glad to the brink of fear

The Neil Welliver exhibit at the Portland Museum of Art, Water and Sky, is not the show for which one might hope.  How could it be?  Put together as a tribute to the late artist after his death, the works come mostly from the Museum's holdings and loans from a few (presumably local) collections that one imagines could be quickly arranged, it is more of a taste of Welliver's work than a summation.  There are a few fullscale paintings (but none of his largest landscapes), as well as smaller works, oil sketches, several prints and engravings.  If the highest points of his achievement could not be presented, the Museum at least found ways to highlight aspects of Welliver's work in a way that well served the man and framed his art in an enlightening fashion.

The largest paintings present were from the early phase of Welliver's career, before he began painting his famous canvases of the Maine woods.  Silas with Double Canoe felt unresolved and off-putting to me.  One of his paintings of a nude woman lounging in a woodland stream, if it did not have the compositional complexity  of his later work, certainly showcased his audacity with a paintbrush.  The conventional thing to say about Welliver is that his work brought modernist, Abstract Expressionist sensibility and technique to landscape, and that's true as far as it goes.  In this early painting one sees that truth, as he shows of the virtuosity of his stroke, exuberantly pushing the paint around the figure.

The other unavoidable association with Welliver's name is that of his adopted home of Maine and the artistic heritage it implies.  At Portland, of all places, that legacy is felt; on the floor below the exhibition hangs the Museum's galleries devoted to the art of Maine, where Marsden Hartley seascapes hang alongside stern depictions of the tough fishing towns that dot the state's shoreline.  Farther below, in the gracious older building of the Museum, are paintings by many of the great American landscape artists - and a room of work by Homer than feels like the heart of the institution.

A display of rawness and power, dating back to Homer if not earlier, figures prominently into the myth and reception of Maine artists.  A recent volume on Hartley, for instance, has demonstrated his interest in presenting the "Maineness" of his work through his landscapes of (among other work) Mount Katahdin, quoting him in a letter as writing, "I must get that Mt. for future reason of fame and success."  Something of the same dynamic has applied to the reception of Welliver, with his famous truculence, resolutely rural subject matter, and large scale of his work.  Portland's exhibit reveals that image as a half-truth at best.  It's not simply that Welliver's drama is not that of Hartley's brand of modernism or Homer's epic struggle.  Nor is it that one already knows that Welliver was an intellectual, a friend of poets and thinkers, a self-confessed "eco-freak", or that he denied any real connection to pre-modernist landscape traditions.  But what his prints show, which was new to me if not others, was his immersion in ukiyo-e.  At times his paintings of fish in streams or ducks floating on their surface seemed like exercises in exploring the Japanese print tradition, one as delicate and refined as the popular image of the Maine artist as raw and elemental.  To be sure, he gave these works his own touch and sense - the unique color sense, and short, hitching lines that make up the web of his branches and water ripples - and resolutely filled in and asserted the picture plane.  But the artistic range he explored was further than often assumed.  Welliver's prints, from what I can tell, often get a cooler critical reception than his paintings; I wonder if the exploration of the different aspect of his sensibility that the attraction to Japanese art represents doesn't play a hidden role here, refusing as it does to allow the indulgence of either Ab-Ex or wilderness fantasies of strength and power.

Power does exist in Welliver's canvases, however, and an acuteness of vision that feels brilliantly alive.  A good modernist in his way, he always insisted that he was not interested in representation as such.  His paintings were assertively paintings, not windows on the world, and concerned more with the development of modern art than romantic ideas of nature.  Still, student of Albers though he was, Welliver painted Maine for a reason.  His works offer an exceptionally direct intuition of the feeling of woods.  In some paintings, where trees and branches lay fallen in the marsh and dark clouds gather above, one can almost sense the exact temperature of the fall afternoon, how muddy the ground is, the smell of earth and decaying wood in the chilled air and the promise of rain.  Others present so clear an understanding of failing light that one can almost knows the time of day and year (late afternoon, early October, sunset swiftly approaching.)  As Nemerov wrote, "There is a knowledge in the look of things, / The old hills hunch before the north wind blows."  Along with his grasp of the modern tradition, Neil Welliver shared that knowledge.

(Related: the text of a wonderful interview of Welliver by Edwin Denby, from where I got the amusing photograph of the two of them above; and the Alexander Gallery's page on their Welliver memorial exhibition, complete with images, biography, articles and rememberances.)

Comments

[markdixon.ca]

i have always been a fan of hartley in a formal sense and also due to the fact that i went to school in northern maine. it is nice to discover Welliver's work.

cheers,
mark