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Artworks
Charles Burchfield
The Equinox (Painted during the lunch hour), March 23, 1917Watercolor on paper16 x 18 inches
40.6 x 45.7 cmSigned and dated at lower left: Chas. Burchfield / 1917; inscribed and dated on verso: The Equinox / Mar. 23, 1917 / Painted during the lunch hourCharles Burchfield, Notebook, March 20, 1917 A dappled sky, silver sun – wind out of SW is it the wind or the Equinox? Windy poplars against yellow + white...Charles Burchfield, Notebook, March 20, 1917
A dappled sky, silver sun – wind out of SW is it the wind or the Equinox? Windy poplars against yellow + white dapple rifts robins sing – Windy fresh sunlit noon – oily mud – objects vibrate in space – nothing is distinctly static – grass is green + RV + has a brassy appearance - ; in some places greening grass contrasts with RV mud –
According to the artist's Painting Index, the present work depicts "houses on Rose Street, with Leetonia Furnace lights in sky." Burchfield took inspiration from experiences of daily life and the environment of Salem, Ohio and nearby towns. He was often called “the Sherwood Anderson artist” since he evoked the sense of disillusionment with small-town America captured in Anderson’s collection of short stories focused on Winesburg, Ohio, published in 1919. Burchfield denied this side of his art and instead preferred to share positive memories of his hometown. Art dealer Mary Mowbray-Clarke, who handled Burchfield’s work from her Sunwise Turn Bookshop in Manhattan and initially sold The Equinox, saw Burchfield as “one more youth of the new age, with power whose privilege it is to show us our insincerities and sentimentalities while never looking at us at all, only at the world we have him to grow up in.”
Provenance
[Mary Mowbray-Clarke, Sunwise Turn Bookshop]; to
Martha GrueningExhibitions
Menconi + Schoelkopf, New York, Charles E. Burchfield: Inexhaustible, February 22-April 2, 2021, p. 58, no. 10, illus. p. 36Literature
Charles E. Burchfield, Painting Index, vol. II-10, Charles E. Burchfield Archives, Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, New York // John W. Straus, “Charles E. Burchfield: An Interview with the Artist, An Account and Analysis of His Production and a Catalogue of His Paintings,” honors thesis, Harvard University, 1942, no. 236 // Joseph S. Trovato, Charles Burchfield: Catalogue of Paintings in Public and Private Collections, Utica, New York: Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, 1970, no. 346, p. 62
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