Charles E. Burchfield

We wish to thank The Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, New York, for their kind assistance in cataloguing the present work.

Provenance:
The Artist.
Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries, New York, New York.
Sid Deutsch Art Gallery, Inc., New York, New York.
Acquired directly from the above, 1976.
Private Collection, New York, New York.

Exhibited:
Buffalo, New York, Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, "Charles Burchfield: Early Watercolors," April 24 - May 19, 1963, cat. no. 76.
Boston, Massachusetts, The Library of the Boston Athenaeum, "An American Visionary: Drawings and Watercolors of Charles Burchfield," March 20 - May 16, 1986 (traveling to New Britain Museum of American of Art, New Britain, Connecticut, June 8 - July 20, 1986; Berkshire Museum, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, January 9 - February 15, 1987; Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire, February 22 - March 29, 1987).
Columbus, Ohio, Columbus Museum of Art, "The Paintings of Charles Burchfield: North by Midwest," March 23 - May 18, 1997 (traveling to Burchfield-Penney Art Center, Buffalo, New York, June 15 - August 17, 1997; National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, September 26, 1997 - January 25, 1998).

Literature:
John W. Straus, Charles E. Burchfield: An Interview with the Artist, and Account and Analysis of His Production, and a Catalogue of His Paintings, Honors thesis, Harvard University, Cambridge, 1942, no. 793.
Joseph S. Trovato, ed., Charles Burchfield: Catalogue of Paintings in Public and Private Collections, Utica, 1970, p. 98, no. 671.
John I. H. Bauer, The Inlander: Life and Work of Charles Burchfield, 1893-1967, New York and London, 1982, pg. 115, fig. 92.
J. Benjamin Townsend, “The Career of Charles Burchfield In Retrospect and Prospect," in An American Visionary: Watercolors and Drawings of Charles E. Burchfield, Boston, 1986.
Nannette V. Maciejunes and Michael Hall, eds., The Paintings of Charles Burchfield: North by Midwest, New York, 1997.
Tullis Johnson, “An Agreeable Kind of Horror," in Blistering Vision: Charles E. Burchfield’s Sublime American Landscapes, Buffalo, pp. 18-155.

Lot Essay:
Salem is approximately 30 miles from Irondale in Northeast Ohio, due west of Pittsburgh. Burchfield moved to this small industrial town when he was five years old, following his father’s death and largely remained there until just before 1921. Salem served as fertile ground for much of his early work, c. 1915-1920. 

Storm over Irondale fits nicely into the tail end of the artist’s early "Ohio Landscapes." It was painted three years after his much heralded “golden year,” in which his work was characterized by extensive experimentation approaching near abstraction and "synesthesia" and is a nod to his later ‘realistic’ (but very much with a Regionalist bent) landscapes, painted just a year before his move to Buffalo.

Recorded in his own journal, the present work is the result of several sketches and documents “a romantic [bicycle] trip” in August complete with “imaginary sounds” in which the viewer has a bird’s eye view atop a hill in Irondale framed by gathering, ominous clouds at upper left and right high above an inviting road at lower right. The scene is largely comprised of bluffs partially framed by billowing factories at left. “There is romance at every angle…ideas crowd tumultuously upon each other” Burchfield once opined. In speaking of the present work, he notes: “Irondale surpassed all my expectations…A belated cicada song, by his very song prolonging the heat of the day from far below the noise of fellow practicing baseball came up to me…Here I had the feeling of lonely evenings of childhood when I feared God....“