Nancy and Olivia, 1967, by Alice Neel

Alice Neel (1900-1984) is always described as an artist that was slow to find recognition.  It’s true, but I think it’s also true that her brilliance was of a kind that is only achieved through maturity and persistence.  Our culture likes to think that a genius is a genius, that they must be incandescent in their emergence.  If you pass 30 or 40 and you’re not a star, you should give up, pack it in, and do something useful for a change.  And maybe that makes sense if you think art is all about fresh concepts and the iconoclasm of a new generation defying the elders.  But what if you’re trying to do something very deep and subtle, and nearly impossible to master?

Alice Neel, 1944, photo by Sam Brody

I’m not saying Neel’s early work wasn’t strong, and I’m not saying her sex and her devotion to figuration in an era where the big money was on abstraction didn’t delay her acclaim.  Her early work shows the  influence of the Ashcan School of socially conscious realism, as well as of surrealism and psychological expressionism of the kind that Munch and Ensor developed.  Her paintings of the 1920’s and 1930’s are dark with lots of black paint, and heavy with romantic angst, symbolism, and working class politics.

Degenerate Madonna, 1930, by Alice Neel

Kenneth Fearing (poet, founder of Partisan Review), 1935, by Alice Neel

Those were the radical art fashions of the era.  Neel does them well, but you can see hints that the real essence of her talent lies in her intense focus on the individual human subject.  At the time, she was young, and dedicated to the romantic ideal of the rebellious and bohemian artist, which she lived fully, complete with abusive marriages, nervous breakdowns and suicide attempts.

Ballet Dancer, 1950, by Alice Neel

The Last Sickness (Alice's mother), 1953, by Alice Neel

She persuaded a diverse collection of people to sit for her – her neighbors, her bohemian artist and writer friends, children and old people, naked nudes and dressed-up dandies, the uptight and the laid-back, the pretentious and the naïve.  She found nothing more fascinating than to try to capture in paint something of what it was like to be with these people.  She said, “Like Chekhov, I am a collector of souls.”

Two Girls, Spanish Harlem, 1959, by Alice Neel

Robert Smithson (earthworks artist), 1962, by Alice Neel

Sherry Speeth (mathematician), 1964, by Alice Neel

Alice Neel painted directly from life, and directly on the canvas, without designs or preliminary studies.  She said, “I do not pose my sitters. I do not deliberate and then concoct… Before painting, when I talk to the person, they unconsciously assume their most characteristic pose, which in a way involves all their character and social standing – what the world has done to them and their retaliation.”  Doing a painting of someone was for her an interaction with that person.

Fuller Brush Man, 1965, by Alice Neel

Hartley (Alice's son), 1965, by Alice Neel

Charlotte Willard (art critic & author), 1967, by Alice Neel

The old saying is “Every painter paints himself”, and for most portrait painters this is a limitation.  It means they project something on the subject, some fantasy or ideal.  For Neel, it means she paints how she and her subject encounter each other, in the moment as they look at each other.  The directness of the look, and the directness of the act of painting, capture the uncanny aliveness that Neel’s pictures embody.

In the silent home movie above you can see some of how Neel starts painting, and how she develops the canvas.  Alice’s son Hartley shot this film as she was painting her daughter-in-law Ginny.  She starts out with a black line drawing in thinned paint, sure and direct.  There is no measuring, no roughing in.  It’s distorted and out of proportion, and that doesn’t matter at all.  As she continues to paint, areas of color are filled in here and there, seemingly haphazardly, but with a sense of painterly dynamics.

Andy Warhol (artist), 1970, by Alice Neel

Jackie Curtis (performer, Warhol superstar) and Ritta Redd, 1970, by Alice Neel

The Family (John Gruen, Jane Wilson and Julia), 1970, by Alice Neel. Gruen was a music, dance and art critic, Wilson a painter, and Julia is now director of the Keith Haring foundation.

The eyes are usually enlarged, making intense connection to the painter, and through her, to the viewer.  The hands are often oddly small yet expressive, with snaky fingers grasping the world, holding on tight or draping lazily.  Background elements are sometimes highly textural and at other times they are left as bare indications.  In the later work the use of unfinished areas is masterful.

Carmen and Judy, 1972, by Alice Neel

John Perreault (artist, poet & critic), 1972, by Alice Neel

The Soyer Brothers (Moses and Raphael, artists), 1973, by Alice Neel

Her pictures of people are distorted in proportion, but they are not distorted by idealism or sentimentality, nor by judgment or an agenda.  They are open, clear-eyed, compassionate, and realistic.  The probing engagement is the same whether the subject is a child or a power broker.  Some of her pictures could almost be caricatures, except that they are made with an openness to her subject that is foreign to caricature.

Isabel Bishop (artist), 1974, by Alice Neel

Margaret Evans Pregnant, 1978, by Alice Neel

Geoffrey Hendricks (Fluxus artist) and Brian, 1978, by Alice Neel

The riveting quality of Neel’s paintings convinces me that there is no greater subject for a painter than the individual human being, and that symbolism and theory and “statements” are nothing  but obstacles to true seeing.  Why do so few serious artists in our day attempt it?  The portrait is considered a fusty genre, suitable for sentimentalists and satirists.  It doesn’t challenge the status quo as the contemporary artist is expected to do.  It has no intellectual component.  But perhaps all that is just to rationalize avoiding a challenge that is extremely difficult to pull off, a challenge that engages not just the mind but the whole being of the artist.

Self Portrait, 1980, by Alice Neel

Alice Neel never stopped believing in herself, even as the institutional art world ignored her.  She had to wait for her moment of fame, which finally came with the rise of the feminist movement.  They came looking for the great neglected female artists, and for an approach to art that countered the macho culture of abstract expressionism and pop art.  Neel’s deeply embodied, personally engaged work, with its pregnant women and babies, its frank and unheroic male nudes, fit the bill.  She bristled a bit at being assigned the role of feminist art icon, but she reveled in her late-life fame.

Alice Neel, 1970's, photographer unknown

The illustrations here really don’t do justice to the original paintings.  They lose the subtleties of the color and the sense of scale, which in the later work tends to be half life size or bigger.  Last week I was thrilled to be able to look at some original Alice Neel oils in an exhibit at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery on 57^th Street in Manhattan.  It’s a three person show with pioneering African American artists Benny Andrews and Bob Thompson, whose work is also very much worth looking at, and it’s up for just another week, through April 7, 2012.  The asking price for all the Neels is about half a million dollars each.  I think even when she was 50 years old and living in poverty, Alice Neel knew her work was that valuable.

Check out this brief clip on Neel from ART/New York.  One of the art critics that’s interviewed is John Perreault, whose nude portrait by Neel is included in this post.

If you’re interested in learning more about Alice Neel, I recommend the excellent documentary on her made by her Grandson, Andrew Neel.

All the images here were found on the web, and clicking on the images links back to the site where I found them.

Conversation, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8388 by Fred Hatt

For two weeks in February, 2005, the muted winter landscape of New York’s Central Park was altered by over seven thousand orange curtained gates straddling every meandering footpath of the great park.  Detractors consistently described the nylon fabric as “shower curtains”, but the environmental installation by Christo and Jeanne-Claude was inspired by the traditional Shinto torii, gates signifying the entrance to sacred space.

Viewing the Gates in Central Park, 2005, map from the New York Times

Christo and Jeanne-Claude have been altering the landscape and the cityscape, usually with fabrics, since the 1960′s.  I first became aware of their work in the 1970′s, when I saw the Maysles brothers documentary about the creation of their Running Fence, shimmering white fabric along 25 miles of rolling hills and into the sea on the California coast.  As the film showed, the great majority of the actual work they do is administrative and organizational, negotiating with bureaucracies and property owners, a task that took twenty-five years in the case of The Gates.  The engineering is minimalist and efficient, the materials industrial.  Their work is ephemeral, installed for a limited time, and unsellable.  It appears that they fund these huge projects mainly by selling photos, prints and preparatory sketches like this one:

The Gates, Project for Central Park, New York City, 2003, collage by Christo

Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s combination of aesthetic simplicity, huge scale, and very limited duration gives the work an interesting effect.  It exists for many years as a plan, a project, only very briefly as a reality, and then in a long, lingering afterlife of memories and images.  Its design seems aimed at altering a sense of space, but it succeeds also in altering the sense of time.

Vessels, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8398, by Fred Hatt

I took The Gates as an opportunity to practice my photography.  The saffron fabric seemed to capture the warmth of the sun in the gray wintry air.

Composition, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8400, by Fred Hatt

The colorful rectangles contrasted with the monochrome wriggliness of bare branches and 19th Century cast iron froufrou.

Cherubs, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8432, by Fred Hatt

Here the ephemeral curtains are glimpsed over the top of a boulder that has occupied its space for hundreds of millions of years.

Manhattan Schist, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8449, by Fred Hatt

The Gates created another skyline for the city of skylines.

Skyline, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8452, by Fred Hatt

South End, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8481, by Fred Hatt

Central Park is woven with extensive curlicues of footpaths, but usually they are invisible from a distance.

Breeze, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8492, by Fred Hatt

At dusk, the yellow-orange fabric took on a darker tone.

Dusk, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8512, by Fred Hatt

Construction Sign, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8530, by Fred Hatt

The orange color reminded many people of the orange construction equipment and safety markers seen everywhere in the city.  To some it seemed the entire park had become a construction zone.  The Gates had lots of detractors, grousing about all the hype, about how it didn’t fulfill traditional artistic values, about how it desecrated the classic landscape design of Olmsted and Vaux, about how they couldn’t enjoy the park with all the damn shower curtains and extra tourists.  I think some of these were the same folks that fire off an angry letter every time NPR mentions the existence of popular culture.  If you want to complain about the alteration of the landscape, how about the Second Avenue Subway project, which promises to keep a major commercial artery ripped up for the better part of a decade?

Bridge, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8617, by Fred Hatt

Overlook, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8624, by Fred Hatt

For me, The Gates provided interesting aesthetic effects, but only became truly beautiful when the snow fell.

Winter, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8746, by Fred Hatt

Snow Field, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8752, by Fred Hatt

Reflecttion, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8764, by Fred Hatt

The Gates were emblems of warmth standing amid the ice and snow.

Frozen Lake, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8899, by Fred Hatt

My friend Kayoko Nakajima, a dancer, was inspired to move among the billowing panels of color.

Kayoko's Dance, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8984, by Fred Hatt

The Gates inspired many other artists and parodists, including the charming Somerville Gates.

I walked just about every part of that wonderful park during those two weeks, whenever I had some free time.

Night and Snow, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo panorama #6,by Fred Hatt

And then it was gone, the materials recycled, the tourists gone, the pervasive orange accenting (or blight, if you prefer) vanished completely.  It was only an experience.

For my view of another giant temporary art installation in another great NYC park, click here.

One of Annie Dillard’s great themes is learning how to see – a subject far deeper than it might initially seem.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard (1974)

“When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find. It was a curious compulsion; sadly, I’ve never been seized by it since. For some reason I always “hid” the penny along the same stretch of sidewalk up the street. I would cradle it at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a chipped-off piece of sidewalk. Then I would take a piece of chalk, and, starting at either end of the block, draw huge arrows leading up to the penny from both directions. After I learned to write I labeled the arrows: SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was greatly excited, during all this arrow-drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe. But I never lurked about. I would go straight home and not give the matter another thought, until, some months later, I would be gripped again by the impulse to hide another penny.

“It is still the first week in January, and I’ve got great plans. I’ve been thinking about seeing. There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But—and this is the point—who gets excited by a mere penny? If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded by the sight of a muskrat kid paddling from its den, will you count that sight a chip of copper only, and go your rueful way? It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.”

Kimon Nicolaides writes with great passion about the art of drawing, and his approach is about a method of learning that helps you develop your own way of drawing, rather than about imparting his own tips and tricks, as most drawing instruction books seem to try to do.  Nicolaides would be the second thing I’d recommend to a beginner in life drawing study, after James McMullan’s excellent introduction to learning the art of drawing in “Line by Line“, his recent series of posts on the New York Times website.

The Natural Way to Draw, by Kimon Nicolaides (1941)

“YOU SHOULD DRAW, NOT WHAT THE THING LOOKS LIKE, NOT EVEN WHAT IT IS, BUT WHAT IT IS DOING.  Feel how the figure lifts or droops – pushes forward here – pulls back there – pushes out here – drops down easily there.  Suppose that the model takes the pose of a fighter with fists clenched and jaw thrust forward angrily. Try to draw the actual thrust of the jaw, the clenching of the hand.  A drawing of prize fighters should show the push, from foot to fist, behind their blows that makes them hurt.
. . .
“To be able to see the gesture, you must be able to feel it in your own body.  You should feel that  you are doing whatever the model is doing.  If the model stoops or reaches, pushes or relaxes, you should feel that your own muscles likewise stoop or reach, push or relax.  IF YOU DO NOT RESPOND IN LIKE MANNER TO WHAT THE MODEL IS DOING, YOU CANNOT UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU SEE.  If you do not feel as the model feels, your drawing is only a map or a plan.”

If I had to pick one all time favorite book about the work of the artist, it might be Salvador Dali’s “50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship”.  This book is, in part, a hilarious parody of such classic handbooks of master techniques as Cennino Cennini’s “Il Libro dell’ Arte“, but its suggested techniques, while preposterous and described in overblown language by a supremely conceited madman, manage to convey a great deal of real nitty gritty craft knowledge, along with a sense of the odd mixture of discipline and calculated derangement that drives many of the great artists.

50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship, by Salvador Dalí (1948)

“The apprentice’s Secret Number 22 is that of the drawing of the geodesic lines of his model.  Nothing will reveal itself more useful for the understanding of the mysteries of the nude figure than the knowledge to be derived from the assiduous practice of this method.  Preferably you must choose a plump model, the curves of whose flesh are as turgescent as possible.  The best poses for this are the recumbent ones.  You need a provision of strings of back cotton which have been previously soaked in lnseed oil to which venetian turpentine has been added, in a proportion of five to three.  these strings should be hung up the day before using them, so that they may drip off the excess oil, but without drying altogether.  Once the model is lying down in the pose which you desire you begin cautiously to lay the strings on the model’s body in the places where you wish a clearer indication of the forms.  the curve which these strings adopt will naturally be the geodesic lines of the surface which you want made clear.  You may then draw your nude, but especially these geodesic lines which, if they are in sufficient quantity, will suffice – even should you efface the nude – to imprint its absent volume.”

Qualia, the subjective aspects of experience, have become a major problem in the philosophy of mind.  For example, a physicist can tell you that different colors are simply different wavelengths of light, and that theory can be proven by experiment, but a difference of wavelength does not account for the very different impressions made on us by red and blue.  Wittgenstein was one of the first philosophers to tackle this subject.  This posthumously published book consists mostly of question after question about what we can know and what we should doubt.

Remarks on Colour, by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1978)

“‘The colours’ are not things that have definite properties, so that one could straight off look for or imagine colours that we don’t yet know, or imagine someone who knows different ones than we do.  It is quite possible that, under certain circumstances, we would say that people know colours that we don’t know, but we are not forced to say this, for there is no indication as to what we should regard as adequate analogies to our colours, in order to be able to say it.  This is like the case in which we speak of infra-red ‘light’; there is a good reason for doing it, but we can also call it a misuse.  And something similar is true with my concept ‘having pain in someone else’s body’.”

Josef Albers’ “Interaction of Color” is based on his course for artists, a series of experiments that powerfully demonstrate the relativistic nature of color perception.  There are many books for artists about understanding color, but none are as illuminating as Albers.

Interaction of Color, by Josef Albers (1963)

“Imagine in front of us 3 pots containing water, from left to right:
WARM        LUKEWARM        COLD
When the hands are dipped first into the outer containers, one feels – experiences – perceives – 2 different temperatures:
WARM (at left)                (at right) COLD
Then dipping both hands
into the middle container,
one perceives again
2 different temperatures,
this time, however,
in reversed order
(at left) COLD – WARM (at right)
though the water is neither of these temperatures, but of another, namely
LUKEWARM
Herewith one experiences a discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect called, in this case, a haptic illusion – haptic as related to the sense of touch – the haptic sense.
In much the same way as haptic sensations deceive us, so optical illusions deceive.  they lead us to “see” and to “read” other colors than those with which we are confronted physically.”

Here are a pair of classic books of art appreciation.  John Berger’s writings aim to expand the ways we think about the artwork we see.

Ways of Seeing, by John Berger (1972)

“Original paintings are silent and still in a sense that information never is.  Even a reproduction hung on a wall is not comparable in this respect for in the original the silence and stillness permeate the actual material, the paint, in which one follows the traces of the painter’s immediate gestures.  This has the effect of closing the distance in time between the painting of the picture and one’s own act of looking at it.  In this special sense all paintings are contemporary.  Hence the immediacy of their testimony. Their historical moment is literally there before our eyes.  Cézanne made a similar observation from the painter’s point of view.  ‘A minute in the world’s life passes!  To paint it in its reality, and forget everything for that!  To become that minute, to be the sensitive plate . . . give the image of what we see, forgetting everything that has appeared before our time . . . ‘  What we make of that painted moment when it is before our eyes depends upon what we expect of art, and that in turn depends today upon how we have already experienced the meaning of paintings through reproductions.”

About Looking, by John Berger (1980)

(On Grünewald’s Altarpiece)
“. . . the European tradition is full of images of torture and pain, most of them sadistic.  How is it that this, which is one of the harshest and most pain-filled of all, is an exception?  How is it painted?
It is painted inch by inch.  No contour, no cavity, no rise within the contours, reveals a moment’s flickering of the intensity of depiction.  Depiction is pinned to the pain suffered.  Since no part of the body escapes pain, the depiction can nowhere slack its precision.  The cause of the pain is irrelevant; all that matters now is the faithfulness of the depiction.  This faithfulness came from the empathy of love.”

Finally, recommended for artists’ models, artists that work with models, people that book models for life drawing classes or groups, or students that attend such groups, at this site.  This book is the real deal about the profession of modeling for artists:

The Art Model's Handbook, by Andrew Cahner (2009)

Portrait of Yvonne Landsberg, 1914, by Henri Matisse

The exhibit “Matisse: Radical Invention 1913-1917” is on view through October 11, 2010 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  The show features work from a brief period in the middle of Henri Matisse’s long career, roughly coinciding with the first World War.  It shows the artist engaged in a heroic struggle to transform his “decorative” style into something hard enough and grand enough to stand out in the twentieth century.

Traditional painters start rough and then labor to make their work more polished, more developed, more elaborate.  Matisse worked and reworked his canvases and sculptures to strip them to their structural essence.  He had no interest in smoothing the brushstrokes or making a more convincing illusion of reality.

View of Notre Dame, 1914, by Henri Matisse

Matisse was born in 1869, when photography was already ubiquitous, and came of age in an era when the most interesting movements in art explored liberation from visual realism.  His early work was a kind of post-impressionism, traditional subjects loosely painted with a sensuous approach to vivid colors.

During the time period this show focuses on, Matisse was determined to take his work to a new level.  Perhaps he was challenged by the impact made by the cubism of Picasso and Braque.  Perhaps his previous work began to feel too small and genteel in a time of war. Many of his sculptures and large canvases of this time were repeatedly and heavily reworked, becoming in the process more austere, more bold, and more abstract.

Even as the size of the works expanded towards the monumental, as Matisse’s early rounded, cloudy forms gave way to angular slabs, and his sweet candy colors to fields of blue, black and gray, the images remain sensual and inviting – Matisse could not obscure his inner warmth.

Goldfish and Palette, 1914, by Henri Matisse

Matisse knew that the process of working towards greater abstraction was as interesting as the final works.  Photographers documented incremental stages of paintings that were revised over a period of years, and his sculpture, “Back”, was repeatedly altered by reworking plaster casts, retaining the molds of different versions.  Even where earlier states of the paintings are not documented, Matisse left pentimenti clear enough to invite the viewer to try to penetrate the development of the work by examining the layers of paint.

"The Back", four versions, 1908 through 1931, by Henri Matisse

The curators of this exhibit have used digital tools to analyze these stages of development, and one gallery presents this analysis in an animated display.  If you are not able to make it to the Museum of Modern Art to see the exhibit, this exposition of the successive changes in “Bathers by a River” and “Back” is presented in the excellent website on “Matisse: Radical Invention” hosted by the Art Institute of Chicago, where the exhibit was initially shown.  For anyone interested in the creative process of visual art, this website is worth perusing.

Another great example of Matisse’s work from this period is “The Piano Lesson”, recently compared with other artists’ treatment of the same theme in this post at my friend Claudia’s blog, Museworthy.  The original painting is in this show.  It’s eight feet tall and all that gray is surprisingly luminous.

I also recommend matisse.net, one of the best websites out there devoted to any artist’s full career.

Images in this post were found on the web.  Clicking on the images links back to the sites where I found them.

Autumnal Fantasy, 1916-1944, by Charles E. Burchfield

Charles E. Burchfield’s landscape paintings swarm with spirits.  His wild and hairy visions of the alive world are currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in an exhibit titled Heat Waves in a Swamp.  I knew a little of Burchfield before, mostly through reproductions, but seeing this show, brilliantly curated by sculptor Robert Gober, was like discovering a cache of glittering gems hidden in an old tree stump.

Burchfield grew up in Salem, Ohio and lived most of his life in Gardenville, a rural suburb of Buffalo, New York.  His talent was recognized at a fairly early age, but he had no interest in living in a big city or being part of a movement or scene.  He painted to please himself, and sold paintings to support his wife and five kids.  His life story and his words reveal him as an unassuming and unpretentious man, but so thoroughly an artist that he couldn’t stop thinking as an artist for a moment.  One room of the Whitney show is filled with hundreds of abstract biomorphic doodles that he made while talking on the phone or playing card games with his wife.  Besides doodling he also kept journals throughout his life.  A particular pleasure of the exhibit is that nearly every painting is accompanied by Burchfield’s own eloquent description or reminiscence of its creation.

Charles E. Burchfield painting in his studio in Gardenville, N.Y., 1966, photo by William Doran, Burchfield Penney Art Center

While he did oil paintings and some mixed media, the bulk of Burchfield’s work is done in the medium of “dry brush” watercolor and gouache.  Traditional watercolor technique involves using thin washes of color on absorbent wet paper, and often tries for luminous, saturated colors and a loose, spontaneous style.  Burchfield’s technique is quite different, heavily worked by watercolorist standards, and his colors are often subtle and earthy.  His work achieves a feeling of light not by a light touch, but by a fiery intensity of movement.

His work divides neatly into three periods: the first begins in his breakthrough year of 1917, when he was in his mid-20′s.  He devised a system of visual motifs that embodied different moods and energies, called “conventions for abstract thoughts“.  These forms remind me of the “thought forms” described by Theosophists Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater in a 1901 book as shapes of thoughts visualized through clairvoyant synesthesia, though I do not know whether Burchfield was influenced by Theosophical ideas.  In painting from nature Burchfield saw manifestations of these abstractions, and his paintings of this period seem to depict organic forms through drawn lines whose movement expresses their underlying forces.  Those forces sometimes seem dark, ominous, prickly, overwhelming, or explosive, but always beautiful.  The chaos that is there is fertile and creative.

The Insect Chorus, 1917, by Charles E. Burchfield

Burchfield’s description of the image above reads, “It is late Sunday afternoon in August.  A child stands alone in the garden listening to the metallic sounds of insects.  They are all his world, so, to his mind, all things become saturated with their presence – Crickets lurk in the depths of the grass, the shadows of the trees conceal fantastic creatures, and the boy looks with fear at the black interior of the arbor, not knowing what terrible thing might be there.”

In his middle period Burchfield turned to a kind of American regionalism or social realism, often depicting industrial scenes or working-class settings.  The paintings of this period have a great sense of light and space.  The example below has a deep perspective reminiscent of Breughel, with a whole town visible in the far distance.

End of the Day, 1938, by Charles E. Burchfield

Burchfield’s description:  “At the end of a day of hard labor the workmen plod wearily uphill in the eerie twilight of winter, and it seems to the superficial eye that they have little to come home to in those stark, unpainted houses, but, like the houses, they persist and will not give in; and so they attain a rugged dignity that compels our admiration.”

Sun and Rocks, 1918-1950, by Charles E. Burchfield

Burchfield’s late period begins in 1943, when he was fifty.  He had spent decades developing his craft, but felt that his work was “rather prosaic” compared with his youthful, magical approach.  He went back to early works that were not quite successful, but that had the seeds of great ideas he now had the maturity to accomplish.  He attached extra paper around these early paintings, extending them into bold compositions in monumental scale.  The late period expansions were as much as five or six times larger than the early paintings that form their cores.

While many of the middle-period works in the show are oil paintings on loan from major museums, all the late work is watercolor on paper, which can’t be kept on permanent display due to watercolor’s vulnerability to fading, and most of them are from the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, where the artist’s personal archives reside.  I assume this means most of this late work was not sold in Burchfield’s lifetime.  Perhaps in his later years he had achieved enough recognition, his children were grown, and he felt the freedom to paint for himself, for the sheer joy he clearly felt in it.

The Four Seasons, 1949-1960, by Charles E. Burchfield

Though Burchfield was a protestant, his late work expresses a pure pagan spirituality, in which clouds and rain, trees and insects, are living beings in a web of sacred life.  In one painting, the space between trees, through which the bright distant landscape is seen, becomes a golden dancing figure.  Another seems to show, as curator Robert Gober says, “the point of view of a man lying in a field of dandelions on a sleepless night”.  The late works are overwhelming in their size, their magical light and space, and their thorny, buzzing detail.  The reproductions here don’t even begin to do them justice.

Heat Waves in a Swamp:  The Paintings of Charles Burchfield is curated by Robert Gober.  It was first exhibited at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, before moving to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, where it will remain on view until October 17, 2010.

All illustrations for this post were found on the web.  Clicking on the pictures links to their source pages, which are great places to find more images and information on Burchfield and Heat Waves in a Swamp.