Heat Waves in a Swamp will be the first major Charles Burchfield exhibition to be mounted on the west coast and the first in New York for more than twenty years. Arranged chronologically, it approaches Burchfield’s work with a new perspective facilitated in part by the curatorial sensibilities of Robert Gober.

For recent writers on the history of American art the noted watercolorist Charles Burchfield (1893-1967) has become an increasingly elusive figure, often easier to overlook than to include. Indeed, because of the broad stylistic reach of his paintings, Burchfield often appears to be more than one artist, with scholars and admirers feeling obliged to champion one aspect of his work at the expense of others.

Alfred Hamilton Barr, Jr. (January 28, 1902 – August 15, 1981), known as Alfred H. Barr, Jr., was an art historian and the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. From that position, he was one of the most influential forces in the development of popular attitudes toward modern art; for example, by arranging the blockbuster Van Gogh exhibition of 1935, in the words of author Bernice Kert "a precursor to the hold Van Gogh has to this day on the contemporary imagination."

From 1921 to 1929 Burchfield worked as a designer at the M. H. Birge & Sons wallpaper factory in Buffalo, New York. While he viewed the wallpapers he created there as independent from the art he produced during this time (he once referred to the wallpaper as “hack” work), their designs were, like his art, all based in nature, and they reflected the art-historical influences that had excited and informed him as a student at the Cleveland School of Art, which he attended from 1912 to 1916.

JOHN D. MORSE: What books do you like to read -- what kind of books? Maybe a better way to ask it is, what books do you find yourself re-reading? CHARLES E. BURCHFIELD: Well, now, I like certain books of Knute Hamsun: The Growth of the Soil, of course, and the Segelfoss Town, and The Children of the Age. I have read those so often that I almost feel as though I'd lived in that place, that's Segelfoss. JOHN D. MORSE: Mmhmm.

A lot of people hate doodlers, those who idly scribble during meetings (or classes or trials or whatever). Most people also hate that other closely related species: the fidgeter, who spins pens or reorders papers or plays with his phone during meetings. (I stand guilty as charged. On occasion, I have also been known to whisper.) We doodlers, fidgeters and whisperers always get the same jokey, passive-aggressive line from the authority figure at the front of the room: "I'm sorry, are we bothering you?" How droll. But the underlying message is clear: Pay attention.

Not long before Burchfield, this was the take on landscape painting: Romantic landscape covers the gamut between the Pastoral - inhabited landscape: comfortable and relatively tame, with shepherds and peasants - and the Sublime - wild nature: vast and powerful, inspiring terror and awe.

Charles Burchfield inspired the creation of the museum at Buffalo State College in 1966. Originally called the Charles Burchfield Center, the Burchfield Penney was formally created through the Buffalo State College Foundation Inc. Its first director was Edna M. Lindemann, Ph. D.

Heat Waves in a Swamp will be the first major Charles Burchfield exhibition to be mounted on the west coast and the first in New York for more than twenty years. Arranged chronologically, it approaches Burchfield’s work with a new perspective facilitated in part by the curatorial sensibilities of Robert Gober.