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Lot Essay
In the 1940s and 50s, Charles Burchfield looked back to his breakout pictures from his 1917 “Golden Year,” finding inspiration once again in the moods of nature and sounds of insects that captivated him during his childhood in Salem, Ohio. He both added to existing works from his early career and, as in the present work, created new paintings revisiting motifs from his past with a more powerful emphasis on fantasy.
In Haunted Twilight, Burchfield delights in his memories of an abandoned house in Teegarden, Ohio, four miles southeast from his childhood home. He discovered the deserted building as a young boy while wandering in the countryside during a visit to his grandmother, and he was fascinated watching the creatures that took over the area. Burchfield recalled, “At late twilight flying squirrels, who spent the daylight hours in the attic of the house, would come out one by one, fly to the base of the pine tree, scramble to the top, and then glide to a woods nearby. We—my sister and I—would count them as they came.” (as quoted in E.H. Jones, ed., The Drawings of Charles Burchfield, New York, 1968, n.p.) He memorialized the allure of the Teegarden house in several works, including another example entitled Haunted Twilight (1954-62, Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as well as Old House and Spruce Trees (1951-60, Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin). Of a drawing for the latter, Burchfield wrote that he intended to communicate “the eeriness of an August twilight, with katydids and grasshoppers in full song.” (The Drawings of Charles Burchfield, n.p.)
In the present work, the haunted house appears almost completely overtaken by nature, as tall grasses and towering trees surround it from either side. Rather than the squirrels or grasshoppers in other works from the series, here Burchfield features a spider and owl as the creatures holding dominion over this spooky hamlet. The patterning of the spider’s web appears to reverberate throughout the entire composition—more literally as a cobweb over the house’s awning, and more symbolically as the grasses and trees create similar angular linework. As a result, the entire scene pulses with a resonant energy. As Matthew Baigell explains of this technique, “He began to double and triple the activities occurring within a given area of a painting. Not content with indicating a tree or the sound of insects with short calligraphic strokes, he might superimpose a moth’s movements on some leaves…Such exploitation of detail prevented his paintings from lapsing into static compositions, but instead allowed them to expand in continuous movement. The vital forces of nature surged through his forms.” (Charles Burchfield, New York, 1976, p. 175)
Writing about Burchfield’s works from the mid-1950s, artist Robert Gober praises, “The works from this period of Burchfield’s life are immersed in what he perceived as the complicated beauty and spirituality of nature and are often imbued with visionary, apocalyptic, and hallucinatory qualities.” (Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield, exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles, California, 2009, p. 137) Haunted Twilight of 1957 superbly evokes this particular blend of beauty and fantasy that exemplifies the best of Burchfield’s unique reflections on the American landscape.
In Haunted Twilight, Burchfield delights in his memories of an abandoned house in Teegarden, Ohio, four miles southeast from his childhood home. He discovered the deserted building as a young boy while wandering in the countryside during a visit to his grandmother, and he was fascinated watching the creatures that took over the area. Burchfield recalled, “At late twilight flying squirrels, who spent the daylight hours in the attic of the house, would come out one by one, fly to the base of the pine tree, scramble to the top, and then glide to a woods nearby. We—my sister and I—would count them as they came.” (as quoted in E.H. Jones, ed., The Drawings of Charles Burchfield, New York, 1968, n.p.) He memorialized the allure of the Teegarden house in several works, including another example entitled Haunted Twilight (1954-62, Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, New York) as well as Old House and Spruce Trees (1951-60, Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin). Of a drawing for the latter, Burchfield wrote that he intended to communicate “the eeriness of an August twilight, with katydids and grasshoppers in full song.” (The Drawings of Charles Burchfield, n.p.)
In the present work, the haunted house appears almost completely overtaken by nature, as tall grasses and towering trees surround it from either side. Rather than the squirrels or grasshoppers in other works from the series, here Burchfield features a spider and owl as the creatures holding dominion over this spooky hamlet. The patterning of the spider’s web appears to reverberate throughout the entire composition—more literally as a cobweb over the house’s awning, and more symbolically as the grasses and trees create similar angular linework. As a result, the entire scene pulses with a resonant energy. As Matthew Baigell explains of this technique, “He began to double and triple the activities occurring within a given area of a painting. Not content with indicating a tree or the sound of insects with short calligraphic strokes, he might superimpose a moth’s movements on some leaves…Such exploitation of detail prevented his paintings from lapsing into static compositions, but instead allowed them to expand in continuous movement. The vital forces of nature surged through his forms.” (Charles Burchfield, New York, 1976, p. 175)
Writing about Burchfield’s works from the mid-1950s, artist Robert Gober praises, “The works from this period of Burchfield’s life are immersed in what he perceived as the complicated beauty and spirituality of nature and are often imbued with visionary, apocalyptic, and hallucinatory qualities.” (Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield, exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles, California, 2009, p. 137) Haunted Twilight of 1957 superbly evokes this particular blend of beauty and fantasy that exemplifies the best of Burchfield’s unique reflections on the American landscape.