altarpiece and “Fantasia” outtake. It’s kitsch or something close, though the continuing presence of the old codes for fear and brooding indicate a charge of disturbance that faith didn’t touch. In “Early Spring,” left unfinished at Burchfield’s death in 1967, a tree bristles with thorns or spikes. Nature is in tatters; scrawled at the bottom of the picture in the artist’s hand are the words “very dark pit.”
So right to the end it’s hard to know exactly what to do with this doubter-believer and his confessing, witnessing art. Mr. Gober, in collaboration with the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Burchfield-Penney Art Center in Buffalo, presents him with sober, tender attachment. (And tenderness is necessary; some of the paintings look shockingly fragile and faded.)
Burchfield’s intensities are not for all tastes. But this summer if you’re looking for visionary company in the city, someone who has a deep investment in the way light falls, who loves the world with a romantic’s anxiety and avidity, and who will now and then excuse himself to go to “some secret place to think about God,” he’s the artist for you.
“Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield” remains through Oct. 17 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, (212) 570-3600; whitney.org.
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