Art: Man from Gardenville

In a little white-&-green frame house in the Gardenville suburb of Buffalo live a tall, taciturn man, his wife Bertha, their four little daughters and one son, a mongrel terrier, a poodle and their litter of four. This family has no car, no radio, but plays the records of Sibelius incessantly on the phonograph. Last week tall, taciturn Charles Ephraim Burchfield went diffidently to Manhattan for an art exhibit. Every day his eldest daughter,11, began a letter to him, which the other four finished off with words and drawings. As simple and as unpretentious in his work as he is in Gardenville, Burchfield, top-notch modernist painter of landscapes, was having his first big show since 1930, at the Rehn Galleries. Famed are Burchfield’s drab houses and freight cars. But a field of new light had overrun his color designs and harsh realities. A sea of blond, wind-flowing grass washed around the sides of an Abandoned Farm-House. The light grew dazzling in the two vast landscapes of March Sunlight and The Cliff. It turned brownish late-winter white in Fading Snow Banks. It glimmered in a sunset breaking through Autumn Evening’s two heroic hemlocks, darkening such an unpainted frame house as motorists see briefly on back roads. It rea an artistic climax in Burchfield’s latest and best painting, November Evening, the only oil canvas in the group. Purple clouds overhang a vast prairie, a drab crossroads in the foreground. In the wide desolate emptiness the false front of a flimsy store, its red shingles glaring in the last light, rears up in bright, simple drama. Charles Burchfield, 40, was born in Ashtabula Harbor, Ohio, the son of a tailor. After his father died he went to his mother’s family in Salem, Ohio. He studied at the Cleveland School of Art for four years, helping pay his way with odd jobs. Afterward he went to work in a Salem automobile parts company, enlisted in the camouflage corps of the Army in 1918. From 1921 to 1928 he designed wallpaper for Buffalo’s Birge & Sons. Then he retired to paint, make his own frames and write a little, all of which he does with his left hand, with an appearance of clumsiness. Burchfield’s idea of the way to paint a still life of a hoe is to use it first for three hours in the hot sun. Says he: “You think differently about that hoe afterwards.” His favorite flower is the skunk cabbage because it looks like a penguin, shows up first in the spring, is hardy, indigenous, adventurous. He thinks that, but for its smell, it ought to be the U. S. national flower. Any satiric intent in his pictures of drab U. S. scenes he disclaims, saying that he paints fine pictures, not social themes. Notable is his memory for scenes and moments that struck him with emotion in childhood. Thus, pasted long ago on the back of an old painting, Sunday Morning at Eleven O’clock, is the note: ”I had had a quarrel with my Sunday-school teacher, and had run outside. Wishing to avoid the embarrassment of having to explain at home my premature return from Sunday-school, I hung around in the churchyard until the class was dismissed. A still, hot June morning: the Sunday quiet had settled down over the town—trees stood motionless as if yearning toward the sun; the roses drooped in the heat; all things seemed blended in one harmonious whole; I only was out of harmony.”