Neil Welliver's Cold Light

By ROBERT HUGHES

In Philadelphia, a retrospective of a rigorous realist

Realist painting is now such an accepted fact of American art that one almost forgets how many of its best practitioners were once abstract painters, converted in midcareer. Philip Pearlstein, Sidney Tillim, Alfred Leslie, William Bailey: they all came, in one way or another, out of abstract expressionism, making the change not from opportunism--15 or 20 years ago, practically no collectors or museums were exempt from the tyranny of abstract art--but out of a sense of lost engagement with the physical world and a hunger to recomplicate the game. Yet the past leaves its genetic code in the present work. And of no American realist painter is this truer than Neil Welliver, 53.

Welliver's huge paintings of the Maine woods--usually shown in winter or the early thaws of spring, seen in the remarkable and rigorous clarity of cold light, painted with an almost brusque directness--are among the strongest images in modern American art. For guts and fastidiousness, they are hard to beat. (On the whole, his figure paintings lack the power of his landscapes.) Yet anyone who visits the retrospective of his paintings from 1966 to 1980 at Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art this month (and at Richmond's Virginia Museum of Fine Arts starting in late November) can see that this is not "simple" realism; realism seldom is.

Welliver's kind of realism could have matured only in the past 25 years A.P.--After Pollock. His paintings are saturated with the ideas about surface and space that abstract paintings put into currency in America. They have less to do with locating a set of objects in the illusion of a void than with creating a continuous pelt of shapes that fills the surface from edge to edge, top to bottom. With 19th century landscapists like Bierstadt or Corot, one is softly inducted into the illusion. Welliver points out, 'You can really just enter into it and leave. With mine, there is the resistance of the surface of the painting. The fact of the painting is always in the way."

What detains the eye in a Welliver is, in part, his assertion of "abstract" readings within a very forthright and apparently realistic transcription of raw nature. Typically, his spaces are shallow and entangled. You are on the forest floor, in a cavern of green and gray, gazing at an almost impenetrable screen of slender tree-trunks, fallen branches, brush, lichens and rocks. There is no horizon line to offer visual release: just more forest, dappled and blotched with light. The surface is not oppressively congested--for at his best, in paintings like Late Light, 1978, or Shadow, 1977, Welliver has a gift for surrounding every shape with air, drenching it in transparency--but it puzzles the eye. You can feel the twigs plucking at your coat.

Cezanne, in a phrase that spoke volumes about the classical ambitions of early modern art, said that he wanted to do Poussin over again from nature. Welliver's ambition, at least in part, is to do the same with Pollock. Such landscapes are "allover" paintings, slices taken from a boundless field of pictorial incident. The apparent disorder of the view, that energetic chaos of sticks and rocks, is formalist to the last square inch.

"Courbet looked very hard and had a method," Welliver remarks to the writer Edwin Denby in the catalogue. "Bierstadt did not look very hard and had a method, and de Kooning makes it up as he goes along ... I look very hard, then make it up as I go along." The idea of "sub lime" American landscape is fairly worn currency by now; there are too many generalized cliches of in stant grandeur attached to it. What saves Welliver's sense of awe at large scale is his sense of fact.

"Making it up" on a canvas eight feet square cannot be done outdoors. Laden with a 70-lb. pack of easel, paints, canvas and gear, Welliver trudges out in winter to find a scene and make an oil sketch. The large version is always a studio painting, and its fictions of spontaneity -- of rapid-fire correspondence between the eye scanning a scene and the hand making its marks --take a month or more to achieve. But the paint looks direct and uncluttered; it seems to have been done alla prima, wet into wet, in a few hours. In fact, it is very considered painting. Welliver's accuracy of tone is phenomenal; there are hardly any "holes" and tonally inert areas in his work. With a loaded, flouncing brush he can put in the blue rim of ice around the cold black water of a pond, or the melting rime on the flank of a snow hummock, so that the substance is as palpable as the gesture.

In the best of his land scape work Welliver has an emotional intensity that goes beyond the ordinary limits of realism in painting. Shadow is a stand of birches in snow: strong blue sky peeping through their pale trunks, and more blue scattered in the luminous dark clefts of the snow lying on fallen brush. Just above the middle of the painting, the shadow line of a ridge falls across the trees and the ground. The hill behind you becomes a silent, extraordinary presence: not menacing, not metaphorical, but a sign of what the Middle Ages called natura naturans: nature disclosing itself, going about its business of being.

--By Robert Hughes

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