NYAB Event - Charles Burchfield "Fifty Years as a Painter"

Charles Burchfield "Fifty Years as a Painter"

This event has ended.
At DC Moore Gallery
Media: Painting

Rarely does the opportunity arise to see a wide range of work by Charles Burchfield (1893-1967), one of the most inventive artists of the twentieth century. The gallery will be exhibiting an exceptional group of watercolors and drawings that span his fifty-year career in conjunction with a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Best known for his visionary landscapes of upstate New York and Ohio, Burchfield also addressed the harsh realities of twentieth-century industrialization and life in small towns and urban areas. Burchfield reached a critical juncture around 1920, when he turned to a different set of modernist pictorial strategies and reduced his compositions to a severe geometry of houses and factories, barren trees, and stylized smoke undulating across the sky. After moving to Buffalo, New York, in 1921, he engaged a deeper concern with realism and became a founder of the American Scene painting movement. One of his major subjects at the time was the industrial landscape, particularly the railroad, as seen in the dynamic watercolor, "The Locomotive" (1928). With it, Burchfield boldly confirmed his intention to “paint machinery for its own sake—the beauty of geometrical shapes and forms” that capture “the force and power of industry, alive and moving.”

In the early 1940s, Burchfield returned to a more active expressionism that evolved from some of his early work of around 1917. Swirling skies, anthropomorphic forms, visual notations of insect sounds, and heavily outlined trees radiating a visible energy are some of the elements that characterize his watercolors from these years. "Moon and Thunderhead" (1960) presents a dramatic expanse of sky dominated by a billowing thundercloud, as stylized treetops bend in the wind below. Highlighted in yellow, turquoise, orange, and other colors that push the limits of naturalism, the shapes pile up into a central mass that signals a gathering storm.

[Image: Charles Burchfield "Moon and Thunderhead" (1960) watercolor, gouache, charcoal and chalk on paper 34.25 x 44.5 in.]