Charles Burchfield
Ice Glare
1933
Not on view
Date
1933
Classification
Drawings
Medium
Watercolor, charcoal and graphite pencil on paper
Dimensions
Sheet: 31 1/2 × 25in. (80 × 63.5 cm) Mount (board): 31 1/2 × 25 1/4in. (80 × 64.1 cm)
Accession number
33.64
Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase
Rights and reproductions
Reproduced with permission from the Charles E. Burchfield Foundation and the Burchfield Penney Art Center.
In August 1929, Charles Burchfield resigned from his job as a designer at the M. H. Birge & Sons wallpaper company in Buffalo, New York, to concentrate full-time on his art. While his financial solvency was not impacted by the onset of the Great Depression, his imagery was. In Ice Glare and other contemporaneous works, Burchfield shifted to a darker, more subdued palette, which he used to depict the buildings and empty streets of Buffalo “in all their garish and crude primitiveness and unlovely decay.” To create this image, Burchfield worked on site at the corner of Clinton and Lord Streets, making at least one preparatory drawing before embarking on the watercolor, as was his habit. Burchfield took great care to transcribe the details of the gridded sketch into the complex composition and varied surfaces of this snow-covered scene.
