Floor Plan

1. Conventions for Abstract Thoughts

The exhibition begins with a room featuring drawings from a 1917 album of sketches which attempted to depict human emotions with semi-abstract shapes that would reappear in various forms for years to come.

2. A Golden Year?

The second room is a recreation of a 1930 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the first solo exhibition in the museum’s history.

3. Wallpaper and Marriage

The third room of the exhibition features newly reprinted wallpaper originally produced in 1922, with watercolors completed during his years as a wallpaper designer (1921-1929) hung upon it.

4. The Margins

The Charles E. Burchfield Rotunda is filled with a selection of 199 doodles mounted on 24 pages from a handmade album show what Burchfield considered his “free exercise in abstraction.”

5. Public Acclaim or the Great Depression

This room features two oil paintings and several watercolors from the 1930s that show Burchfield’s developing stylistic changes in both pastoral and industrial landscapes.

6. War and Doubt

This section shows his first foray into a new technique in which he dramatically transformed a number of small-scale watercolors, painted decades earlier by reworking these new compositions into unusually large ecstatic watercolor visions.

7. Reconstruction

This section of the exhibition explores Burchfield’s new composite method of working, with detailed studies for these enlarged works alongside both finished and unfinished versions.

8. Great Art and Death

The final room culminates in the late, great transcendental watercolors of the 1950s and 1960s, with a central vitrine containing the more than 10,000 handwritten journal pages that he kept throughout his life.