Charles Burchfield's painted memories

Magazine Antiques, March, 1997 by Nannette V. Maciejunes, Norine S. Hendricks

The American painter Charles Burchfield made a dramatic and, for his hometown, memorable debut in the New York City press when his first exhibition there was reviewed in 1920. The critic Henry McBride declared watercolors such as Corner Store in Winter [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE II OMITTED] to be savage satires, writing:

Mr. Burchfield had the great good fortune to pass his young life - he is but twenty-six - in the loathsome town of Salem, Ohio, and his pictures grew out of his detestation for this place. No German hated England as hardly as Mr. Burchfield hated, and I hope hates, Salem! for what would become of Mr. Burchfield's art if Salem should reform or if he should move to some likable place? Salem is a place of shanties, so Mr. Burchfield says, dreadful, wobbly shanties that seem positively to leer with invitation at passing cyclones which, however; disdain them.(1)

In fact McBride was so convinced of the young artist's intentions that he later expressed concern for his "present safety and future spiritual growth." He doubted Salem would allow Burchfield to "go on hating her at close range," but he worried that if the artist were forced to leave the town he would never "as effectively hate any other place."(2)

Contrary to what McBride believed, Burchfield's early paintings were not simply "songs of hate."(3) Burchfield was so horrified by McBride's conclusions that he lobbied for the rest of his life to counteract the impression that the critic's words had left. He publicly defended his home town in print in 1928, protesting that what McBride had seen in his work was the result of a certain bitterness about life that had overcome him in the winter of 1917-1918. Concerning that time, Burchfield wrote, he "saw everything through a veil of violent dissatisfaction with myself and everything about me. I was not indicting Salem, Ohio, but was merely giving way to a mental mood, and sought out the scenes that would express it."(4)

In 1938 the story was still circulating, and Burchfield felt compelled to defend himself in a letter to the Salem News on June 17:

Believing that the case of "Burchfield vs. Salem" or "Salem vs. Burchfield," whichever it is, has gotten beyond the funny stage, I feel that it is time I said something on the subject.

Having a genuine affection for my home town, and wishing to visit it in the future, I do not want to be met at the outskirts of the city by a group of indignant citizens with shotguns, preventing my entrance....I remember Salem for a happy boyhood...and an early manhood when my career was taking shape....There is no town or city anywhere that I would have preferred to Salem, as a place to grow up in; not only for its physical characteristics, but for the people that live there....And I might add that it would be impossible to find one picture of mine that would give the foregoing statement the lie.(5)

Burchfield's inability to let go of McBride's accusation becomes even more understandable when one realizes that Salem provided the moorings for his creative imagination throughout his artistic career. He was continually haunted by his memories of the childhood he had spent there, able to forget neither its delights nor its terrors. Even in his dreams he was inexorably drawn back to the Salem of his youth. In a typical vivid dream he had at the age of sixty-three, Burchfield recalled seeing "the whole map of the world" suspended in the sky over Salem, and on awakening, he "lay...for some time filled with sweetly sad regrets over lost boyhood sensations."(6)

Over the course of his career, Burchfield gave form to these memories in three identifiable groups of paintings. The first, which he created after returning to Salem from studying at the Cleveland School of Art (now the Cleveland Institute of Art), evoked the Salem of his childhood and the sensations he experienced. He painted the second group after having lived in Gardenville, a suburb of Buffalo, New York, for more than twenty years. For these he used the first group as a point of departure to create works that became known as reconstructions. In these large-scale watercolors he revisited his boyhood from the perspective of middle age.

While the first two groups are easily recognizable as memory pictures, the third group which Burchfield painted off and on during his career, can less readily be linked to his memories. It includes many of the large-scale expressionist watercolors of nature for which he is best remembered today. The Three Trees [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE IV OMITTED], for example, is much more than an evocative depiction of the summer sun breaking through the clouds to illuminate the landscape. It is a painted memory of Salem, which he declared he created partly as a monument to his love for the town and his life there.(7) He chose as the subject for the painting a grove of trees with a distant view of Salem and the tower of his boyhood school. The three trees were a local landmark that Burchfield was particularly fond of, writing that "they epitomize all that Salem meant to me as a boy and young man."(8) When he began the painting in 1931, however, he had lived elsewhere for a decade and the scene no longer even existed. The school tower had been demolished in 1923 and two of the trees had been felled by a tornado in 1925 - facts that only added to the appeal of the subject for Burchfield. Indeed, he noted that immediately after the destruction of the trees he was first "seized with a desire to recreate them in a picture."(9) What he re-created was not only a piece of Salem's past but also of his own past - "the mood of childhood when a summer noon seems endless."(10)