The work of American artist Charles Burchfield (1893‱967) is reexamined by the Hammer Museum, in conjunction with the Burchfield Penney Art Center, in “Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield,” an exhibition curated by artist Robert Gober. The exhibition is on view in Los Angeles through January 3, and is scheduled to travel to the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, N.Y., March 5⁍ay 23, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City in the summer.
Featuring more than 80 major watercolors, drawings and oil paintings drawn from important private and public collections, this exhibition also weaves together myriad ephemeral objects, including doodles, journals, scrapbooks and letters from the Burchfield archive at the Burchfield Penney Art Center. This combination of artwork and biographical material in “Heat Waves in a Swamp” provides new insights into Burchfield as a person as well as an artist.
Burchfield worked almost exclusively in watercolor on paper and his primary subject was his experience of nature in his immediate surroundings, such as scenes from his backyard, vistas near his home captured and imbued with highly expressionistic light, at times creating a clear-eyed depiction of the world and at other times one that is wholly unique, mystical and visionary.
The exhibition is the first major Burchfield show to be mounted on the West Coast and the first in New York for more than 20 years. Arranged chronologically, it approaches Burchfield’s work with a new perspective facilitated in part by the curatorial sensibilities of Gober.
Working with Hammer coordinating curator Cynthia Burlingham, Gober has augmented a large selection of watercolors with the inclusion of extensive biographical material that continually infuses the artist’s own thoughts about his work and artistic practice. An obsessive collector, organizer and archivist, Burchfield left a treasure trove of well-maintained notebooks, sketches, journals and doodles spanning his entire career. This material is now part of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at Buffalo State College, which houses more than 25,000 objects by this visionary American artist.
The exhibition begins with work Burchfield created in 1916 while living in Salem, Ohio, and follows his career with special attention to transformative and often reflective moments in his life and work. For example, drawings from a 1917 sketchbook titled “Conventions for Abstract Thoughts” represent human emotions with semiabstract shapes that would appear in his work for years to come. This is followed by an entire room dedicated to the 1930 Burchfield exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, which was the first solo artist exhibition in the museum’s young history.
More than a decade later, Burchfield returns to his early expressionistic watercolors for inspiration. He begins to make monumental pieces created by literally transforming a number of small-scale watercolors from 1916 to 1918 †pasting large strips of paper around the early watercolors to increase their size and reworking these new compositions into unusually large ecstatic watercolor visions.
This return to his roots results in an explosion of color and the exhibition culminates in the late, transcendental watercolors of the 1950s and 1960s. These monumental paintings are accompanied by a central vitrine containing the more than 10,000 handwritten journal pages that Burchfield kept throughout his life, from a young teenager until his death from a heart attack in 1967.
The Hammer is at 10899 Wilshire Boulevard, at Westwood Boulevard. For information, www.hammer.ucla.edu or 310-443-7041.
