Charles Burchfield

I really thought the Charles Burchfield show at the Whitney (through October 17, 2010) was splendid with just a few reservations. I could have done without a wall full of his doodles, they really didn't add much to the show, and if you've seen one boring doodle you've seen them all, kinda like listening to other people's dreams. Also why have notebooks displayed in a case but not show the insides? Otherwise his wonderful paintings shine. His nature moves and shimmers in the light and pulsates with the hot summer sun pouring down. Working almost exclusively in watercolors, (the one or two oils shown have a dead muddy static feel} Burchfield’s landscapes almost look animated and this effect is one of the things about his work that attracted me as a young artist. Another thing that is interesting to me is that for a short period of time, 1921 to 1929 Burchfield worked as a wallpaper designer at the M. H. Birge & Sons wallpaper factory in Buffalo and some of his wallpaper designs from this period are exhibited in a gallery that also includes several of his watercolors also from the same period and are displayed on walls covered in a reprint of one of his wallpaper designs. This is a nice touch by the curator the artist Robert Gober who has done an outstanding job curating the art of another artist. I had no idea that so many of his works were large, and the best of these paintings that Burchfield did in his later years are shown in the last gallery. These paintings knocked me out with their scale and radiance and proves that with age some artists just get better and better.