'He Belonged to No School, Had No Master'

Some artists seem almost indecently gifted. The painter Fairfield Porter wrote first-rate art criticism, posthumously collected in Art in Its Own Terms (1979). Donald Justice, one of our finest recent poets, was an accomplished watercolorist and composer. For fifty-six years a painter much admired by Justice, Charles Burchfield, kept one of the great American journals. In 1993, the State University of New York Press published a 737-page selection from it edited by J. Benjamin Townsend, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place. With it, Guy Davenport wrote, Burchfield “takes his place among American writers.” 

Written in pencil, ink and crayon, Burchfield’s journals amount to some 10,000 manuscript pages and more than two million words, now housed at the Burchfield-Penney Art Center in Buffalo, N.Y. Excerpts are also published online by the art center at Charles E. Burchfield in His Own Words. An Ohio native, Burchfield lived for most of his life in West Seneca, a suburb of Buffalo. His journals chronicle the life of an obsessive, hardworking artist who lived an otherwise conventional American life. He was a husband and father of five who loved going to the movies, reading and listening to classical music and big-band jazz. He loved Sibelius and Ellington. By profession he worked as a designer of wallpaper, in Cleveland and Buffalo. His life was decidedly not bohemian. He was too busy painting to play dress-up and outrage the neighbors.

 

Burchfield graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1916, much influenced by one of his teachers, Henry Keller. But he followed a singular path, seemingly immune to the dominant trends of twentieth-century art. The vibrant and visionary coexist in his paintings with the ominous and spooky. As Hilton Kramer wrote in 2005, reviewing a Burchfield exhibition:

 

“It’s been suggested that he was influenced by the short stories of Sherwood Anderson, and while that influence may account for the feeling of isolation and abandonment in Burchfield’s work, it doesn’t really shed much light on his penchant for depicting both nature and the manmade world in such stark and threatening terms. It’s certain, anyway, that he had a deeply introspective turn of mind.”

 

Burchfield’s best-known watercolors are rhapsodic renderings of nature, though I’m partial to his urban and industrial scenes. In Charles Burchfield’s Seasons (Pomegranate Artbooks, 1994), Guy Davenport writes:

 

“Quite early in the century Burchfield began to paint landscapes in an original Expressionist manner, apparently without influence. He belonged to no 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.”

 

Burchfield was born on this date, April 9, in 1893 and died on January 10, 1967. Here he is, writing in his journal on his sixtieth birthday:

 

“ . . . a huge column of black smoke to the S.W. caught my eye, and I rushed in to ask Bertha [his wife] if she wanted to go & see what it was. She was all for it & we were soon on our way.

 

“It proved to be an oil-dump along the railroad . . . south of the Indian Church Rd. Bridge. We parked off the road near the top and had a fine spot to view it from. An awe-inspiring fascinating sight; the sullen red of burning oil forcing its way up into the black smoke mass. It was interesting to see a telegraph pile just outlined in bluish white smoke, then suddenly burst into flame. All the towns six companies were out, and they fought it with chemicals – when it was evident that they were bringing at under control, we left.”