Exhibit of the week: Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield

UCLA Hammer Museum

Through Jan. 3, 2010

Charles Burchfield “has never fit comfortably into the narrative of American art,” said Hilarie M. Sheets in ARTnews. Once a “hot young painter,” whose retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1930 was the first the museum ever dedicated to a single artist, Burchfield found himself out of sync with the times in his later years. During the 1940s and ’50s, abstract expressionists pushed American art to world renown. Burchfield, meanwhile, spent those decades producing increasingly bizarre landscapes, often “rendered with near hallucinatory intensity,” of the countryside around his upstate New York home. “Although his paintings always evolved from direct visual experience, he used highly animated lines and abstracted motifs to convey the sounds and smells of nature.” Gradually, Burchfield came to be considered more of a visionary eccentric than an important American artist.

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But the real reason Burchfield isn’t better remembered today is that he “worked almost exclusively in watercolors,” said Jori Finkel in The New York Times. Unlike oil paintings, watercolors are too fragile to be exhibited more than every few years—so it’s usually difficult even to view Burchfield’s work. This new retrospective at UCLA’s Hammer Museum miraculously brings together nearly 80 paintings, “as well as journals, wallpaper designs, doodles, and other ephemera.” Some of his early, “Hopperesque street scenes register today as rather conventional.” But starting around 1950, the artist began employing a startlingly original working method, “literally reusing decades-old pictures.” By layering strips of paper on all sides, he was able to paint over them anew, creating “dark, brooding watercolors” such as The Coming of Spring and Two Ravines. These late paintings, some bordering on the psychedelic, show “an artist who was more wide-ranging and inventive than generally assumed.”

Even though he worked in a form traditionally associated with Sunday-painter dilettantes, “Burchfield is no Pollyanna,” said Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times. He typically favored “an autumnal palette of golds, russets, gray, and other often nippy colors, plus a heavy dose of black,” and his rather morose subjects—as made clear by their titles—include Flowers in a Back Alley and White Violets and Abandoned Coal Mine. This “rich and provocative” exhibition, organized by sculptor Robert Gober, not only proves that Burchfield was a master of the watercolor form. It also makes an excellent case that “watercolor was the most important medium” in American art during the first half of the 20th century. In fact, without the pioneering, emotionally pulsating nature paintings of Burchfield, Georgia O’Keeffe, or John Marin, the work of the abstract expressionists themselves would have been “unthinkable.”