The mature paintings carry those early influences forward. Welliver used the natural repetitions and distortions of the woods to draw out the abstraction already present in the landscape. The works are built from long plein-air sessions, the artist carrying a seven- ty-pound pack of supplies into remote terrain and painting for three hours at a stretch. He continued this practice on and around his property in Maine until his death in 2005.

The presentation also includes de Kooning’s Head, 1951, painted at the outset of the artist’s celebrated Woman series. The work comes from the personal collection of Edith Halpert, who acquired it in 1956 directly from Sidney Janis. It has not been shown publicly since the 1960 exhibition of Halpert’s collection at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Additional modern works by gallery artists, including a major 1942 Georgia O’Keeffe painting, will round out the booth.

Neil Welliver (1929–2005, Millville, PA) studied at the Philadelphia College of Art and received his MFA from Yale University in 1955. He taught at Yale from the mid-1950s to
the mid-1960s and served as chair of the graduate program in painting at the University of Pennsylvania from 1966 to 1989. A member of the National Academy of Design, he received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among others.