Embracing Earth: Burchfield & Whitman

For an ongoing series of exhibitions that explore how the work of Charles E. Burchfield relates to work by other artists, the Burchfield Penney Art Center compares Burchfield and the American poet Walt Whitman. Burchfield’s poetic journal writings about nature mirror his expressive paintings and drawings. Indeed, around 1956 he was quoted as saying, “I am seeking simplified reaffirmation of some of my early period. I want to praise and exalt nature as Walt Whitman has done in Leaves of Grass.” The exhibition shows how their parallel perceptions of nature were expressed both visually and textually, focusing on Whitman's prose published in Specimen Days. Burchfield Scholar Nancy Weekly co-curated the exhibition with Whitman scholar Sam Magavern, who wrote the major catalog essay and has worked with actors from Ujima Company to create films and recordings of writings by Whitman and Burchfield.

Magavern proposed this exhibition as a multi-media initiative, with this introduction to the textual alliances between the two men who lived nearly a century apart:

Charles Burchfield is famous as a watercolor painter, and Walt Whitman as a poet, but they also excelled in another genre: writing prose, in the form of notebook entries, about their experiences of nature. For Burchfield, this was a lifelong endeavor, stretching from his high school years until near death; his journals include 72 books with over ten thousand pages. Whitman kept notebooks his whole life, too, but he wrote his finest nature prose in the late 1870s, when he was spending time at a farm outside of Camden, New Jersey and jotting down notes inspired by his surroundings. He collected roughly fifty of these short pieces into Specimen Days, the fragmentary memoir that he published in 1882. These pieces bear many resemblances to Burchfield’s journal entries and allow us to compare and contrast the two writers.

Weekly proposed the title based on Burchfield’s thoughts on April 25, 1935, about how simple gardening became transcendent:

Working in the yard. A clear sunshiny day, with a cool wind from the north.  Transplanting the valerian ever-blooming bleeding-hearts, daphne, phlox and rose-bushes to the back & side-gardens, so as to make a wide lawn back of the garage.  Each year the ritual of actually putting my hands in the earth, seems like a newly discovered delight. The wonderful feel of the soft rich loan — all my petty worries fell away to nothing — I feel like falling prostrate and embracing Earth —

Whitman and Burchfield’s mutual appreciation of nature is reflected in vivid descriptions that also come alive in the artist’s watercolors and drawings, including studies that incorporate thoughts about how to articulate the subject meaningfully. Art was curated from the Burchfield Penney Art Center’s unique collection and archives, and generous loans from the Delaware Museum of Art in Wilmington, Delaware, DC Moore Gallery in New York, and private collectors.