The Paintings of Charles Burchfield North by Midwest

Published 1997 - 280 pages - Hardcover

The work of renowned American watercolorist Charles Burchfield (1893-1967) has been the subject of numerous books and exhibitions over the past sixty years. The fascination with his paintings has continued, but Burch- field studies have remained essentially unchanged since 1930, when Alfred H. Barr, Jr., then director of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, described Burch- field's paintings as "one of the most isolated and original phenomena in American art." This view, which became widely held, and the artist's portrayal of him- self in his prolific journals, led scholars and critics to regard Burchfield as an immensely talented yet independent painter, something of an outsider. Certain observers saw him as an idiosyncratic American Scene painter; others characterized him as an eccentric modernist. Despite Burchfield's considerable achievements, over time he was placed on the margins of twentieth- century art history. By drawing Burchfield's work back into a dialogue with the cultural and historic environment in which it was created, this collection of essays reasserts the central importance of Burchfield's paint- ing to the history of modern American art.