The Sphinx and the Milky Way, Selections from the Journals of Charles Burchfield, edited by Ben Estes

  For international orders please click here. In the early years of the twentieth century, Charles Burchfield (1893-1967) began painting mystic and visionary landscapes, and with some of his con­temporaries, including Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keefe, and Grant Wood, can be seen to have built the foundations of a particularly American sensibility that the critic Dave Hickey said "continues to evoke an unrepentant, gnostic vision of this vast, rolling, abandoned continent—America without Europe—America without Americans—a massive, alluring kingdom ..." For most of his life, Burchfield also kept a journal. Over 54 years, he filled nearly 10,000 pages. To call this journal epic would be an understatement. A masterpiece whose bulk has remained unread, it is a handwritten tome that combines elements of the American nature journal with a dash of nineteenth-­century spiritual autobiography. It is the record of a man who spent much of his life looking at and considering the sky. In this comparat