ART : Outwardly Ordinary Life of Burchfield Held Inner Struggles

We live in the age of biography. Thick volumes on every artist and hanger-on with a life worth telling cram the bookstores. Documentaries and docudramas sweep the screens. Reading and watching, we chew on the cultural past like a cud: Paris in the ‘20s; Berlin in the ‘30s; New York in the ‘50s; Everywhere in the ‘60s.

One recurrent theme about creativity in America during this century has been the Crack-Up--a losing struggle to reconcile private discipline with the public and commercial display that often defines success. Jackson Pollock, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Delmore Schwartz, Arshile Gorky and Sylvia Plath are some well-known examples.

But hard-drinking, money-chasing, self-losing despair adds up to only one biographical motif. Another reflects the stubbornly inward lives of artists sustained by outwardly ordinary lives.

Among poets, there was William Carlos Williams, a doctor in Rutherford, N. J., who visited Paris in the ‘20s and made the crucial decision to return to Rutherford to continue his writing there. There was composer Charles Ives, who earned his living as an insurance salesman in Danbury, Conn.

Charles E. Burchfield, a painter whose early work is on display at the Laguna Art Museum through April 24, also lived a quiet life of remarkable intensity.

Burchfield didn’t so much fight the fashionable Modernism of his time as ignore it, a disregard that got him branded as regressive by some critics. He painted landscapes he saw through a lonely, inner eye that quickened purple-shadowed streets and sunstruck mountains with an emotional energy worlds apart from mere decoration. He avoided major cities, having grown up in Salem, Ohio, and later moving to Buffalo, N. Y.

His children say he was a self-contained man who kept his art private, even from them.

“We had a shelf on a wall in the living room and when he was done with a painting he would put it up and call for my mother,” said Burchfield’s son, Arthur, a retired IBM executive who attended the opening of the Laguna show with Mary Alice Mustain, one of his four sisters.

He said his mother, Bertha, would look the new work over and comment. “She wasn’t afraid to speak her mind, and he took what she said to heart. But, as children, we were never present for that.”

“We learned his love of nature,” said Mustain, 64. “He took us with him on his hikes and walks.”

Was there ever a sense that his life style, that of the artist, made him feel out of place among his neighbors? “I think it was a struggle for him,” Arthur, 58, said.

“When I was growing up, I was taunted. The kids would talk about ‘crazy Burchfield.’ You know, ‘All your dad does all day is paint pictures?’ He was different. But he shielded us from whatever unhappiness he might have experienced over it. My mother was a buffer between us and him. She was a very strong woman. She handled the details of our lives and let him paint. She had absolute faith in him.”

William Carlos Williams would come home from his pediatric house calls and write about himself dancing naked in the night to an inner music while Rutherford slept. An essay that accompanies the Laguna show--curated by the Columbus (Ohio) Museum of Art and due in Buffalo after it closes here--says that Burchfield “danced in the fields to the sound of imaginary music.”

At that time--1917--he was a 24-year-old accountant in Salem, where he returned after graduating from the Cleveland School (now Institute) of Art. He painted during his lunch hour and in his spare time.

He also kept extensive journals. “After a long period of gloom,” he wrote in 1916, “I came home tonight under the half-moon exceedingly light of heart, so that I unconsciously whistled. . . . Fireflies popped like stars.”

He served in the Army during World War I and emerged in 1919 without a sense of direction.

“Right after the Army, he was even thinking about suicide,” his son said. “He just felt that nothing had any meaning. He wasn’t happy with the work he had done and destroyed a huge number of his paintings. . . . Then he read ‘Winesburg, Ohio,’ by Sherwood Anderson, and that inspired him again.”

From Anderson’s book of stories, Burchfield learned how a highly personal vision could be drawn from the kind of small-town background he shared with the author.

“I think he had inner struggles all along,” Arthur Burchfield said. “In his journals, you could see that he had this struggle. I think it was his feeling that nature was the most important thing, feeling so deeply about it, and trying to reconcile that with his domestic life, his wife and children.”

In Buffalo, where Burchfield lived starting in 1920, he worked as a wallpaper designer for nine years before his family could get by--just barely at first--from sales of his paintings.

Critics have said that Burchfield brings other artists to mind, including Van Gogh and the moody Norwegian, Edvard Munch. But Arthur Burchfield said his father never consciously embraced artistic influences. “He made the remark once that, ‘I don’t really love art. I love my own art.’ He didn’t pay much attention to other artists’ work. He had no desire to be part of the art world. No desire at all. His life was that of a small-town guy. He looked like your small-town corner druggist.”

But he was hardly a naif. He wrote that he was inspired by the “telescoping of time” in Chinese scroll painting and by Richard Wagner’s idea of the leitmotif (a musical phrase recurring throughout a piece of music). “He said he thought Picasso was responsible for setting painting back 1,000 years,” his son recalled. “He didn’t care for abstract art. He hated labels. They kept trying to put labels on him.” Burchfield painted until he died in 1967, at age 73, of a cerebral hemorrhage. Whitney Museum curator John I. H. Baur wrote a biography that was published in 1984 by Cornwall books: “Life and Work of Charles Burchfield, 1893-1967: The Inlander.”

Antonin Artaud once wrote of Van Gogh that he had “discovered what he was and who he was, when the collective consciousness of society, to punish him for escaping its clutches, suicided him.” Whether true in Van Gogh’s case or not, that idea has hardened into a romantic assumption about the tragic shape of an artist’s life. Charles Burchfield’s example demonstrates that it need not be so.