Arts and Letters

I hardly knew Charles Burchfield, that is to say I met him only once, when we were serving on an art jury together, some fifteen or twenty years ago. We spent the day in a drafty warehouse with two other painters and we must have examined over two hundred paintings for the Prix de Rome competition.

The jury system may not always produce remarkable results in judging paintings, but it turns out to be a fine way for artists to get to know each other. We soon learn something we never knew. As prejudice falls away, our perceptions and range of feeling and sympathies manifest themselves. Burchfield was an excellent and experienced juror on all these counts and a pleasure to be with.

I remember we shared a taxi together going uptown when the judging was over, and we were talking about the artist's sense of security and how it affected his work and progress. Before we had a chance to make a few generalities about this inexhaustible subject, the taxi had reached the fifties and Burchfield had to get out to visit his dealer, Frank Rehn, and after that, he told me, he would take the sleeper back to his home in Buffalo. We parted as friends, but somehow I never met him again.

I imagine that this single encounter, in terms of experience, might be the rough equivalent often meetings at dinner, or twenty cocktail parties, which might cause one to say, "Oh yes, I know the man very well."

Painters may know each other's work well enough to write long critical essays, the way writers write about each other, but they rarely ever do. I have been asked to write this memorial tribute to Charles Burchfield which only Edward Hopper who was his old and close friend could have done properly.

It is not easy on this occasion to sum up what an artist like Burchfield stood for. There is, for instance, a certain historical formula which can trace an artist's influences and derivations and show how his personal style fits into the main currents of his time, how he synthesized this quality, adding or subtracting this or that. This formula will tell you virtually nothing about Burchfield. While his work looked contemporary it was uniquely his own and outside of the modern art syndrome.

He once called himself a romantic-realist, which is generally true. It can also be quite misleading, depending on the emphasis you put on these two words. It does not mean that he painted realistically with romantic overtones. His romance was with nature itself, his enduring passion, with a devotion steeped in empathy and animism, to which he could never get close enough. He would have liked to learn the song of the grasshoppers, in order to follow the dance of the flowers.

In a letter to a friend, he once wrote, "You cannot experience a landscape until you have known all of its discomforts—you have to curse, fight mosquitoes, be slapped by stinging branches, fall over rocks and skin your knees, be stung by nettles, scratched by grasshopper grass and pricked by brambles, before you can experience the world of nature." This quotation incidentally is taken from a very sympathetic book about him, written by John Baur, who had access to Burchfield's voluminous notebooks. These notebooks go back to the age of fifteen when he had started his journal, and he continued it throughout his life. While he was publicly shy and taciturn he poured into his journal his most intimate thoughts and feelings, and he wrote with remarkable poetic force. It appears that he even considered devoting himself primarily to writing about nature at one time.

As an artist, he tried to create a symbolic form which would give strength and expression to these feelings. This quest began in 1918, when as a youth he invented a series of calligraphic symbols corresponding to his emotional responses to the dominant forces of nature. He persisted in this, through various phases, until he died last January.

His last period—the large and luminous water-colors—are the freest and most expressive of all his paintings. He must have felt that he had found his way at last, and that his voice was now in tune with the "Song of Creation."