The Inlander

By John Ireland Howe Baur

Subjects: realism, watercolor artist, American art

Description: From the dust jacket: Charles Burchfield and Edward Hopper are perhaps the two most important 20th century artists in the long American realist tradition. Of the two, Burchfield was without question the more varied, the more romantic, and the more imaginative. He was also more deeply involved than any other American artist of the century in the poetic and spiritual meaning of nature. As the last chapter of The Inlander points out, Burchfield‘s art may be seen as a combination of a vein a pantheism that stretches from Emerson, Thoreau, and the Hudson River School to Burchfield‘s last great watercolors from the 1950s and early 60s. Burchfield kept a journal throughout his life and was a prolific letter writer. Much of Mr. Bauer story is drawn from these in sources so that the artist's development and the inward and outward events of his career are traced through his own words. It is a fascinating record of painful growth, of intense shyness slowly overcome, of emotional crises, and above all of a courageous dedication to his deeply held aesthetic beliefs. Burchfield's career fell into three well-marked periods. In the first period (1915 to 21), he devised those decorative and often fantastic interpretations of nature in which he visualized sounds, such as the songs of crickets, and childhood emotions, such as fear of the dark. In the second period (1921 to 43), attention shifted to the villages and cities of the Midwest and North, especially Buffalo, and his style turned toward the somber realism for which he is perhaps best known. In his last period (1943 to 67), he returned to nature and developed an intensely personal kind of expressionism with which he composed his hymns of praise to the cycles of the seasons, the forces of birth, growth, and death, and the beauty and tragedy of change. In all, this is perhaps the most illuminating analysis of an important artist in our life that has been published in many years.