Charles Burchfield watercolors | American Modernism | NYC

Charles Ephraim Burchfield (1893–1967) has been commemorated with several major museum and gallery exhibitions in the past decade, including the 2010 retrospective, Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the 2009 exhibition at the Columbus Museum of Art, The Architecture of Painting: Charles Burchfield, 1920.

While recent exhibitions have focused on the full span of Burchfield’s life and career, his early period merits special attention.  From 1916–1918, Burchfield was highly prolific, painting hundreds of watercolors in his ever-evolving visionary style.  The artist recalls Henry Turner Bailey, head of the Cleveland School of Design, as being particularly impressed by the design and pattern-oriented watercolors of this period. [1] Citing 1917 as “about the most important of [his] early years,”[2] it was then that Burchfield developed the pictorial symbols to express his emotional connection to nature, a defining trait throughout his oeuvre.

Questroyal Fine Art currently owns two Burchfield watercolors from his early years, Backyard, Late Winter, 1916, and Dead Trees in Southern Woods, 1918, both of which are featured in our new catalogue. The below quotes are excerpts from Timeless: Important American Paintings Volume XII:

I was jolted by Blakelock and now, unexpectedly, by Burchfield. There is

nothing quite as astounding as the moment when an artwork engages that

part of your mind that lets you see natural phenomena you have never

before comprehended. It is as if you have a supernatural sensory ability: you

are seeing as well as hearing an image. This sounds a bit fantastical, but

some of you may or will experience just such a moment.

Burchfield actually invented systems of symbols to visually represent sound,

and his inanimate objects were given human emotions. All of his art was

designed to transport the viewer to a new level of discovery. He was confident

and determined, writing: “It came over me all at once how proud and glad

I was that I was ‘I’— that my conception of nature was sufficient to me.”

Both of the watercolors presented here were created within one year of

what Burchfield determined was his golden year: 1917. This was the period

when “memories of [his] boyhood crowded in upon [him] to make that

time also a dream world of the imagination.”

In Backyard — Late Winter, 1916, the artist commingles trees with

architectural elements, without undue emphasis on either. The arrangement

serves as an example of what Edward Hopper noted about Burchfield’s

ability to produce an evocative mood by refusing to use any one component

“too exclusively.”

In Dead Trees in Southern Woods, 1918, a thick coppice of trees is

represented, with those in the background curved to form peaks like Gothic

arches (a symbol of God in nature). Burchfield’s interest in nature’s divinity

and mysticism is unmistakable.

–Louis M. Salerno, Owner, Questroyal Fine Art