Hammer Blog

With a prestigious grant from the Asian Cultural Council, Hammer adjunct curator James Elaine moved to China in April 2008 to seek out emerging artists within China and throughout Asia. This blog provides a fascinating insight into Jamie’s travels and the art world in China.

During my many travels across China I often come across signage with English wording that is not quite right for one reason or another. I guess you could say that they are lost in translation or signs that make me wonder.

On February 4 and 5, and again from February 15 to 20, 1941, Burchfield was in New York, serving on the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation jury for the fine arts awards. After the jury work was over he stayed three days to look at exhibitions.

Gardenville
February 20, 1941

(CEB bracketed the following in red pencil.)

"Greatest of these was the exhibit of Nineteen(th) Century French art at the Metropolitan–the largest collection I have ever seen. What a glorious period! What a sense of the joy of living, and the dignity and worthwhile-ness of humanity shine thru these pictures! And what fine craftsmanship, and design organization,–From the most imposing Salon picture, to the most apparently casual little sketch, there is an authority, and power that would be hard to equal. Is this perhaps the greatest period in art to date?

To mention the pictures that appealed

THOUGHTS FOR A RAINY DAY: AN EXCERPT FROM THE JOURNALS OF CHARLES BURCHFIELD

Cleveland, Ohio
October 26, 1914

"...Rain ceases at noon and afternoon is cold and windy with white-rifted cloud-rolls tearings out the Northern Lake. I could not concentrate my mind on my work. Once or twice I went outdoors and swelled with the cold buoyancy of the day. Leaves shooting streak-like thu the air! Leaf-cyclones capering in whirling course over the emerald grass! Half-nake trees wind riddled! Towards close of school while looking out of window I was delighted to note on how the shot like wind streaked over the flattened grass, the gloss spots of the rippling blades appearing like finely sifting snow! At 3:30 thru Park (1) to room. A sleet show wind whistled. Thence to Library (2) afoot. I walk head high & chest out exultant in the wind."

Footnotes
1) A

Grayson Perry. Map of Nowhere, 2008. Purple color etching from five plates, ed. 10/15. UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum. Purchased with funds provided by the Helga K. and Walter Oppenheimer bequest.


British artist Grayson Perry was awarded the Turner Prize for his provocative ceramic vases in 2003. A monumental etching recently acquired by the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts demonstrates Perry's skills as a printmaker. It combines a diagram of the artist's body with a medieval map of the world. The composition is riddle with allegorical references to the artist's own identities and witty allusions to current social, political, and economic themes. Churches for Microsoft and Starbucks, and an Elizabethan portrait of a woman titled St. Claire, Perry's alter ego/patron saint, are a few of the images that adorn this iconographic tour-de-force.

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The Hammer Museum is deeply grateful to the following individuals, foundations

(No sound. Run Time: 2 min. 40 sec.)

CONVENTIONS FOR ABSTRACT THOUGHTS
In 1917, the year that the United States entered World War I, Burchfield made a series of symbolic drawings that catalogued emotions, expressing abstract thoughts in semiabstract forms, which he referred to as "conventions." The conventions are part nature, part fantasy, and they tend to represent dark emotions, such as "dangerous brooding," "muted sorrow," and "fear, morbidness and melancholy." (From Heat Waves in a Swamp or..."the healthy glamour of everyday life", Texts by Robert Gober, assisted by Becky Kinder)

Reanalysis of Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night shows more fully how Burchfield used his newly developed symbolic pictographs to illustrate not only his childhood fears but also his adult distaste for religious zealotry, provoked by a Presbyterian Sunday school teacher, his evangelical grandfather, and the example of his late, unreligious father