The Daily Bulletin Archive

The Burchfield Penney Art Center at Buffalo State College will host a major retrospective of work by American artist Charles E. Burchfield, Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield, from March 7 to May 23.

Selected as one of the top 10 exhibitions of 2009 by theNew Yorker magazine and the Los Angeles Times when it debuted at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles last fall, the exhibition includes more than 80 major watercolors, drawings, and oil paintings from private and public collections, as well as paintings and sketches seldom if ever seen by the public. The show has also drawn praise from critics at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

Curated by artist Robert Gober and organized by the Hammer in collaboration with the Burchfield Penney, the show combines artwork and biographical material to provide new insights into Burchfield’s creative vision and artistic process. The exhibition will travel next to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

An obsessive collector, organizer, and archivist, Burchfield left a trove of well-maintained sketches, notebooks, journals, and doodles spanning his entire career. This material is housed primarily at the Burchfield Penney, which has more than 25,000 objects by the artist. In curating the exhibit, Gober included much of this archival material, enriching each painting with a glimpse of how it came to be.

“I was interested in creating this exhibition because I wanted to take a deeper look at Burchfield: the man, the artist, and the work; how he lived his life; where he lived his life; how he made his works and the works themselves,” Gober said.

Many major institutions have collected Burchfield’s work, including the Whitney, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Smithsonian Institution, the National Gallery of Art, and the Chicago Art Institute. Burchfield’s work constituted the first solo exhibition at the newly opened MoMA in 1930. There has not been a major retrospective of his work in more than 20 years.

The exhibition is accompanied by a 160-page, fully illustrated catalog edited by Gober and Cynthia Burlingham, Hammer deputy director, with essays by Gober, Burlingham, critic Dave Hickey, Burchfield Penney head of collections and the Charles Cary Rumsey curator Nancy Weekly, and Burchfield Penney research assistant Tullis Johnson. Published by Prestel, the catalog is a major scholarly addition to the study of Burchfield and includes illustrations of both paintings and historical material from the Burchfield Penney Art Center.

A full range of public programs, including panel discussions, lectures, and workshops, will also accompany the exhibition. For details, visitwww.YourNewBurchfieldPenney.com.

The exhibition is made possible at the Burchfield Penney through the support of Peter and Joan Andrews, the Charles E. Burchfield Foundation, Carol E. Heckman and Charles E. Balbach, M&T Bank, and the John R. Oishei Foundation.

A special members’ preview will be held on March 6 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.