Burchfield

I have finally looked at and read Charles Burchfield’s Seasons, a volume Guy Davenport published with Pomegranate Artbooks in 1994. The spine is already broken in the library copy I have, several pages are held only by threads, and the color reproductions appear washed out, but Davenport’s essay, as you ought to expect, is provocative and gracefully learned – another grateful act of homage from one American artist to another. Davenport might be writing about himself when he says: “[Burchfield] exhibited no trace whatever of the bohemian propensities we associate with artists.” In other words, an artist’s job is to make art, not to posture and parade the self.

This week, without setting out to do so, I have written about several artists born in my home state, Ohio – Sherwood Anderson, Hart Crane, William Dean Howells, and now Burchfield, who was born in 1893 in Ashtabula Harbor, in the northeastern corner of the state, east of Cleveland. Davenport places Burchfield in an artistic context that explains everything and nothing, as is always the case with individual genius:

"Quite early in the century Burchfield began to paint landscapes in an original Expressionist manner, apparently without influence. He belonged to school, had no master, did not derive from any other painter. We can point to Van Gogh's whorls of light around stars and to his writhing trees. We can remember Samuel Palmer and William Blake. But none of these influences can be traced. In many paintings Burchfield uses cartoon-strip squiggles (agitrons, cartoonists call them) to indicate movement or vibrancy. From the cartoonist's vocabulary he took also squeans and blurgits to indicate shafts of light and the sounds of crickets.”

Blake, Van Gogh Winsor McCay and George Herriman as precursors? It fits. Burchfield’s paintings are unlike any others I know. They are vibrant (even the gloomiest winter scenes) and exalted and sometimes funny (like the best comic strips). Here’s Davenport:

“Exaggeration is native to comedy, and comedy in Burchfield is a dimension of joy. The enormous dragonflies, with their comic-strip agitrons, appear in paintings of extraordinary lushness in color and light.”

With Burchfield, we question the meaning of the stickiest word in the art lexicon – realism. Again, Davenport:

“Visionary is a word that recurs in writing about Burchfield. Its use is problematic in that the visionary heightening characteristic of his ecstatic landscapes is always grounded in the real. Anyone who has visited the terrain around Argenteuil and Giverny has wondered how bland and ordinary a countryside can be so magically beautiful in a canvas by Monet. 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, a sign language for radiant light, for wind, for insect song, for emanations. `To see nature with the eye of an interpreter,’ he wrote toward the end of his life in his journal (June 30, 1964).’”

Davenport relates this line from Burchfield’s journal to our Puritan inheritance, to our predisposition for reading nature as “God’s other book,” as Davenport put it. He relates this to early American botanists, Francis Parkman’s histories and Thoreau (whose work Burchfield read). Parallel with his painting we also have the 10,000-page journal Burchfield kept for 56 years, until his death in 1967. In 1993, the State University of New York published an ample selection, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend and titled Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place – “with which,” Davenport writes, “he takes his place among American writers.” I’m browsing in it now.

Davenport next gives us a rhapsodic passage in which a painting by Burchfield (The Three Trees), a poem by Emily Dickinson (“Four trees upon a solitary acre”), and Thoreau’s Faith in a Seed are placed side by side. I won’t try to describe what Davenport does here because that would diminish his scholarly art. Please read it.

Burchfield had a fondness for yellow, and the first color plate in Davenport’s book reproduces one of my favorites among Burchfield’s paintings, Yellow Afterglow, from 1916. Two years earlier, on July 26, 1914, while reading Thoreau’s Walden, Burchfield noted in his journal:

“Afternoon calm and peaceful. A few wisps of clouds appear. Sunset the `yellow light' kind. What a miracle that yellow light is coming as it does well after the sun has dropped below the rim of the world. All things become saturated with yellow light, even our thoughts. And so I sit in the saffron air, climbing the heights. At times I read slowly from Thoreau’s Walden. I bless the chance that sent the book into my hands. It had always been my intention to read it, but like most good resolutions, it was put off. From reading it, the doubts that have assailed me –i.e. whether a spiritual life was to be preferred to a sensual existence, and whether to work for money, or for the love of my work– were banished. Thus as I sat and dreamed into the future, my mind was dissolved into the yellow and carried by it to undreamed of heights. Life seemed full of good things.”

By profession Burchfield worked as a designer of wallpaper, in Cleveland and Buffalo. Here’s Davenport on the seeming tension between painter and commercial illustrator, artist and father of five:

“`If only,’ Picasso once said to a critic, `you could see the paintings in my mind!’ We do not need this evidence of the artist’s interior world; even those of us who are not artists have it. But in the case of artists who move in the world as level-headed and practical businessmen (Wallace Stevens and Charles Ives, insurance executives; William Carlos Williams, pediatrician), the discrepancy between the daily round and intense creativity is suspiciously instructive. The imagination seems to thrive on stolen time. Some of Burchfield’s most brilliant paintings were done in after-hours and on weekends. Henri Rousseau began as a Sunday painter.”

Davenport judges Summer Solstice, reproduced on the cover of his book, to be Burchfield’s “ultimate achievement.” Of it he writes:

“It is what all works of great art must be, a communication of a state of mind. It must also be native to its medium, however much it can claim kinship with others; in this watercolor, with the in tensest melodies of Sibelius, with other pastoral visionaries like Turner, Samuel Palmer, and Monet. The tree is a geyser of green and gold. It is a Romantic painting in that the artist has imposed his own ecstatic feeling onto an innocent tree in a meadow (of no interest to a cow, except as shade). It is not a Mediterranean painting; it is Northern, it is Druid, Scandinavian, mystical. And yet it is thoroughly American -- Thoreau could have come close to finding words for a description of it. It could illustrate Tolkien's golden tree brought back to the Shire from Rive dell. It is a poem by Emily Dickinson. It is music by Elgar. No other American painter could have done it. Genius is always unique.”

And always profligate. Like Davenport himself (scholar, painter, teacher, poet, essayist, fiction writer, and so on), Burchfield worked in many forms, ignoring arbitrary genres, schools and established, pre-approved ways of doing things:

“His work is so rich that its periods can supply museums with large collections in which he might seem to be only a painter of Ohio small towns, or of mid-American industry, or of woods and forests in all weathers, or of domestic tranquility, or of Creation as the essence of all earthly beauty.”