Charles E. Burchfield (1893-1967)

and raw, primitive, and in earnest; and the smiling Hudson Valley; a place for mellowness, and vegetation.Oct 4 – 5 & 13 – Jury duty at Phila. (last date for prizes); The worst jury I ever served on – or rather I should hasten to add, the worst chairman, for it was the chairman who made all the cheap political overtures; which I will not bother to enumerate, but mention only a typical example:; His nomination of the French painter Simon as a 1st prize winner, so as to emphasize the International character of the show (not because he though Simon’s water-colors were good, for he realized as well as the rest of us that the quality of his work was well below that of a dozen Americans picked at random.) Fortunately no one else on the jury felt politically inclined.; Met for the first time Robert Riggs. He is a bluff genial, hearty sort of person. He had one trial that so many print-makers, and making water-colors of the precious type have, one that I deplore: insistence on “print-quality” as the prime requisite for a good print. The print award went, in spite of all I and one other juror could say, to an otherwise sterile mediocre work because it had “such marvelous lithographic grays” in it –