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Charles Burchfield's Seasons. San Francisco:
Pomegranate Artbooks, 1994.
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Charles Burchfield's Seasons
Charles Burchfield's Seasons. San Francisco: Pomegranate Artbooks, 1994.
Size: 28 by 26 cm. Pagination: [i-iv] vi-xv [36 color plates, each with a notes page facing] "Selected Bibliography" (last page) ([Pomegranate] Essential Paintings Series)Spine title: Burchfield's Seasons
- Published by Pomegranate Books, Rohnert Park, CA.
- Produced by Chameleon Books, New York, NY.
- Creative Director: Arnold Skolnick (verso t-p).
Other books in the Series:
- Joseph Stella's Symbolism / Irma B. Jaffe
- Jared French's Myths / Nancy Grimes
- Edward Hopper's New England / Carl Little
- Stuart Davis's Abstract Argot / William Wilson
- Childe Hassam's New York / Ilene Susan Fort
- Yasuo Kuniyoshi's Women / Tom Wolf
Other books available [from Pomegranate]
- Paul Cadmus / Lincoln Kirstein
- George Tooker / Thomas H. Garver
- Richard Estes Paintings & Prints / John Arthur
- Ben Shahn / Frances K. Pohl
Charles Ephraim Burchfield (1893-1967), American watercolorist, visionary-realist landscape painter of nature, especially its weather and ever-changing seasons, its woods and fields. Born in Ashtabula, OH, raised in Salem, OH, lived in Gardenville, NY, suburb of Buffalo. Married with five children. Professional work as wall paper designer in Cleveland and Buffalo.
GD's essay opens with reference to two "crucial" books published on the eve of the entry of the U.S.A. into World War II:
- Thomas Craven, A Treasury of Art Masterpieces from the Renaissance to the Present Day (1939)
- Peyton Boswell, Jr., Modern American Painting (1940)
Burchfield's paintings are included in both books, along with those of artists John Sloan (1871-1951), Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975), John Steuart Curry (1897-1946 ), Reginald Marsh (1898-1954), and Grant Wood (1892-1942). Both Craven and Boswell sought to emphasize the energy and pattern of American culture and society these artists exhibited in their works. At war's end, Europe's museums exhibited not these painters, but the abstract expressionists Mark Rothko (1903-1970), Arshile Gorky (1904-1948), Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), and Robert Motherwell (1915-1991).
Excerpts from GD's essay follow.
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"Quite early in the [twentieth] 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.
That one medium can be an analogue of another in the arts is a characteristic of Modernism. Whistler had his symphonies, arrangements, and nocturnes; Pound his cantos; Eliot his quartets. Debussy's La Mer is a seascape. It has always been understood that Sibelius's music evokes the forests and plains of Finland . . . In Sibelius Burchfield found a kindred spirit, a guide to transposing nature into an ecstatic exaggeration of itself, and perhaps his belief in God . . . ." (p. viii)
"Interpreting -- reading -- nature is an enterprise that came over on the Mayflower. To the Puritan mind nature was God's other book. The pioneer botanists of northern Europe were largely Protestant, with an understanding that the medicinal properties of plants were a gift from God to be discovered and that the beauty of plants was a fitting substitution for Catholic statuary and ornament in churches and burial grounds. The flower garden joined the kitchen garden of the humblest homes.
American writing from its beginning has always been concerned with the forest, the clearing, the farm, the orchard. The honey bee came over with the settlers of New England, along with the apple tree and the pear. . . ." (p. ix)
"His [Burchfield's] journals, with which he takes his place among American writers, record fifty-six years of excursions and meditations. The journals that have survived number ten thousand pages. J. Benjamin Townsend's selections, arranged thematically, run to seven hundred pages, and are aptly subtitled The Poetry of Place." (p. x)
". . . Burchfield's trees are beings, presences, silent and majestic cohabitants of the earth with the lion and the robin. They are alive in a different way, secretly in public view. He has painted them under their nourishing clouds, in a fertile meadow, just outside a town. . . .
Burchfield progressed over the years from the prose of realism to the poetry of color and tone, and on into a music of natural phenomena. . . ." (p. xi)
"Burchfield spent his life in a climate in which the seasons change in slow transitions, with long autumns and springs, with very hot summers and very cold winters. Violent winds blow off Lake Erie. The land is fertile, and figured in the American and European imagination as an earthly paradise. Wordsworth and Coleridge once planned to found a utopian society along the Susquehanna. Charles Fourier dreamed of an ideal society in Ohio, and Napoleon after Waterloo hoped that he could get there and set up as a gentleman farmer." (p. xii)
". . . The Renaissance had thought of this theme [of the four seasons] as the dance of the Horae (the seasons) to the music of Apollo. Or, as in Poussin's painting, the dance of the Hours to the music of time. at the dawn of Greek antiquity there was thought to be three seasons, with winter as a dead gap between autumn and spring. Alkman in the 6th century B. C. wrote a little poem suggesting that winter, for all its bleakness and starvation, ought to be a season, too.
Neoclassicism more that classicism itself saw great significance and beauty in the cyclical recurrence of four seasons. From Botticelli's Primavera to the present, this set of four stages in a metamorphosis -- a kind of quartet for the visual arts -- has attracted artists, poets, and composers. Without rehearsing the whole tradition, we can instantly think of James Thompson's The Seasons (1730), which Haydn recreated in his oratorio Die Jahreszeiten (1801), a work as handsome in its way as Vivaldi's The Seasons (1725). The theme has been treated as a cycle of four works by many artists, most notably Cosima Tura, Brueghel the Elder, Watteau, Arcimboldo, Flaxman, Delacroix, and Millet. In our own time, Grant Wood, Paul Cadmus, Christopher Fry (his cycle of four plays), and Pavel Tchelitchew (all four seasons arch across Cache-Cache)." (p. xiii)
"The word season is agricultural; its ancestor in Latin means seedtime. The word hour comes from the more usual Latin for season; the horae commutationes, 'the changing seasons,' was the Roman year. It was their sense that time stands for awhile; a season is a statio, a standing (this is the word that becomes season). seasons divide into days, into hours, hours into minutes, momenti temporis. Ancient time was fluid and unclocked. Our time is measured by atomic pulses, in nanoseconds. It is tense with anxiety, bedeviled by a fanatic precision." (p. xiv)
"There are many paintings of Burchfield's in which the duration of the tone of light, of the feeling of a moment, is a matter of seconds. . . . My own taste for Burchfield began with such paintings: sunflowers in a backyard, hydrangeas soaked with sunlight around an old house, small-town streets with trees in all kinds of weather. My next perception was that his imagination and versatility, like Hokusai's or Paul Klee's, was endless. He was not trapped, like Benton or O'Keeffe, in a trademark style. His mind, to use a poetic analogy, was somewhere between Wordsworth and Blake; that is, between a contemplative exultation and a visionary adoration of nature. The backyard sunflowers in hot afternoon light would become in time the magnificent Summer Solstice (1961-1966), which seems to me to be Burchfield's ultimate achievement.
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 intensest 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 Rivendell. It is a poem by Emily Dickinson. It is music by Elgar. No other American painter could have done it. Genius is always unique. (p. xv)
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