Charles Ephraim Burchfield 1893 - 1967

M. Knoedler & Co., New York
Kennedy Galleries, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 1985

Columbus, Ohio, Columbus Museum of Art; Washington D.C., National Museum of American Art, The Paintings of Charles Burchfield: North by Midwest, March 1997-January 1998

Joseph S. Trovato, Charles Burchfield: Catalogue of Paintings in Public and Private Collections, Utica, New York, 1970, p. 70, no. 403
Art News, Vol. 73, Issue 10, November 1974, illustrated
John I.H. Baur, The Inlander: Life and Work of Charles Burchfield, 1893-1967, East Brunswick, New Jersey, 1982, fig. 43, p. 62, illustrated p. 68

Excellent condition; this work has been unframed: no apparent tears, the artist's original mounting.
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Charles Burchfield has long been recognized by critics and scholars as a groundbreaking artist, one not easily categorized, though various labels such as romantic, realist, expressionist, and regionalist have been used to describe his work at one time or another.  Largely self-taught, Burchfield's natural tendency toward abstraction and his visual depiction of emotions through a private lexicon of symbols were at the forefront of what A.E. Gallatin called "a spirit of modernity." Indeed, Burchfield not only pushed his images out onto the limb of innovation, but from early on expressed a strong preference to work in watercolor. As a medium, watercolor proved far more spontaneous and easier to edit and correct, thus more adaptable to stylistic exploration -- Burchfield wrote that when working in oil he had to "stop and think about how I am going to apply the paint to canvas, which is a detriment to complete freedom of expression." Though watercolor had been broadly adapted in Britain, it wasn't until the late 19^th century that American painters fully accepted the medium. It was also particularly popular with the "Cleveland School" in which Burchfield was a prominent figure.  

Burchfield was raised in Salem, Ohio, and graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1916. He was an obsessive artist by junior high school, constantly sketching and painting, including an episode in 1911 during which he was overcome by a kind of mania for his work, driving himself to a state of nervous exhaustion. After graduation, imbued with the teachings and writings of Arthur Wesley Dow, who believed in the deconstruction of nature into a set of graphic elements, Burchfield enrolled at New York's National Academy of Design, but made it through only one afternoon of classes. He soon abandoned the urban environment that always left him anxious and uncomfortable, returning to the quiet world of Salem. In 1920, Henry McBride wrote that "Mr. Burchfield had the great good fortune to pass his young life in the loathsome town of Salem, Ohio and his pictures grew out of his detestation for this place." His pictures however often expressed the opposite – a deep affection and nostalgia for Salem, and yet the numerous images he completed (many while looking out of his bedroom window) convey an abiding tension between a small town idyll and a dark, industrial foreboding.

The center portion of Main Street, Salem, Ohio was initially painted in 1917, during what Burchfield would later label his "Golden Year" – a prolific period of "pure" work, before outside influences or criticism had touched his art. The linear geometry of the buildings is seen through a filigree screen of shimmering snow, the flakes streaking like comets through the winter air. The heavy directional brushwork of the driving snow pictorializes both the sensations of cold and wet and the sound of wind, producing a multisensory memory / image of Burchfield's childhood in Salem. Beyond the structures the atmosphere is charged with tailored shapes that suggest looming spectres thrown into relief by dark shadows high in the sky. These forms seem to refer to his 1917 compendium "Conventions for Abstract Thoughts," a visual glossary that interpreted "abstract thoughts in semiabstract forms" (Robert Gober, Heatwaves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield, p. 47) – and sketched shapes that captured a generally dark catalogue of emotions. The shadowed curves over Main Street combine the semiotic signifiers for "Nostalgia" and "The Fear of Loneliness."  Carved into the  pediment of the firehouse at right is the date "1893," the year of Burchfield's birth, suggesting the artist's deep nostalgic connection to the town. The clearly older structures receding to the left form a timeline; a solitary figure, which we intuit to be a woman huddled beneath an umbrella, moves against the wind and the flow of traffic, alone, seemingly headed back not just in space but also in time.

 The automobiles and telephone pole in the foreground break continuity with the picture's 1917 date, clearly indicating that Burchfield, as he did with many of his "Golden Year" pictures revisited the work decades later, conjoining paper, expanding the image, and adding these anachronistic elements to reinforce a sense of temporal displacement. There are no wires on the pole, and the cars are still, their grilles and headlamps forming sleeping faces while the snow piles up. There is no sense of peace in this winter scene, though the light and movement create a visual cacophony that sizzles with the sensation and contrasting imagery of ice and flame. The innocence of his isolated small town, huddled beneath nature's threatening sky, also faces the coming horrors of the Second World War, which had seared itself deeply into Burchfield's consciousness by the 1940s.  Together, the icy blast of a winter storm and the gloom of a deepening recession into the past express Burchfield's intense yearning for a simpler, "golden" time, before the cold hand of death and the hot crucible of war intruded to create the shimmering wave of uncertainty that envelopes the heart of his home town.