Charles Burchfield

Charles Burchfield was born April 9, 1893, in Ashtabula, Ohio, and was raised by his widowed mother in nearby Salem from the age of five. He filled notebooks obsessively as a teenager, inventing a private visual vocabulary of quivering lines and staring windows to draw what insects and houses sounded like rather than how they looked, and later called 1917 alone his 'golden year,' the twelve months that generated half his life's output. He trained at the Cleveland Institute of Art under Henry Keller, then in 1918 was assigned to an Army camouflage unit, painting canvas over tanks and artificial hills -- a strange use of an eye that had already spent years learning how to disguise the ordinary as something stranger.

Burchfield supported a family of seven through most of the 1920s as a wallpaper designer at Buffalo's H. M. Birge & Sons, painting only at night and on weekends, before dealer Frank Rehn took him on in 1928 and let him quit. In spring 1930 the newly opened Museum of Modern Art gave him its first-ever solo exhibition, built around the visionary early watercolors he had made as a young man in Salem. Through the 1920s and 1930s he had, meanwhile, already been painting differently -- realist small-town streets, factories and grain elevators that got him grouped with the American Scene painters and Regionalists, a label he never accepted. In 1936, Life magazine named him one of America's ten greatest painters. He kept working from the house he bought in Gardenville, outside Buffalo, for the rest of his life.

Around 1943, at fifty, Burchfield described going through a personal crisis and went back to two paintings he had abandoned decades earlier. He physically enlarged them -- beveling the edges, gluing on matching strips of paper, mounting the whole thing on board -- and kept painting, turning 15-inch sketches from 1917 into six-foot canvases finished in the 1940s. Coming of Spring and Two Ravines, worked on a month apart, had not hung in the same room since the year he started them. The Regionalist decades that made him a Life magazine name and paid for his children's shoes were, on his own later account, close to a suppression of the artist he actually was; the hallucinatory nature paintings of his last twenty-four years are the ones he and most historians now treat as his real work.

Burchfield died of a heart attack on January 10, 1967, at his home in West Seneca, and was buried nearby in East Aurora. Buffalo State College opened a center to hold his papers and paintings the following year; it grew, through a 1980s renaming and a 1990s gift, into the Burchfield Penney Art Center, which holds the largest Burchfield collection anywhere. His reputation slid for a while after his death, overshadowed by the abstract painters who followed him, before museum retrospectives beginning in the 1990s and 2000s recovered the visionary watercolors as the real inheritance -- his houses and hillsides turn up now on book covers and in painters who never met him.

Charles Burchfield's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Coming of Spring artwork
  Begun in 1917, physically enlarged and completed in the early 1940s 1917
• Two Ravines artwork
  Companion piece to Coming of Spring, finished within a month of it 1943
• Ice Glare artwork
  Middle-period realist watercolor of a Buffalo winter street 1933
• Wallpaper pattern designs for H. M. Birge & Sons other
  Salaried design work, 1921-1929, that supported his family before he painted full-time 1921

• April 9, 1893 aged 0 Born in Ashtabula, Ohio
• 1916 aged ~23 Graduates the Cleveland Institute of Art under Henry Keller
• 1917 aged ~24 Produces roughly half his lifetime output in his self-described 'golden year'
• 1918 aged ~25 Serves in an Army camouflage unit
• 1921 aged ~28 Moves to Buffalo and begins work as a wallpaper designer
• 1922 aged ~29 Marries Bertha Kenreich
• Spring 1930 aged ~37 Given the Museum of Modern Art's first-ever one-artist exhibition Built around his early 1916-1918 watercolors.
• 1943 aged ~50 Physically enlarges two abandoned 1917 paintings and returns to visionary work
• January 10, 1967 aged 73 Dies of a heart attack in West Seneca, New York

• Edward Hopper 1882–1967
  Realist painter whose depictions of urban isolation, like Nighthawks, became iconic American images. gallery-mate of
• Georgia O'Keeffe 1887–1986
  Modernist painter known for her enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes. contemporary of
• Grant Wood 1891–1942
  Regionalist painter best known for American Gothic, one of the most parodied images in American art. contrasted with
• Winslow Homer 1836–1910
  Painter and illustrator whose seascapes and scenes of American life captured the nation's spirit. grouped with