City Critique:

This exhibition examined Charles E. Burchfield’s fascination with the city as a symbol for American growth during the first four decades of the twentieth century. Coming from the small town of Salem, Ohio, Burchfield was overwhelmed on his first trip to New York City in 1916 to attend the National Academy of Design on a scholarship. While Burchfield didn’t stay to complete the first semester, his art student instincts were fully engaged as he documented his observations of street scenes with a series of small drawings. Radically different from the countryside and woods near his home, New York nevertheless seemed to be both a mammoth, densely populated metropolis featuring new skyscrapers, such as the Woolworth Building, as well as a village with parks, trees, gas street lights, strolling pedestrians, and a parade. After just two months, he sought refuge back in Salem.

Five years later, needing to support himself, Burchfield moved to Buffalo, New York in November 1921 to become an assistant designer at M. H. Birge & Sons, a quality wallpaper company. He moved to the suburb of Gardenville in April 1925 and, while riding the bus to work, he decided the city possessed potential subjects for paintings although he lacked the time needed to devote to new artwork. After resigning in August 1929 as head of the Birge design department, Burchfield fully embraced painting as his life’s ambition. Lake Erie, grain elevators, cargo ships, iron bridges, commercial urban buildings, and older, dilapidated dwellings inspired his romanticized realism. He relished urban decay for its weathered beauty—in a strange way it reflected the power of nature over human intervention.

Many Burchfield enthusiasts consider his urban “Middle Period” to be his greatest, bringing American subjects to an art world that previously had valued only European art. Drawn primarily from the Burchfield Penney Art Center’s collection, the exhibition also featured Buildings and Street Scene (c. 1940; Study for Gates Down (1920); and 1916 New York City watercolors and drawings that have never been exhibited in Buffalo. Lenders also included the Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Rochester, the DC Moore Gallery in New York City, which represents the artist’s estate for the Charles E. Burchfield Foundation, and private collectors.

City Critique was curated by Nancy Weekly and presented in honor of Edna M. Lindemann, founding director of the Burchfield Penney. The exhibition and its accompanying brochure were made possible by the generosity of Ilene and Peter Fleischmann, Edward J. Wozniak, and Parkside Coffee Company.