During the second half of the twentieth century—when American art was dominated by a series of movements from Abstract Expressionism to Conceptualism—Neil Welliver (1929–2005) was working in the idiom of landscape, perpetuating a genre that reaches back to the first great indigenous movement in the United States, the Hudson River School. This fall the Alexandre Gallery in New York City recognized his achievement with a memorial exhibition focusing on a core group of seven large-scale paintings from the late 1970s and mid-1980s, supplemented with a selection of oil sketches and prints. By that period, Welliver had eliminated the figure to devote himself to pure landscape. Like the Hudson River School painters, he was grounded in a specific place, green in summer, snowy in winter, and spent decades exploring the stony fields, streams and forest interiors—with their thickets of birth and poplar, and tangles of fallen brush—near his farm in Maine. Above all, he was enamoured of the Maine light. “There is extraordinary clarity,” he remarked. “You can look for a mile but objects seem right before your face; you can identify them. I’m interested in the character of the light—that northern flat light—where the sun doesn’t get very high.” Welliver’s blues can seem almost artic, as in Back of Hatchet (1978), in the shadows on the snow or the sky seen through a screen of birch trees with their dalmatian-coat bark. In Midday Barren (1983) the light beats down on the almost-lunar rocks jutting from a green-brown field. Big Flowage (1979) is dominated by blue as well, vividly crisp in sky and water. The meaty, biomorphic clouds moving across the two reflected realms are reminiscent of Bellows. Welliver’s landscapes have not only a specific topography but also a specific climate. Blueberries in Fissures (1983) juxtaposes Welliver’s signature chill blue with rivulets of scarlet criss-crossing a big-shouldered hill topped with spindly trees.

Neil Welliver, Old Windfall, 1981–82 Courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York City

Some of the images are densely green, especially the woodland interiors. The epic-scale, 96-by-120-inch Old Windfall (1981–82) surges with vitality. The standing trees, modeled with light and shadow, angle towards and away from each other in gracefully choreographed patterns. Fallen trunks undulate across the dappled forest floor like oceanic waves. The habitat is a process of growth, decay and rebirth. You can see the same process at work in the more intimate, 35-by-34-inch woodcut Stump (2000). The Pre-Raphaelite detail of fern and bracken took twenty-seven hand-carved blocks and features thirty colors within a relatively restrained but coolly opulent palette. The selection of etchings and woodcuts here, some recently completed by master printmaker Shigemitsu Tsukaguchi, Welliver’s collaborator since the 1970s, is excellent. Stump has a rich physicality that suggests Courbet. Other works—Trees Reflected on Ice, a 2002 acquatint, and St. John—Winter (2000), etching and acquatint—are delicate, almost monochromatic and calligraphically Asian in sensibility.

We see layers of art historical resonance in Welliver’s paintings. Old Windfall reminds the viewer of Asher Durand’s Hudson River School sous bois as well as Courbet, but it is also a modernist picture. Modernism’s all-over approach to the canvas is evident in the unifying palette of green, white and ocher, in the tangle of twigs and foliage filling in the spaces between the dynamic verticals. Welliver adeptly conveys the illusion of a three-dimensional reality but never abandons the twentieth-century dictum that a painting is—before anything else—an arrangement of shapes and colors on a flat surface. This negotiation between the imperatives of representation and abstraction is reflected in his working method. He began with oil studies done on site, translated the raw material into drawings in the studio and then painted the full-scale work in an imaginative act not dissimilar from the performances of the Abstract Expressionists. He painted quickly, working wet-on-wet from the upper left corner to the lower right, letting his brushworks create a surface autonomous from, and yet in harmony with, the phenomenal world captured in the plein air sketches.

Welliver studied with Josef Albers at Yale and was appointed to the faculty there by his mentor; he continued to influence generations of artists at the School of Fine Art at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught until 1989. His works are represented in most major American museums, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. “Neil Welliver: A Memorial Exhibition” continues through October 22, 2005, at the Alexandre Gallery, 41 East 57th Street, New York, New York 10022. Telephone (212) 755-2828. On the web at www.alexandregallery.com

Originally printed in American Arts Quarterly, Volume 22, number 4.