To both the elect and the electorate, who are jaded by the pro I iteration of novelties in 20th-century art, it is a cultural hardship to be a good follower and not a popularizer. Burkhardt’s portion is the bottom crust because his talent for assimilating and complementing Gorky’s achievements in loose-field symbolist painting, can be appreciated only by those who see a painting in front of them, not an object for classification. Limbo expresses aggressive futility in girder, wrench, and key shapes clamped into shackling adjacency within slithery paint handling. The color transitions: greys skirting yellow-orange and blue, are paced to sensualize waiting (like exhaust from a small town bus terminal). Burkhardt has the gift of knowing how to understand; if his works do not achieve the privileges of temperament, they usually earn the rights of labor.
—Rosalind G. Wholden
