THE BROOKLYN RAIL, December/January 2007
Neil Welliver: The Absent Painter
by Jeremy Sigler

Neil Welliver: A Memorial Exhibition, Alexandre Gallery, September 8–October 22, 2006
Neil Welliver: Chosen Terrain, The Hudson River MuseuM, September 30, 2006–January 7, 2007

Even when he was living, the maverick American Realist painter Neil Welliver (1929-2005) could have been considered an absentee artist. Absent from New York gallery openings, absent from the painting department that he chaired at the University of Pennsylvania from 1966 to 1989, absent from the discourse of generational rivals such as Alex Katz, and, in a way, hauntingly absent even from his own paintings.

Welliver, who endured a string of personal tragedies (the premature deaths of three of his children, his wife and his best friend, all unrelated, and a 1975 fire that destroyed much of his lifetime’s work as well as his home) and lived the last few decades of his life as something of a hermit, displays in his remarkable landscape paintings an unsettling, voyeuristic, perhaps even necromaniacal sense of intimacy that makes them uniquely intriguing. While the paintings are made with detached, almost deviant precision—as if the artist were making meticulous representations of “nature corpses” in order to achieve a kind of dark, erotic pleasure—it’s hard not to imagine that behind their cool surfaces, indeed in order for their cool surfaces to have been created in the first place, there must have lurked a vigorous, messy, and revealing creative process.

Whenever I view the work, I picture Welliver alone in the woods, somewhere on his 1,600-acre property in mid-coastal Lincolnville, Maine, clad in khaki pants and a pair of waders at the edge of a fast-moving stream, a paintbrush in his teeth and a small French easel precariously balanced alongside the slippery riverbed. A pugnacious art world fugitive who had studied with and then taught under Josef Albers at Yale in the 1950s, yet defiantly rejected his era’s vogue for nonrepresentational painting, out in his element he’d be squinting at the fish, the birds and the far-off horizon, spitting tobacco, chewing his mustache, cursing us all—a roll of Tums in his shirt pocket and his eye zeroing-in on the flat, all-over screen of his life’s obsession….

This was the real Neil Welliver. And this is where he would bring the real, piston-driven landscape—the natural world in its state of constant improvisation—to a shocking and indelible halt, to his trademark, sewn-up graphic solution. Painting en plein air, Welliver made small, roughly two-foot-square studies that he would later blow up into large-scale oil paintings in his barn studio. There, Welliver employed a modified Renaissance technique that involves making a large color-by-numbers style drawing of the study on a sheet of thin brown paper, painstakingly pricking each line of the drawing with thousands of tiny holes, and then pouncing the drawing’s surface with a soft bag of charcoal so as to leave its impression upon a primed canvas. Once the lines were there, he would lay down the oil paint—all mixed to one precise “Welliver” consistency—and methodically fill in the empty graphic sprawl of the canvas, inch by inch, wet on wet, from the top left corner to the bottom right, almost as if he were a human laser printer.

The paintings on view at Alexandre Gallery, which span the latter part of Welliver’s career, get right to the paradoxical condition of the artist’s strange and riveting sensibility. At once pulsating with life and completely deadpan, the landscapes can almost be read as vaudevillian actors on the gallery stage, performing an array of silently spectacular pratfalls. Completely defying convention, they reveal no inner emotion—whether depicting a two-inch cascade of brown water over the ledge of a rock (“Red River Falls,” 1990), or a million tedious flecks of mossy gray light hopping across a stoic stump (“Stump and Ferns,” 1986). The paintings, in other words, truly capture nature in melancholy animation, but with no trace of Welliver’s actual, human emotions, which were, in fact, quite volatile and close to the surface.

Though patently realistic at first glance, Welliver’s works reveal themselves to be far more awkward and clumsy than expected upon closer inspection. Like Bugs Bunny, not only are they funny as vaudevillians, they’re funny as cartoons. For while Welliver hones in and locks down many compositions (“Blueberry Burn Morey’s Hill,” 1997); in others (“Thawed Ledge,” 1998) his tendency is to let the composition distend and droop, as if flouting his great mentor’s “homage to the square.” At times his pond-ish reflections, choo-choo-ing clouds and floppy ferns are of such a preposterously goofball variety that one can’t help but think he must have been going for the laugh.

But the trees and rocks and skies and rivers, no matter how Disney or Hokusai-esque, know not to crack a smile. Like the comedy of Buster Keaton, they hide suffering behind their “old stone face.” It is their duty to remain in character—that’s how this kind of humor works. And even if the humor is working, let’s be honest, none of us are really standing there laughing, are we" Welliver’s work has, for me, always been an inspiringly chilling experience; he never makes a wrong move or second-guesses himself. Hundreds of miles from the work’s indigenous habitat, I stand before the linen surfaces of these crazily meticulous paintings, consumed by Welliver’s ravenous eye, his ruthless machinations of paint, his deliberately heartless gag—his significantly consistent absence. Yes, if you don’t mind, I’m still gonna call it that.

THE BOSTON GLOBE, January 30, 2005
Survival Artist
By Stephen Jermanok

Maine’s rugged and raw beauty has been a lure to many of America’s foremost landscape artists. Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School of art, first visited Mount Desert Island in 1844. When he retuned home to New York, his wealthy patrons were astounded by the mix of mountains and sea on his canvases. Man versus the chaotic forces of nature kept Winslow Homer busy on the boulder-strewn shores of Prouts Neck for more than two decades. Ten years after Homer’s death, Georgia O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, and John Marin all mined the Maine coast for inspiration, changing the landscape to fit their modernist styles.

With the advent of abstract expressionism in the late 1940s, landscape painting met its demise. The fine-art community snickered as landscapes were relegated to commercial art. The New York school desperately wanted to put the artist back in the artwork, eschewing pretty pictures for a frenzied attack on the canvas, be it Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings or the works of Willem de Kooning, which flattened the canvas and emphasized brush strokes. This decade had a profound effect on a young artist named Neil Welliver.

Welliver had studied under colorist Josef Albers at Yale in the 1950s. But instead of diving headfirst into abstraction, Welliver painted sensuous nudes bathing in shimmering ponds. "Albers would say to me, ‘These nudes look awfully naked, don’t they"’" says Welliver, now 75, who sits in a wheelchair in his living room in Maine for his interview.

Welliver was undeterred, bringing his figurative works to Lincolnville, Maine, in 1962, at the suggestion of fellow artists Alex Katz and Lois Dodd. He summered at a 106-acre farm and moved there permanently eight years later. Gradually, his nudes and other figures, like his painting of one of his young sons paddling a canoe, grew less important, receding into an overgrowth of forest thick with pines and sparkling with water. In the mid-1970s, the people in his work disappeared altogether.

Three tragedies in Welliver’s life may have led him to this decision. The studio in his barn burned, along with many of his works. The, in 1976, his only daughter succumbed to sudden infant death syndrome, and his wife, Polly, died soon after. Welliver retreated to his woods, by then totaling 1,600 acres and stretching a mile along the sinuous Ducktrap River and across the pasture called Briggs meadow. The result on canvas was a dark foray into a forest where trees are uprooted, the land is scarred from fire, and thick bogs are home to submerged and steely rocks. But light started to seep back into his paintings, especially in the winter months, when the Maine sky is often crystal cleat and snow illuminates the landscape. Welliver would snowshoe out to some virgin locale and paint for hours.

"He hit his stride and developed his mature style in the late 1970s," says Phil Alexandre, owner of the Alexandre Gallery in New York, which represents Welliver. "Those are the large-scale paintings acquired by the Met and MOMA in Manhattan, the MFA in Boston, the Hirshhorn Museum in D.C." Welliver began to reap praise from art critics such as Robert Hughes at Time magazine, who wrote that his "paintings of the Maine woods are among the strongest images in modern American art."

As if Welliver hadn’t faced enough adversity, he would also have to deal with the deaths of two of his five sons and overcome health problems, including a heart attack and, of late, hydrocephalus, more commonly referred to as water on the brain. Last May, Welliver and his wife, Mimi, moved from the farm to a new home perched high above his beloved Ducktrap River. On the mend, he is unable to give elaborate answers to questions but is sharp enough to shoot off one-liners. "How did you go about choosing the locales in the woods that you painted""

"Wherever I could park my easel and it wouldn’t fall down."

"Were you friends with de Kooning""

"Sure but he was still a pain in the ass."

Welliver doesn’t let his malady interfere with his work. He continues to paint every day. Hanging from the wall in his new studio is a large canvas of the Ducktrap River, viewed from above. The ubiquitous forest stands on either side of the water, loosely painted and more abstract than in his earlier offerings. In Welliver’s paintings, which have been compared to the works of realist painter Gustave Courbet, you’ll find thick brush strokes that look slick and wet, as if they were created only yesterday, and a limited palette of green, red, blue, yellow, and white. "You think you’re looking at an accurate Maine landscape, but then you realize his colors are quite unnatural," says Chris Crosman, director of the Farnsworth Museum in nearby Rockland.

Welliver is clearly a landscape artist of the post-abstract expressionist era, or as Hughes states in his book American Visions, "he could only have matured in the 30 years after Pollock." His plein-air studied in the woods are merely sketches for large paintings produced in his barn, often as grand as 8 feet by 10 feet. Welliver outlines the sketch on the canvas and paints from top to bottom until finished, never returning to touch up the work.

There’s only one way to truly immerse yourself in Welliver’s woods: Leave the art behind and frolic in the same trees, marshes, bogs, and river that so enrapture him. Welliver recently donated 695 acres of his farm to Maine’s Coastal Mountains Land Trust, allowing public to traverse his woods. Many of the trees seen in paintings like The Birches (1977) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art have been lost due to ice storms, but a thick forest and dense underbrush remain, timber crackling underfoot. Light splinters through the branches of fallen firs onto their newborn cousins, dwarf pines – a cycle of nature, death, and rebirth that mirrors the ebb and flow of Welliver’s life.

Stephen Jermanok is a freelance writer living in Newton.

 
ARTNEWS, January 2007
By Rachel Somerstein

The best part of this stunning show of paintings of the Maine woods was the opportunity it offered to see Neil Welliver’s small studies alongside his finished, large-scale oils. Viewing the 24-inch-square “preps” juxtaposed with the 60-inch canvases showed that Welliver needed the larger format.

In the gallery’s foyer, the “Study for Blueberry Burn Morey’s Hill” hung beside the finished painting of the same name (both 1997). In these works a green mountain rises behind a large expanse of deep brown soil studded with rocks. Though Welliver (1929-2005) kept the composition of the finished painting close to that of the study, the fertile-looking patch of earth—which takes up nearly two-thirds of the painting—seems almost startling in the way it dominates the painting’s space, and the rocks have enough room to relax into suggestions of other forms, like a fish skeleton.

The six other large works on view mostly depicted snowy scenes of Maine woods. In “Thawed Ledge” (1988) and “Thaw on Black Brook” (1991), streams cut through mostly virgin snow, and shadow rendered in soft violet and gray plays on white boulders. The curvaceous organic forms of these streams—almost feminine in their roundness—communicates the extent to which nature, even beneath a frozen exterior, remains fruitful. The evocation of the body is no accident: although Welliver made his name panting woods, he began his career portraying nudes.

The artist’s use of color (he studied with Josef Albers) and the way he balanced short, quick brushstrokes with large, abstract forms grant these paintings a striking sense of movement, testifying to his facility wit the brush and ability to translate what he saw.

THE NEW YORK OBSERVER, SEPTEMBER 26, 2005
Welliver Captured Nature’s Logic With a Serenely Intractable Visio
By MARIO NAVES

Neil Welliver, the American artist who died last spring at the age of 75, was one hell of a painter, and if you want a surefire way of confirming it, go to the memorial exhibition mounted at Alexandre Gallery, take advantage of the bench in the main gallery, and take a good, hard gander at Back of Hatchet (1978), a depiction of birch trees in winter painted on a swath of canvas measuring eight by 10 feet.

Note the crisp, almost clinical lucidity with which Welliver delineated the dense forest, seeming to capture every wiry twist and turn of the leafless branches. Marvel at how he retained the bracing blue of the sprawling Maine sky, seen through the thicket in the distance. Realize that though the palette is limited, it’s effect is nevertheless expansive, an illusion aided by three green trees placed precisely and unexpectedly in the foreground. Finally, scratch your head at how a picture so true to life – to the light, weep and untamed logic of nature – could simultaneously have so little to do with representation.

Welliver didn’t care about representation. You don’t have tot get up close to the canvas – with its confounding network of drawling and, at times, impatient slurs of buttery oil paint – to sense Welliver’s remove from observed phenomenon or his not altogether unskeptical debt to Abstract Expressionism. You can read his motivations in the insistent, all-but-manic attention paid to every last inch of the composition and in the way clarity of definition keeps the image resolutely on the surface of the canvas. Welliver was an impudent painter: He set up certain expectations (ah, the grandeur of nature!) only to thumb his nose at them (it’s just colored mud on a piece of rag).

That paradox is inherent to the art of painting, of course, but rarely has it been brought to such a relentlessly inflexible conclusion. The accompanying prints are merely fetching in comparison, and the smaller canvases are muddled. Oil paint and a massive scale were integral to Welliver’s coolly intractable vision. Luckily for us, five other big pictures tag alongside Back of Hatchet, offering plenty to take pleasure in.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Sigler, Jeremy.  “Neil Welliver: The Absent Painter,” The Brooklyn Rail, January, 2007.
Gardner, James.  “Neil Welliver.”  New York Post, September 10, 2005.
Jermanok, Stephen. “Survival Artist.”  The Boston Globe Magazine, January 30, 2005.
Johnson, Ken.  “Neil Welliver, 75, Painter of Large-Scale Landscapes (obituary).”  The New York Times, April 8, 2005.
May, Stephen.  “Neil Welliver.” American Arts Quarterly, Fall 2005.
Mullarkey, Maureen.  “Finding Fiction in the Wilderness.”  The New York Sun, September 8, 2005.
Naves, Mario.  “Welliver Captured Nature’s Logic With a Serenely Intractable Vision.”  The New York Observer, September 26, 2005.
“Neil Welliver (obituary).”  Art in America, June/July 2005.
Sommerstein, Rachel.  “A Master of the Modern Landscape (obituary).”  ARTnews, June 2005.
Cohen, David.  “Neil Welliver: Alexandre Gallery.” The New York Sun, June 3, 2004.
May, Stephen.  “Neil Welliver: Alexandre.”  ARTnews, September 2004.
Neil Welliver: Oil Studies (exh. cat.), New York: Alexandre Gallery with essays by Mark Strand and Robert M. Doty, 2004.
Teachout, Terry.  “The Pierre Matisse Collection: Little New Under the Son.”  The Washington Post, June 6, 2004.
“Neil Welliver.” The New Yorker, June 14 & 21, 2004.
Naves, Mario.  “No-Nonsense Portraits of Wild, Naked Women.”  The New York Observer, January 14, 2002.
Schreiber, Laurie. “Beyond the Surface,” The Bar Harbor Times, September 5, 2002.
Neil Welliver: Early Figurative Paintings (exh. cat.), New York: Alexandre Gallery, with essays by Barry Schwabsky and Frank H. Goodyear, Jr., 2001.
Johnson, Ken.  “Neil Welliver: Early Figurative Paintings.”  The New York Times, December 21, 2001.
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"Neil Welliver/Hand Colored Prints, February 24–April 4, 1981." Graphics and Graphics, Boston, MA, ill.
Crossley, Mimi. "Neil Welliver: Paintings and Prints." The Houston Post, May 3, 1981.
Twenty Artists: Yale School of Art 1950–1970 (exh. cat.), Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. 1981, pp. 60–61, ill.
Real, Really Real Super Real: Directions in Contemporary American Realism (exh. cat.), The San Antonio Museum Association, San Antonio, TX, 1981, pp. 104–105, ill.
Masterpieces from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, 1981, pl. 103.
Neil Welliver/Presidents’s Choice (exh. cat.), with introduction by Andrew Morgan, Visual Arts Gallery, Florida International University, Miami, FL, 1981, ill.
Henry, Gerrit. "Painterly Realism and the Modern Landscape." Art in America, September 1981, pp. 112–119, ill.
Kramer, Hilton. "The Return of the Realist—And a New Battle Shaping Up." The New York Times, October 25, 1981.
Olander, William. "Artists View the World Around Them." Museum, November/December 1981, pp. 58–61, ill.
Goodyear, Frank H., Jr. "American Realism Since 1960." Portfolio, November/December 1981, pp. 72–80, ill.
Donohue, Victoria. "He Views the World in Large and Lush Terms." The Philadelphia Inquirer, December 7, 1981.
Taylor, Robert. "Welliver Country Comes To Worcester." Boston Globe, December 9, 1981, p. B4.
Arthur, John. Realists Drawings and Watercolors: Contemporary American Works on Paper. Boston: New York Graphics Society, 1980.
Realism Photorealism (exh. cat.), with essays by John Arthur, Philbrook Art Center, Tulsa, OK, 1980, pp. 33, 62, 63, ill.
Itner, John G. "Review, Art and Antiques." The New York Post, February 8, 1980.
Florescu, Michael. "New York Exhibitions." Art/World, February 15, 1980
Boorsch, S. "New Editions." Art News, March 1980, p. 118, ill.
Garson, Sandra. "You Don’t Have to Know Maine to Love Welliver." Vision: A Journal of the Visual Arts in Maine, March/April/May 1980, p. 16.
Stein, Judith. "Portrait, Philadelphia." Portfolio, December 1980.
Hammel, M. "Painters of Maine." Down East, 1979 Annual.
Kramer, Hilton. "Art: Landscapes of Neil Welliver." The New York Times, March 2, 1979.
Ashbery, John. "Maine Events." New York, March 12, 1979.
S.C.C. "Review." Art/World, March 15–April 15, 1979.
Isaacson, Philip. "Where the Paintings Go in Winter." The Maine Sunday Telegram, March 18, 1979.
Kramer, Hilton. "Museums." The New York Times, November 23, 1979.
Medoff, Eve. "Neil Welliver: Painting, Inclusive and Intense." American Artist, April 1979, pp. 5, 48–53, ill.
Davis, Christopher. "Portrait of a Painter." The Pennsylvania Gazette, April 1979, pp. 16–23, ill. (on cover).
"Exhibition at Fischbach Gallery, New York." Art Forum, May 1979, p. 68, ill.
Berlind, Robert. "Exhibition at Fischbach Gallery, New York." Art in America, May 1979, p. 140, ill.
Ratcliff, Carter. "The Contemporary Landscape." Portfolio, August/September 1979, pp. 42–47, ill.
Downes, Rackstraw, ed. Fairfield Porter: Art In Its Own Terms: Selected Criticism 1935–1975. New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1979
Neil Welliver: Watercolors and Prints 1973–1978 (exh. cat.), with introduction by David Bourdon, Brooke Alexander, Inc., New York, NY, 1978, ill.
Two Decades: American Art from the Collection of the Smith College Museum of Art (exh cat.), Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ, 1978, ill. (on cover)
Goodman, C. "Eight Contemporary American Realists, Exhibition at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia." Arts, January 1978, p. 16.
Kramer, Hilton. "Exhibition at Brooke Alexander, Inc., New York." The New York Times, April 14, 1978.
French-Frazier, Nina. "Exhibition at Brooke Alexander, Inc., New York." Arts, June 1978, p. 28, ill.
Art at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston (exh. cat.), Federal Reserve Bank, Boston, MA, 1977, p. 6, ill.
Eight Contemporary American Realists (exh. cat.), Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA, 1977, pp. 44–48, ill.
"Exhibition at Fischbach Gallery, New York." Art News, January 1977, p. 124.
Caedozo, Judith. "Exhibition at Fischbach Gallery, New York." Art Forum, February 1977, pp. 70-71, ill.
"25th Anniversary Show: Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York." Arts, March 1977, pp. 33–34.
Welliver, Neil. "Inclusive Painting: Bicentennial Exhibition Sponsored by the United States Department of the Interior." America 1976 (exh. cat.), United States Department of the Interior, Washington, DC, 1976, pp. 13–15, ill.
Kramer, Hilton. "Back to the Land, with a Paintbrush." The New York Times, May 30, 1976.
Shorr, Harriet. "Neil Welliver." Arts, November 1976, p. 5, ill.
"Exhibition at Fischbach Uptown Gallery, New York." Art International, January 1975, pp. 47–48, ill.
"Exhibition at Fischbach Uptown Gallery, New York." Arts, January 1975, p. 11, ill.
Shorr, Harriet. "Exhibition at Fischbach Uptown Gallery, New York." Art in America, March 1975, p. 88, ill.
Frackman, Noel. "Neil Welliver." Art in America, May/June 1975.
Hicks, Nancy. "Energy Crisis Impels Many to Study and Erect Windmills as Power Source." The New York Times, May 20, 1974.
1973 Biennial Exhibition: Contemporary American Art (exh. cat.), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, p. 79, ill.
Kramer, Hilton. "Art: Comeback for Landscapes." The New York Times, January 31, 1972.
Mellow, James. "When ‘What’ is as Important as ‘How’." The New York Times, January 31, 1972.
Schjeldahl, Peter. "From Outdoor Nudes to Just Outdoors." The New York Times, November 12, 1972.
"Exhibition at John Bernard Myers Gallery, New York." Art News, December 1972, p. 78.
1972 Annual Exhibition: Contemporary American Painting (exh. cat.), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, p. 25, ill.
"Exhibition at John Bernard Myers Gallery, New York." Art News, April 1971, p. 74.
Glueck, Grace. "Neil Welliver." The New York Times, March 20, 1971.
Ashbery, John. "Reviews and Previews." Art News, February 1970, p. 63.
Downes, Rackstraw. "Reviews and Previews." Art News, February 1970.
Kramer, Hilton. "Galleries, Weekend." The New York Times, March 30, 1970.
Ratcliff, Carter. "Exhibition at Tibor de Nagy Gallery." Art International, April 1970, p. 69, ill.
"Art in New York." Time, March 14, 1969.
"Exhibition at De Nagy Gallery." Art News, March 1969, p. 12, 71, ill.
Glueck, Grace. "Exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery." Art in America, March 1969, p. 116, ill.
Mellow, J. "New York Letter." Art International, Summer 1969.
"Monumentality." Perspecta, 1967, pp. 23–31, 99, ill.
Downes, Rackstraw. "Welliver’s Travels." Art News, November 1967, pp. 34–36, ill.
Welliver, Neil. "Albers on Albers." Art News, January 1966, pp. 48–51.
"Exhibition at Stable Gallery." Art News, February 1965, p. 13.
Grossberg, J. "Stable Gallery." Arts, February 1965, p. 58.
Schuyler, James. "Exhibitions at Stable Gallery." Art News, January 1962, p. 8, ill.
Mastai, M.L.D. "News from New York." Apollo, March 1962, p. 67.
Raynor, Vivien. "New York Exhibitions: In the Galleries." Arts, March 1962, p. 47.
"New Talent 1959: Painting." Art in America, Spring 1959, p. 59, ill.