International studio (80.1925)

mceRnAcionAL

"house of death"

not in his art I have no means of knowing. But
the disintegrating spiritual effect of unsuccess in
life's business is nowhere more completely summed
up than in these two pictures, particularly in those
store-fronts with the rotted clapboards, the blis-
tered corrugated iron, the warped frames, the
weathered paint. All that is noted here in failure
as represented through village life is reflected in
the world of the farm in the watercolor Burchfield
calls "Watering Time." The too-ambitious barns,
ineradicable habit of the American farmer, with

by charles burchfield

their pathetic attempts at conventional orna-
mentation are hideous in themselves or when
regarded as symbols of failure. And their struc-
tural unsoundness finds myriad economic echoes
in the dreadful barnyard with its ill-conditioned
horses. In this picture, as in "Noonday Heat,"
Burchfield uses color as unsparingly as he does
human facts. In fact his color seems to be even
more relentless, no tone or shadow escaping his
eyes, his palette contributing quite as much as his
passion for truth to the success of his painting.

MARCH I925

Jour sixty-nine