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Charles Burchfield's Seasons
Reflects on Burchfield's expressive and unusually large-scale and densely painted watercolors of mystical and enlivened landscapes
- GenresArt
88 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 12, 2015
Watercolors are not my favorite medium when it comes to painting, and landscapes are far from my favored subject matter.
But Charles Burchfield makes me shut my fool mouth about all that:
The Sphinx and the Milky Way, 1946
This book of gorgeously electric paintings of nature and the occasional building (whose lush color plates are so much more vivid than the degraded approximations of these jpegs), is introduced with a sensitive and rueful essay from Guy Davenport, who sees Burchfield as a might-have-been mighty influence were it not for WW2's turning our eyes from the humanities to inhumanity.
He imagines a lost strain of particularly American painting that might have become a school in itself had this pre-war painter flourished.
After the war it was too late, as the center had ceased to hold and the American masters were those who had given up on representational art. The paint making it onto the walls of European museums were things like Rothko's blurred boxes and Pollock's measured chaos (although Hopper and O'Keefe sneaked through, too), no windblown prairies, doleful farmhouses, or buzzing bogs rendered in what might be loosely called impressionistic but more... trippy:
His are the only landscapes I've ever found truly moving; I don't mean that in the sense of provoking a specific emotion by depicting a scene keyed to elicit it. I mean that elusive sensation when elements of a painting steal into your mind separately and then join up somewhere in the back, barely accessible, hardly sensible, but present as a power, which then goes back out through your gaze at the painting: it manifests itself anew through that delayed fusion of effects.
Bleah, that was terrible, but I'm not going to delete it and type another attempt because I know it'll get no closer.
You know how landscapes so often lack that hum, that action (even in stillness), that sense of ubiquitous life that you see and feel in actual nature? This difference for me had never been overcome by landscape paintings that, yes, I could appreciate for technical brilliance and objective beauty, but still missed something.
Burchfield's work is fully charged with this absent dynamism. I hate to use the word electric again but without going over the top into beyond-representational expressionistic gestures, Burchfield often enlivens his trees, clouds, and fields with an energy that seems to radiate from within them, rather than being an overlaid effect or the peculiar optics of a particular painterly lens.
But he's not always so lively. He does every season, and can just as artfully deprive his paintings of the vibrant sizzle and leave it sucked-out, damp, and glum, tired but aching to tell a story of a dreary November.
But my favorites of his are when he somehow does both, resulting in an enigmatically sinister vibe that shudders with suppressed hysteria, amping quaint loveliness up with a good juicy gothic injection.
And Guy is the perfect guy to introduce us. Mr. Davenport, I mean. He knows odd and obscure don't always mean avant-garde; it's sometimes apres-, but every bit as worthy of notice. He reminds us of Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood, painters suddenly dated and unsightly to eyes adjusting to the light outside bomb shelters, not in the mood to see paintings of things, much less things so yesterday.
Davenport notes that while some of Burchfield's flourishes may seem borrowed from Van Gogh or Blake, their more likely source was cartoons, their conventions coming in to indicate motion and sound, as in this example which--I apologize--is difficult to make out in this jpeg:
What endeared me to Davenport most was his taking a stance totally (accidentally?) counter to that of the High Modernist Priest/art-critic Clement Greenberg. The latter saw Modernism as the inevitable purification of art, as all the arts are "truest" when they borrow least from other arts and refer only to themselves, whereas Davenport writes "That one medium can be an analogue of another in the arts is a characteristic of Modernism."
If we take Greenberg's approach, we must see Post-Modernism as a huge rupture, a decisive departure, a clear break from Modernism, but alas that line is famously fuzzy, and less a line than a blurred group of gradations, in my opinion.
There seem to be fewer such steps between impressionism and Modernism, to Davenport:
To this amateur art-viewer, Burchfield's Nature verges on the animistic,
but Davenport disagrees a bit when he describes Burchfield's "sense of nature's sacredness, a kind of worship that never confuses creation and Creator...." Though, just before that, he writes "Birchfield's trees are beings, presences, silent and majestic cohabitants of the earth..." so it turns out he like totally agrees with me. Sorta.
Landscape painters often evoked the emotionally placid effect of Nature by imbuing their work with a stillness that bans breezes, not to mention brisk winds,
so when Modernism put the kibosh on representation, it retarded experimental explorations of weather as a subject and theme (hard to ignore in the American Midwest) as Burchfield did with art that wouldn't look out of place in a graphic novel nearly a century later:
This makes me think of two things: class and the progression narrative. By class I mean the strict differentiation between "low" and what is considered "high" art, and the requirement that all the latter be rebelling against the previous orthodoxy while denying its own formation as a new orthodoxy. Until it is. Again with class: the distinction between the technical tricks of cartoonists and the Romanticist fevered "inspiration" of a Jackson Pollock seems to me grounded in conservative and even reactionary attitudes toward social stratification no matter how "liberated" the splattering is supposed to be. Those splatters, coming from a different social stratus, would be mere spatters. I'm not making a philistine "my four-year-old-could-do-that" argument, and I believe those splatters are important, but a complicated socio-cultural context made that possible, perhaps inevitable, not the force of a solitary genius, which Romantic notion Modernism was supposedly overthrowing anyway.
Yes then there's that "overthrowing" thing, the faddishness that results when we impose this orthodoxy-challenge-overthrow-orthodoxy-challenge-overthrow-etc. narrative for no other reason than the demand for novelty and the ease of parsing artistic expression into generations, acting as if it's as natural as biological evolution but approached by each newly blessed "school" or "movement" utterly blind to its pre-inscribed demise. Each movement must greet its ascendance with the assumption that it is finally, at last, the end of all this progress, an obtuseness you rarely witness in the similarly-structured developments of fashion or pop music. The border guards patrolling the division between entertainment and art rarely seem to notice how art is often more like entertainment than entertainment is, especially if the art is not particularly entertaining.
I could entertain my eyes and that back-room of my brain before a Burchfield for ages (I've only seen two "live") despite not being able to place him or his ilk neatly in one of those evolutionary charts of the arts. But what do I know? I'm still on the ape end of that scheme.
But Charles Burchfield makes me shut my fool mouth about all that:
The Sphinx and the Milky Way, 1946
This book of gorgeously electric paintings of nature and the occasional building (whose lush color plates are so much more vivid than the degraded approximations of these jpegs), is introduced with a sensitive and rueful essay from Guy Davenport, who sees Burchfield as a might-have-been mighty influence were it not for WW2's turning our eyes from the humanities to inhumanity.
He imagines a lost strain of particularly American painting that might have become a school in itself had this pre-war painter flourished.
After the war it was too late, as the center had ceased to hold and the American masters were those who had given up on representational art. The paint making it onto the walls of European museums were things like Rothko's blurred boxes and Pollock's measured chaos (although Hopper and O'Keefe sneaked through, too), no windblown prairies, doleful farmhouses, or buzzing bogs rendered in what might be loosely called impressionistic but more... trippy:
His are the only landscapes I've ever found truly moving; I don't mean that in the sense of provoking a specific emotion by depicting a scene keyed to elicit it. I mean that elusive sensation when elements of a painting steal into your mind separately and then join up somewhere in the back, barely accessible, hardly sensible, but present as a power, which then goes back out through your gaze at the painting: it manifests itself anew through that delayed fusion of effects.
Bleah, that was terrible, but I'm not going to delete it and type another attempt because I know it'll get no closer.
You know how landscapes so often lack that hum, that action (even in stillness), that sense of ubiquitous life that you see and feel in actual nature? This difference for me had never been overcome by landscape paintings that, yes, I could appreciate for technical brilliance and objective beauty, but still missed something.
Burchfield's work is fully charged with this absent dynamism. I hate to use the word electric again but without going over the top into beyond-representational expressionistic gestures, Burchfield often enlivens his trees, clouds, and fields with an energy that seems to radiate from within them, rather than being an overlaid effect or the peculiar optics of a particular painterly lens.
But he's not always so lively. He does every season, and can just as artfully deprive his paintings of the vibrant sizzle and leave it sucked-out, damp, and glum, tired but aching to tell a story of a dreary November.
But my favorites of his are when he somehow does both, resulting in an enigmatically sinister vibe that shudders with suppressed hysteria, amping quaint loveliness up with a good juicy gothic injection.
And Guy is the perfect guy to introduce us. Mr. Davenport, I mean. He knows odd and obscure don't always mean avant-garde; it's sometimes apres-, but every bit as worthy of notice. He reminds us of Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood, painters suddenly dated and unsightly to eyes adjusting to the light outside bomb shelters, not in the mood to see paintings of things, much less things so yesterday.
Davenport notes that while some of Burchfield's flourishes may seem borrowed from Van Gogh or Blake, their more likely source was cartoons, their conventions coming in to indicate motion and sound, as in this example which--I apologize--is difficult to make out in this jpeg:
What endeared me to Davenport most was his taking a stance totally (accidentally?) counter to that of the High Modernist Priest/art-critic Clement Greenberg. The latter saw Modernism as the inevitable purification of art, as all the arts are "truest" when they borrow least from other arts and refer only to themselves, whereas Davenport writes "That one medium can be an analogue of another in the arts is a characteristic of Modernism."
If we take Greenberg's approach, we must see Post-Modernism as a huge rupture, a decisive departure, a clear break from Modernism, but alas that line is famously fuzzy, and less a line than a blurred group of gradations, in my opinion.
There seem to be fewer such steps between impressionism and Modernism, to Davenport:
Impressionism in the hands of Pissaro, Van Gogh, and Seurat kept moving toward the visionary and the abstract. The step from Van Gogh to Willem de Kooning is a short one, but one that Burchfield never took. Or took, rather, in his own way, into an idiomatic calligraphy of his own devising, to sign language for radiant light, for wind, for insect song, for emanations."
To this amateur art-viewer, Burchfield's Nature verges on the animistic,
but Davenport disagrees a bit when he describes Burchfield's "sense of nature's sacredness, a kind of worship that never confuses creation and Creator...." Though, just before that, he writes "Birchfield's trees are beings, presences, silent and majestic cohabitants of the earth..." so it turns out he like totally agrees with me. Sorta.
Landscape painters often evoked the emotionally placid effect of Nature by imbuing their work with a stillness that bans breezes, not to mention brisk winds,
so when Modernism put the kibosh on representation, it retarded experimental explorations of weather as a subject and theme (hard to ignore in the American Midwest) as Burchfield did with art that wouldn't look out of place in a graphic novel nearly a century later:
This makes me think of two things: class and the progression narrative. By class I mean the strict differentiation between "low" and what is considered "high" art, and the requirement that all the latter be rebelling against the previous orthodoxy while denying its own formation as a new orthodoxy. Until it is. Again with class: the distinction between the technical tricks of cartoonists and the Romanticist fevered "inspiration" of a Jackson Pollock seems to me grounded in conservative and even reactionary attitudes toward social stratification no matter how "liberated" the splattering is supposed to be. Those splatters, coming from a different social stratus, would be mere spatters. I'm not making a philistine "my four-year-old-could-do-that" argument, and I believe those splatters are important, but a complicated socio-cultural context made that possible, perhaps inevitable, not the force of a solitary genius, which Romantic notion Modernism was supposedly overthrowing anyway.
Yes then there's that "overthrowing" thing, the faddishness that results when we impose this orthodoxy-challenge-overthrow-orthodoxy-challenge-overthrow-etc. narrative for no other reason than the demand for novelty and the ease of parsing artistic expression into generations, acting as if it's as natural as biological evolution but approached by each newly blessed "school" or "movement" utterly blind to its pre-inscribed demise. Each movement must greet its ascendance with the assumption that it is finally, at last, the end of all this progress, an obtuseness you rarely witness in the similarly-structured developments of fashion or pop music. The border guards patrolling the division between entertainment and art rarely seem to notice how art is often more like entertainment than entertainment is, especially if the art is not particularly entertaining.
I could entertain my eyes and that back-room of my brain before a Burchfield for ages (I've only seen two "live") despite not being able to place him or his ilk neatly in one of those evolutionary charts of the arts. But what do I know? I'm still on the ape end of that scheme.
September 10, 2014
35 plates or so of Burchfield's thoughtful, sometimes rhapsodic, sometimes bleak, nearly Blakean watercolors. Nature, as Davenport observes of the paintings, the journals, which SPEAK, persists--one season entails another, and so forth. And curiously, fell entropy seems only to hole up where humans have--meaning leaning barns, crumbled walks, rust-bearded siding and branch-lines. There is faith in the seed--a seed. But people and theirs--their sofas and chimneys and, yes, their paintings--all art, as Pater had it, aspiring to the condition of music, and music itself falling short--short of...this fruit of the wakeful earth--that low ebb of scum on the pond fretful by shimmying reedage, the willow bending with thirst before the twining convolvuli--better ever and anon, than that glass of milk forgotten in the cupboard.
December 12, 2022
Favorite work, June Wind, 1937
Used cartoon squiggles (agitrons)
Used cartoon squiggles (agitrons)
February 24, 2016
Charles Burchfield (1893 –19670) was one of the major American watercolorists of the 20th-century, an artist I was totally unfamiliar with until recently. Described as a “pastoral visionary” and known for his passionate watercolors of nature scenes and townscapes, he was masterful at conveying the shifting moods of light and wind, of weather and seasons. This collection of thirty-six color plates includes excerpts from his journals of fifty-six years and an introductory essay by Guy Davenport.
“This is my beauty—all the beauty I wish for: the love of this nature around my home. They talk of Italian skies. I envy not the Italian. Nor do they envy me. I find no sympathetic beauty in the sky I have not lived under. The Elysian fields are not a the ends of the earth—they are here at my feet.”
- Charles Burchfield
“This is my beauty—all the beauty I wish for: the love of this nature around my home. They talk of Italian skies. I envy not the Italian. Nor do they envy me. I find no sympathetic beauty in the sky I have not lived under. The Elysian fields are not a the ends of the earth—they are here at my feet.”
- Charles Burchfield
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