Burchfield’s Proto-Surrealism

Charles E. Burchfield. September Wind and Rain. 1949. Butler Institute of American Art.

Several works of Charles Burchfield (1893-1967) from the permanent collection of the Butler Institute of American Art currently on view show the artist’s brilliant use of watercolor as a medium to depict fanciful renderings of the natural world. Born in Ashtabula Harbor in 1893 and raised in Salem, Ohio, Burchfield attended the Cleveland School of Art with the intention of becoming an illustrator, but discovered he preferred painting instead. While art historians often describe Burchfield as having developed his style in isolation and being unaware of the European avant-garde, research into his time in Cleveland shows he was exposed to various movements, and studied under local modernist artists. His early and later style is usually linked to German Expressionism, however, he may also be labeled as a Proto-Surrealist, as evidenced from his journal entries and sketchbooks.

Cleveland in the beginning half of the twentieth century with its growing immigrant population, increase in industry and wealth, and focus on commercial arts struggled to find a place for modern art movements in its cultural life. While there were artists who championed modernism and formed groups like the Kokoon Arts Club¹, and individuals such as Louis Rorimer, and Richard Laukhuff who invited avant-garde artists to exhibit in their studio and book store, the American public around the time of World War I was beginning to turn against cultural diversity in favor of a national spirit. To counter the avant-garde, academic artists came together to form the Cleveland Society of Artists in 1913. Many members had direct ties with established galleries, the museum, and local newspapers and arts publications. Grace Kelly, an artist and critic, began her career by writing articles about impressionistic and modern paintings as being “freaks”² and many of the artists believed that American art should express good taste and conservative values that were expressed in Cleveland by critics and professors at the Cleveland School of Art.

While these artists vehemently spoke out against the avant-garde as being anarchist, the political scene had also been challenged by the trial of socialist activist Eugene Debs in the Cleveland Federal Court in 1918. Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison for encouraging Americans to resist the draft and one of his lawyers organized a protest in Public Square that ended in riots leaving two dead, and hundreds of arrests. This upheaval furthered the growing nationwide anti-German sentiment and belief that modern art was a foreign invasion of the “lunatic fringe.”

By this time Charles Burchfield had already graduated from the Cleveland School of Art and began to establish himself as a leading watercolor painter. Burchfield’s time at the Cleveland School of Art (1912-1916) provided him exposure to modernist ideas and techniques that he learned from his professor Henry Keller and close friend William Sommer. In Cleveland, Burchfield frequented Laukhuff’s Bookstore which was known for carrying avant-garde periodicals and books from Europe as well as being a meeting place for modernist artists to exhibit and discuss the philosophies of Nietzche.³ Burchfield also attended exhibits and parties held by the Kokoon Arts Club and was exposed to the works of Sommer and William Zorach in 1915. It is at this point that ideas of exploring the subconscious and dreams enter into Cleveland art, well before the formation of the Surrealists in Paris in 1924.

Both Sommer and Zorach believed in exploring art that expressed emotion, spirituality, and the subconscious. They often worked in watercolor, the medium that Burchfield came to prefer, due to its quick execution and tendency towards spontaneity.⁴ Sommer’s techniques for expressing his subconscious in his paintings range from being intoxicated and suffering head injuries, staring at the sun and painting the after images and even entering a trance like state influenced by his readings of the Bhagavad-Gita and Japanese Zen philosophies.⁵

Charles E. Burchfield. Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night. 1917. Cleveland Museum of Art.

Burchfield’s own work took to a much darker place as he became preoccupied with a deep sense of depression and haunting in his works between 1916 and 1919. Fearing the onset of insanity and increasingly disturbing nightmares (often containing birds of prey), Burchfield developed nearly six notebooks with symbols reflecting different psychological states and called them the “Conventions of Abstract Thoughts.” In many of his paintings the use of symbols would directly relate to the emotional state he was in or wanted to convey. This can be directly seen in Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night from 1917 where he combines the symbol for fear with a swaying church bell in a tower that “seemed to vibrate with a dull roar afterwards, dying slowly and with a growl.”⁶ The painting originates from the recollection of being terrified of the bells ringing on a stormy winter evening in his  childhood. Preparing sketches, Burchfield felt that the steeple resembled a hawk, but later decided it looked more like a grotesque parrot. This “parrot” in the painting has Burchfield’s symbols for imbecility and viewing the house on the right, his symbol for morbidness can be seen in the windows and doors. In the house on the left the door panels contain the image of insanity and the windows of melancholy.⁷

Charles E. Burchfield. The East Wind. 1918. Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

While Burchfield felt a strong kinship to nature, during periods of depression he would often turn to man made structures in his work. Houses, he described, “have appeared of being amazed or angry; each one is a new sight.”⁸ In his 1918 watercolor The East Wind, Burchfield expresses his fascination with houses and their unique moody and haunting nature and writes in his journals that, “at dusk they are evil; seem to brood over some crime.”⁹ The ghostly skull-like shadow cast by the house dominates his composition clearly illustrates his internal struggles with the other houses depicted cowering in the background. His paranoia about nature haunting him is also presented with the strong rain and winds blowing diagonally across the page.

In 1919, Richard Laukhuff exhibited on a rotating basis fifty of Burchfield’s watercolors that took on a more intense surrealistic quality while Burchfield was away at army boot camp. The exhibit received negative criticisms about the disturbing nature of the works.¹⁰ Burchfield later reflected on these paintings in his journals that, “There followed a degeneracy in my art that I have never been able to explain… I later destroyed all the paintings of this period… viewed from any angle whatsoever, there is not a single redeeming feature about them,” though he later regretted this action.¹¹

Burchfield abandoned his natural progression of painting his inner emotions and thoughts to adopt a more realistic style depicting landscapes and scenes of his home in Salem, Ohio and soon after, in Buffalo, New York where he took a position designing wallpaper. While Laukhuff believed in the avant-garde, he may have been one of the reasons Burchfield turned to the American Scene or regionalist movement by giving him a copy of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio in May of 1919. In reading Anderson’s novel, Burchfield found that he was moved to depict Midwestern life in a real manner. The exploration of his childhood fantasies and psychological anxieties lost their luster and his earlier paintings appeared to him as a dead end road.¹²

The new paintings Burchfield produced were lauded by critics, both locally and nationally, such as Grace Kelly and Thomas Craven. Craven, who began writing about art in the 1920’s, took a strong anti-bohemian stance that held art to reflect the American experience thus making the works identifiable and relatable to the masses. Modern art, as he saw it, could not communicate the human condition. His opinions propped up the trend toward nationalism and debased European art  that could not speak to American sensibilities.¹³ In 1948, an exhibit of Burchfield’s American Scene paintings opened the Town and Country Gallery prompting Kelly to write a review for the Plain Dealer. She recognizes the influences of Keller and of Laukhuff, but maintained that his success came when he adopted his realist style and praises him as being, “a star of the first magnitude in the world of art.”¹⁴ Even in the beginning of the twenty-first century, artist and critic Dan Tranberg wrote a review titled “Early Experiments Detract From Great, Mature Burchfields” of a Cleveland Artists Foundation exhibit of Burchfield’s work. In the article, he does what is popular among critics and art historians by linking him to his contemporary Edward Hopper, and noted that, “While the show certainly has a few gems, many of the works by Burchfield make redundant statements about his trials and errors,”¹⁵ and that many of the failures in his opinion are only relevant to the exhibit due to the Cleveland subject matter.

Craven, being fanatical about the need for art to express the American Scene, continued to denounce the influences of European modern art claiming that American artists who worked in the style did so because of their inability to think for themselves and, “that their art, as bad as it is, is no worse than any other form of bad art.”¹⁶ Of Burchfield, Craven wrote that he was a driving force responsible to moving art in America away from the French school and towards a concentration on the surrounding local environment.¹⁷ Even Edward Hopper acknowledged Burchfield’s paintings as having been “rooted in our land.”¹⁸ Later in his career though, he returned to working in a more surreal expressionist manner occasionally attempting to recreate works that he once destroyed.

1. Founded in 1911 to promote and exhibit modern art.
2. William Robinson, and David Steinberg, Transformations in Cleveland Art, 1796-1946, (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1996), 91.
3. Gladys Haddad, Laukhuff’s Bookstore: Cleveland’s Literary and Artistic Landmark (Akron: NOBS, 1997).
4. Robinson and Steinberg, Transformations in Cleveland Art, 86.
5. Elizabeth McClelland, William Sommer: Cleveland’s Early Modern Master (Cleveland: John Carrol University Cleveland Artists Series, 1992), 66-67.
6. J. Benjamin Townsend, ed., Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 18.
7. John I. H. Baur, Charles Burchfield (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1956), 27-30.
8. Townsend, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, 273.
9. Baur, Charles Burchfield, 34.
10. Robinson and Steinberg, Transformations in Cleveland Art, 90.
11. Baur, Charles Burchfield, 33.
12. Ibid, 34.
13. Matthew Baigell, “The Beginnings of ‘The American Wave’ and the Depression,” Art Journal, Vol. 27, No. 4, Summer, 1968, 338.
14. Grace V. Kelly, “Burchfield One-Man Exhibition Opens at Town-Country Today,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, January 4, 1948, Cleveland Artists Foundation Clipping File.
15. Dan Tranberg, “Early Experiments Detract From Great Mature Burchfields,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 18, 2000, 5-E.
16. Henry Geldzahler, American Painting in the Twentieth Century, (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1965),  90-91.
17. Matthew Baigell, Artist and Identity in Twentieth-Century America, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 93.
18. Ibid. 74.