Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave. at 75th Street; 212-570-3600 or whitney.org.
Through Oct. 17. 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday; 1 to 9 p.m. Friday.
Admission: $18, $12 over 62; free under 18.
The Charles Burchfield exhibit at the Whitney Museum is probably the best show to come to any area museum in the past year. That said, it's not an easy exhibit to get along with. Burchfield (1893-1967) is an artist who can be both revelatory and — well, no way around this — strangely grotesque, at times.
The strangeness may account for why Burchfield is nowhere near as well known as contemporaries such as Edward Hopper and Georgia O'Keeffe. He pushed the envelope, which shouldn't be a problem, given today's zeitgeist, but he pushed it in a fantasy-world direction that has never sat well, even with an envelope-pushing establishment.
There are other reasons he isn't better appreciated: He worked almost exclusively in the minor medium of watercolor (though on a large scale); he lived a family man's life in upstate Buffalo, and he was a visionary who can seem more passionate – and unbalanced — than Van Gogh.
To call him a landscape painter is misleading, because it suggests that Burchfield set out to work in an artistic genre.
"How is it possible to make people understand," he wrote in one of his many journals, "that artists are not interested in art?" a thought later echoed by Barnett Newman when he said "Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds."
Burchfield was a nature painter who dared to try to paint the unseen in the natural world — the songs of birds and insects, the sap moving through the trees, the mysterious life force in everything.
Born in Ohio, he went to the Cleveland Institute of Art in the years leading up to World War I, a time when the tsunami of European modernism was rolling through the American art world. Like O'Keeffe, Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley, Burchfield took on the challenge of abstraction: how to communicate without recourse to simple representation?
One of the exhibit's early galleries features a 1917 sketchbook titled "Conventions for Abstract Thoughts," in which an idealistic young Burchfield tried to design a set of abstract forms to represent human characteristics and feelings. Some are cartoonish, such as "Imbecility" — a pair of ovals that look like vacant eyes — while others are farfetched, such as "Dangerous Brooding," which looks like the yawning mouth of a lamprey eel.
In paintings such as "The Insect Chorus," he tried to convey the songs of crickets, cicadas and other chattering bugs with patterns of wavy black lines, squiggles, jagged edges and arabesques that completely obscure the vegetation the insects inhabit.
Army art
After a stint in the Army as a camouflage artist, followed by nine years working as a wallpaper designer, Burchfield pulled in his horns and joined the Depression-era, realism-rooted "American Scene" movement, popularized by such artists as Hopper, Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood. In mood, his large watercolors lack the Western swagger of Benton or the model-train-set perfection of Wood. In temperament, they are closer to Hopper's loneliness and alienation – brooding, dark-windowed churches, factory workers trudging home and, in "Black Iron," a hulking industrial drawbridge, a menacing thing, rendered in a watercolor with the weight and solidity of an oil painting.
In the '40s, feeling that he had lost his true path, Burchfield began to rework and expand his paintings from the late teens and '20s, exhorting himself to abandon realism and push further into fantasy. The paintings he did in those three decades before his death are the boldest, most transcendent and magical of his career.
At times, his efforts to go beyond appearances seem loosely grounded in scientific knowledge. He didn't just paint light illuminating the surface of things, but light as visible radiant energy and auras, the songs of birds as visible sound waves bouncing among the trees like a series of boomerangs. In "Song of the Telegraph," the poles and wires vibrate, pulse and hum.
All of this sounds quite joyous and life-affirming. So why is there so often this sense of desolation? Why are trees always jagged and broken-looking? Why do forests have the spooky forms of Gothic architecture decorated with bat wings and spider webs?
Terrible and fearsome
Burchfield had a dark side. The current runs through his journals. But he also belongs to a tradition of American pantheism, in which nature – like Melville's Moby Dick – was something terrible and fearsome as well as something beautiful. In struggling with this vision, he sometimes got lost in it.
But when he succeeded, as in his paintings of night moths and star-studded skies, Burchfield made masterpieces. In "Dandelion Seed Heads and the Moon," the fluffy globes of the flowers are each like separate worlds, as complete and perfect as the moon hanging in the night sky. Here and elsewhere, Burchfield found salvation.
Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave. at 75th Street; or whitney.org.
Through Oct. 17. 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday; 1 to 9 p.m. Friday.
Admission: $18, $12 over 62; free under 18.
The Charles Burchfield exhibit at the Whitney Museum is probably the best show to come to any area museum in the past year. That said, it's not an easy exhibit to get along with. Burchfield (1893-1967) is an artist who can be both revelatory and — well, no way around this — strangely grotesque, at times.
The strangeness may account for why Burchfield is nowhere near as well known as contemporaries such as Edward Hopper and Georgia O'Keeffe. He pushed the envelope, which shouldn't be a problem, given today's zeitgeist, but he pushed it in a fantasy-world direction that has never sat well, even with an envelope-pushing establishment.
There are other reasons he isn't better appreciated: He worked almost exclusively in the minor medium of watercolor (though on a large scale); he lived a family man's life in upstate Buffalo, and he was a visionary who can seem more passionate – and unbalanced — than Van Gogh.
To call him a landscape painter is misleading, because it suggests that Burchfield set out to work in an artistic genre.
"How is it possible to make people understand," he wrote in one of his many journals, "that artists are not interested in art?" a thought later echoed by Barnett Newman when he said "Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds."
Burchfield was a nature painter who dared to try to paint the unseen in the natural world — the songs of birds and insects, the sap moving through the trees, the mysterious life force in everything.
Born in Ohio, he went to the Cleveland Institute of Art in the years leading up to World War I, a time when the tsunami of European modernism was rolling through the American art world. Like O'Keeffe, Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley, Burchfield took on the challenge of abstraction: how to communicate without recourse to simple representation?
One of the exhibit's early galleries features a 1917 sketchbook titled "Conventions for Abstract Thoughts," in which an idealistic young Burchfield tried to design a set of abstract forms to represent human characteristics and feelings. Some are cartoonish, such as "Imbecility" — a pair of ovals that look like vacant eyes — while others are farfetched, such as "Dangerous Brooding," which looks like the yawning mouth of a lamprey eel.
In paintings such as "The Insect Chorus," he tried to convey the songs of crickets, cicadas and other chattering bugs with patterns of wavy black lines, squiggles, jagged edges and arabesques that completely obscure the vegetation the insects inhabit.
Army art
After a stint in the Army as a camouflage artist, followed by nine years working as a wallpaper designer, Burchfield pulled in his horns and joined the Depression-era, realism-rooted "American Scene" movement, popularized by such artists as Hopper, Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood. In mood, his large watercolors lack the Western swagger of Benton or the model-train-set perfection of Wood. In temperament, they are closer to Hopper's loneliness and alienation – brooding, dark-windowed churches, factory workers trudging home and, in "Black Iron," a hulking industrial drawbridge, a menacing thing, rendered in a watercolor with the weight and solidity of an oil painting.
In the '40s, feeling that he had lost his true path, Burchfield began to rework and expand his paintings from the late teens and '20s, exhorting himself to abandon realism and push further into fantasy. The paintings he did in those three decades before his death are the boldest, most transcendent and magical of his career.
At times, his efforts to go beyond appearances seem loosely grounded in scientific knowledge. He didn't just paint light illuminating the surface of things, but light as visible radiant energy and auras, the songs of birds as visible sound waves bouncing among the trees like a series of boomerangs. In "Song of the Telegraph," the poles and wires vibrate, pulse and hum.
All of this sounds quite joyous and life-affirming. So why is there so often this sense of desolation? Why are trees always jagged and broken-looking? Why do forests have the spooky forms of Gothic architecture decorated with bat wings and spider webs?
Terrible and fearsome
Burchfield had a dark side. The current runs through his journals. But he also belongs to a tradition of American pantheism, in which nature – like Melville's Moby Dick – was something terrible and fearsome as well as something beautiful. In struggling with this vision, he sometimes got lost in it.
But when he succeeded, as in his paintings of night moths and star-studded skies, Burchfield made masterpieces. In "Dandelion Seed Heads and the Moon," the fluffy globes of the flowers are each like separate worlds, as complete and perfect as the moon hanging in the night sky. Here and elsewhere, Burchfield found salvation.
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