468
PARTrSAN REVIEW
now emphasized by the density of paint or engulfed by it. Even if you
knew nothing of the British-born Walker's sojourn in Australia, his
gray
and earth-toned palette, like his swelling shapes and rhythmic spotted
patterning, powerfully evoked primitive and aboriginal art. At the same
time, they seemed like earmarks of Analytic Cubism, as though
Walker
had somehow reinvented Modernism's intimate connection with ritual
artifact, with his stay in Australia standing in for Picasso's visits to the
Musee de Trocadero. All in all, a wonderful show.
The centennial of the birth of the watercolorist Charles Burchfield
(1893- 1967) has been marked by the publication of his collected writings
and, among other things, a fine selection of early work shown at Kennedy
Gallery in April and May; another exhibition will be seen at the Drawing
Center this summer. Burchfield is a puzzling artist. Apparently a mod–
ernist, although isolated from any real contact with other modernists, he
was an intense romantic, a visionary who animated anything he chose to
paint, as though revealing hidden spirits in trees , houses, cloud forma–
tions, and the like. Yet there's something engagingly vernacular about
Burchfield's mysticism, an almost cartoon-like liveliness. The show at
Kennedy, which spanned 1915 to 1922, revealed a wider range than I had
expected, from relatively straightforward, high-key, vaguely Fauvist land–
scapes and farmscapes, to highly- charged, dark, brooding views of
ramshackle buildings that turn unlovely parts of the American scene into
transcendental symbols. I'm eager to see what will be at the Drawing
Center, given their record of superbly chosen and superbly installed ex–
hibits.
One of the most entertaining shows of the past season I came across
entirely by accident; passing through Williamstown en route from
Middlebury to Yale, I took the advice of Professor Lane Faison and
stopped at the Williams College Art Museum to see a show he recom–
mended "in spite of the title."
Hot
Dry
Men
J
Cold Wet Women
proved to
be a fascinating survey of how seventeenth-century theories about the
humors, and their influence on character, appearance, and behavior, were
reflected in depictions of the period. For once, a revisionist theory was
enlightening. I'm not sure I was entirely convinced by some of the exhi–
bition's contentions. The convention of depicting male figures with
ruddy skin and females with pale, for example, may reflect seventeenth–
century theories about the respective influence of sun and moon,
Mars
and Venus, and all the rest of it, but surely it also has some basis in the
difference between how and where the sexes spent their time. But it was
an immensely interesting show that offered an opportunity to study an
impressive group of Baroque paintings, drawings, prints, and objects, both
for their intrinsic merits and for newly revealed meanings.
