A Favorite Painting 23

Charles Burchfield, Rainy Night 1929-1930

In the period between the World Wars in the United States, the nation seemed to experience a period of introspection. This played out in artistic circles with the emergence of the regional painters, whose subjects eschewed any kind of universality in favor of focusing on the unique characteristics of the artist's immediate environment, and really promoting a powerful sense of place in their work. Among the major practitioners of this style were Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and John Steuart Curry, all of whom were associated with the rural midwest. Much more interesting to me, are the urban regionalists, like Reginald Marsh, Edward Hopper, and Charles Burchfield. Burchfield did amazing, semi-abstract landscapes in addition to more realistic work like the painting shown above. But it's his street scenes and neighborhood snapshots that resonate most with me. Part of the reason for this, is that many of them depict my hometown of Buffalo, NY, and there's a powerful nostalgic pull to his depictions of scenes that are buried deep in my own memories of a particular time and place, even though the bulk of his work was produced long before I was born. This is possible, I think, because Buffalo is the kind of place that revels in its history, seeing evidence of past and longed-for future glory in the victorian mansions and gilded age commercial buildings that defined its once prosperous centrality as the Queen City of the Great Lakes. Burchfield was there in its heyday, but in pictures like Rainy Night there's a achingly poignant sense of twilight that almost foreshadows the city's eventual decline. As it happens, the building on the corner of this picture still stands, in fact was recently renovated, and is one of those powerful lingering links to the past. It stands right across the street from the downtown library, and when I visit and walk past, it's always with a strong sense of the urban meloncholy captured by Burchfield in this painting.