Buffalo Rising Online

Nov 18th 2008, 2:39pm By RaChaCha

With the eyes of Western New York on the opening of the new Burchfield-Penney Art Center this week, there is perhaps no better time to pass along some great news announced last month by CityView Properties at the commencement of their Genesee Gateway project.

At the commencement, CityView partner Doug Swift revealed that in the course of historic research for the project, they become aware of a Charles Burchfield painting of the Werner Photographic building and parts of the rest of the Genesee Gateway block. The painting, with the catchy title, Street Scene, is currently owned by the Dallas Museum of Art in Texas. In the painting Burchfield shows, in his inimitable style, many features of this block in its heyday, including the streetcar tracks embedded in the stone-block street (perhaps still present below the asphalt?), a box-gatherer and his cart, and trade signs like the giant tooth above a dentist’s office. Burchfield is known for grim and sometimes vaguely menacing imagery in his paintings, and Street Scene is no exception. Another trade sign, a giant pair of scissors, seems poised to take off the head of an approaching man, and lights in a dark window seem to stare like eyes onto the street.

CityView is working with the museum to have a museum-quality reproduction made of this strikingly engaging painting, to bring back to Buffalo. The prospect of getting this painting back to view full-size—even as a reproduction—is very exciting. And with the Buehl Block revitalized, wouldn’t it also be great to get a reproduction—or even the real thing—of Rainy Night, the iconic Burchfield painting depicting that building in its heyday. People who have been fortunate enough to see Rainy Night at its current home at the San Diego Museum of Art (recently it has not been on regular display) report that it has its maximum impact when seen full-size, with its brush strokes. Museum-quality reproductions reproduce the brush strokes to the degree possible.

About Street Scene, believed to be from the early 1940’s, the Dallas Museum of Art quotes Charles Burchfield as saying, “For me the ‘picture’ was the grim dramatic quality of the buildings in the eerie light of an imminent storm.” The museum pinpoints the season as the spring, and says, “the scene derives a surreal quality from the giant trade signs of a molar and a pair of shears, and the ‘false-front’ effect of the central structure.” In fact, that “false-front” impression—a unique characteristic of the Werner Photographic building—is still evident today. Perhaps it helped draw Burchfield’s eye to this block—note that the painter’s vantage point is perfectly aligned to show a smokestack that could then be glimpsed in the gap between the buildings.

Buffalo News arts writer Colin Dabkowski wrote Sunday about Burchfield’s paintings like Street Scene and Rainy Night that the “dark urban street scenes, renditions of Buffalo's industrial plants and grain elevators…seemed to owe much to the painter's good friend Edward Hopper.”

Also Tom O’Malley suggests in a Buffalo News opinion piece that, more than anything else, the work of Charles Burchfield teaches us “about the beauty of the world that we see every day and rarely notice.” This painting demonstrates that—although painted as a dark and somewhat foreboding scene, it reveals much of the beauty to be found in these buildings and the world around them, that someone just passing through wouldn’t notice.

Tom, an adjunct professor at Canisius College, advises anyone wanting to know and understand Burchfield to “adopt” one of his paintings by studying it and “taking it everywhere in the imagination.” For those of us who love Buffalo’s historic architecture and streetscapes, Street Scene, like Rainy Night, is one of those paintings. It seems clear that the folks at CityView, in appreciating and restoring the beauty and potential of rundown buildings and blocks that others pass obliviously, have truly learned that lesson that Charles Burchfield’s work teaches.

Image from the Dallas Museum of Art, provided by CityView Properties

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