Charles Burchfield’s ‘Retreat of Winter’ at The Burchfield Penney Art Center

By: Frank Housh

In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, – no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature” (Essay, 1836)

If you wish to understand Charles Burchfield’s work, especially his masterpiece “Retreat of Winter,” you need to go back 100 years when the tender, green sprouts of American Transcendentalism sprang from the dry, frozen ground. 

Transcendentalism was a literary and artistic movement that resisted the early 19th Century’s intellectual method of engaging with the world. The Transcendentalists refused to accept the equation of reason with virtue, reason as the exclusive means of gaining knowledge or finding meaning in the world. 

Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman prized intuition over reason and experience — especially the experience of nature — as the source of true meaning in the world. 

This elevation of the natural over the intellectual struck a deep chord with a young Charles Burchfield in 1914 when, as a museum guard at the (now defunct) Hatch Gallery in Cleveland, he became “overwhelmed” by an exhibit of Chinese nature scrolls which depicted a landscape’s transformation over the seasons. 

Burchfield’s quest to capture nature’s seasonal liminality never left him, as evidenced by the Burchfield Penney Art Center’s remarkable companion exhibitions, “Retreat of Winter” and Embracing Earth: Burchfield & Whitman. The exhibitions include a comprehensive history of the painting, including journal entries, studies, and sketches which go back decades prior to “Retreat of Winter’s” completion.

“Retreat of Winter” is a large-scale watercolor that seeks not merely to represent the transition of a “black hollow” from winter to spring; rather, Burchfield creates a sublime, immersive experience in which the viewer can hear the birdsong, smell the buttercups, and be entranced by the babble of a just-thawed stream’s journey downhill. 

Charles Burchfield was 28 in 1921 when he moved to Buffalo to design wallpaper for the M.H. Birge & Sons Wallpaper Company at Niagara and Maryland Streets. He quit in 1929 to become a professional artist, eventually earning a reputation as an important and iconoclastic American artist. The Burchfield Penney Art Center, “BurchFest” at his home near Clinton and Union Roads in West Seneca and the Burchfield Nature and Art Center all claim him as a son of Buffalo and each provides key insights into his life and work. 

This article is the first in a series The Buffalo Hive will produce discussing Charles Burchfield, the world which he inhabited, and his remarkable “Retreat of Winter.”

Watch this space.

“Retreat of Winter” is on view at the Burchfield Penney Art Center from Aug. 9 to Oct. 20, 2024. Its companion exhibit, “Embracing Earth: Burchfield & Whitman,” is on view from July 12 to Oct. 27, 2024. You can find more information here.

Frank Housh is the Managing Editor of The Buffalo Hive.