Small beginnings, big dreams
It was conceived in the 1960s as an institution dedicated exclusively to Burchfield, but its first director had other ideas
It all started in 1964, when Buffalo collectors Peter C. and Joan Andrews presented Buffalo State College with Charles Burchfield's masterpiece "December Storm," a bewitching and darkly portentous rendering of sunbeams streaming through angry winter clouds and casting fractured light onto the windblown trees and rural buildings below.
"December Storm" was the seed from which the Charles Burchfield Center grew, and was followed upon the center's official opening in 1966-67 with several studies for the seminal watercolor along with studies for the major Burchfield painting "Fireflies and Lightning," which the center would eventually acquire in 1998.
Over the next 10 years, a wealth of material by Burchfield entered the collection, including several of the artist's paintings and drawings of Buffalo scenes, notably the ruddy 1931-38 work "Grain Elevators," along with many of the later watercolors containing his trademark symbolic language he dubbed "conventions for abstract thoughts." The center also acquired a collection of wallpapers he had designed from his tenure at Buffalo's M.H. Birge and Sons wallpaper company, along with various drawings, doodles and pieces of memorabilia.
Although the center was originally conceived as an institution dedicated exclusively to Burchfield, its first director, Edna M. Lindemann, fostered an expansion of that philosophy almost from the start. Under her tenure, the collection blossomed to include artists whose work provided context to Burchfield's work. The first non-Burchfield painting, Robert N. Blair's "Edge of Holland," entered the collection in 1966. Photographs by Wilbur H. Porterfield and painters Florence Julia Bach ("Portrait of Mrs. Charles Cary"), Lars Sellstedt ("Self Portrait" and "Venetian Scene") soon followed.
In 1974, thanks to a $5,000 grant from the National Endowment for the arts, the center began to collect work from living local artists in earnest, including Harvey Breverman, Edwin Dickinson, Seymour Drumlevitch, Philip C. Elliott, Roland Wise and others. These artists, along with Martha Visser't Hooft, whose 1963 painting "Monument," entered the collection that same year, represent the old guard of Buffalo's top regional artists and have since been subjects of major exhibitions at the center.
"It was the big opportunity to acquire some decent paintings, and I think that was very important," said longtime Burchfield-Penney curator Nancy Weekly of the 1974 grant. "Once you start acquiring the bigger canvases, it just kind of raises the bar and you start to get donations from those artists. I think it helped to give the collection more credibility."
Over the next 10 to 15 years, the center marshaled that credibility to acquire hundreds more drawings and watercolors by Burchfield, as well as work from dozens of well-known Buffalo artists:
In 1986, the center began its "Collectors Club," a group that contributed money and funded the periodic purchasing of local contemporary art. Funds from that program enabled the center to acquire work from Charles Clough, Robert Longo and the photographer Cindy Sherman. The members of that trio, which helped found Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, each went on to prominent careers in the art world.
The Burchfield-Penney Art Center as we know it today really came into existence in the years between 1991 and 1994, when Lockport collector Charles Rand Penney donated several immense collections of art totaling more than 1,300 objects. The first included 162 works by 110 Western New York artists, ranging from the late 19th century to 1980. That gift was followed, most importantly, by 184 paintings, drawings and other works by Burchfield himself. Penney had tried to be comprehensive in his collection of Burchfield's work, and his trove of paintings included important late works like "Solitude" and "The Moth and the Thunderclap," as well as earlier works like the 1916 piece "Poplar Trees" and the musically inflected 1931 painting "December Light."
Penney also donated 409 objects and 548 books from the important Roycroft arts and craft movement, along with 53 pieces of local craft art by 20 separate artists. And in honor of his contributions, arranged by former Burchfield-Penney director and Buffalo News art critic Anthony Bannon, the center adopted Penney's name in 1994.
With this contribution, the center's profile skyrocketed, enabling it to step up its fundraising, collecting and programming and ultimately to construct its own freestanding building.
Since 1994, the center has continuously collected work from Western New York artists both dead and living, from a painting by Edward Hopper and couch designed by Frank Lloyd Wright to works from from younger artists like A.J. Fries, Joe Miller and John Opera as well as more established local artists like sculptor Alfonso Volo and painter Wes Olmsted. One of its most important Burchfield paintings, "Fireflies and Lightning," previously owned by Julie Andrews and Blake Edwards was acquired at great cost ($300,000) and in dramatic fashion at a 1998 auction at Sotheby's auction house in New York City.
As it stands, the collection includes 729 works by Burchfield (plus an additional 25,000 Burchfield-related objects, including notes, drawings and ephemera) and 6,620 non-Burchfield works, which includes 2,850 drawings, 753 paintings, 702 photographs and many prints, sculptures, craft pieces, folk and decorative art, wallpapers and mixed media and video work.
As the new center opens, Weekly said, she hopes that the momentum from the new building and its ascendant profile will help the museum build its endowment and begin collecting more ambitiously. She said she hopes to bring more media art into the collection, as well as larger-scale work.
"I think we're going to be able to accommodate things on a very different scale," Weekly said, "and I think that will enable us to be more bold and be able to purchase more and hopefully encourage larger donations or larger works to be donated, because people will be so thrilled to have them in our museum."
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