Charles E. Burchfield, Autograph, signed letter to Dr. Theodor W. Braasch, March 14, 1956

...I was very much interested in your comments on the “Fourth Burchfield” — Only gradually have I come to realize it myself – La Verne George, (Art Digest) when she saw “The Wood-pecker” (which she was crazy about) remarked upon a “totally new phase” for which she could find no title – At first it rather alarmed me, for I share with you and others a detestation of the Abstract & Non-Objective School – I didn’t want to go abstract; but the development has been inexorable, nothing I consciously planned but which just has grown of itself – I felt that my abstractions had no kinship with the current use of the term, but you have put it very clearly into words when you say I have “arrived at a sort of synthesis which makes possible a “non-abstract message arrived at by abstract means” – I suppose there ought to be a term for it, but I’d be the last one to devise one — I understand what you mean by “Referential Abstraction” but agree with you it is not satisfactory, and sounds a little too much like an invention of Andrew Ritchie, I fear. Mrs. Mowbray-Clarke, (who launched me on my career —) sensed it too but could not find a name for it – She thought my latest work the “crown of my career”
Charles E. Burchfield, March 14, 1956