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.
Cézanne, 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.