Neil Welliver: Figures 1955 – 1965
October 10 through November 10, 2007
Reception and Fuller Building Open House, Thursday, October 25, 6 – 8 pm

The gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of early figurative work by Neil Welliver. Dating from 1955 through 1965, these works have not been exhibited since they originally were shown at Stable Gallery in the 1960s. This exhibition extends a reexamining begun in 2001 with a gallery show of Welliver’s figurative work from the 1970s. Included will be 22 works, both paintings and watercolors.

During the ten-year period that this show examines, Welliver’s interests were twofold: the nude and the landscape. At the time representational work was considered philistine and out of step with the current modes of abstraction. But for Welliver the challenge was to paint the figure and the landscape from direct observation, as a modern, post 1950s American painter. Among Welliver’s concerns were creating a new balance between image, ground, materials and surface while moving away from his teachers’ abstraction toward a new figurative style.

In the early 1960s Welliver moved to a farm in rural Lincolnville, Maine. This move in many ways supported Welliver’s mode of working. Called by one critic, “domestic realism” there is a darkly comedic air present. Welliver is exploring the conventions of portraiture and the work has a homey quality with the images dominated by solid figures that are loosely painted, lush and seductively tactile. During this period Welliver was part of a close community of contemporaries that included Fairfield Porter, Rudy Burckhardt, Edwin Denby, Lois Dodd and Alex Katz.

There is an intense symbolism present in these works. Huge hands hover above figures, skeletons bathe in a stream, marching bands converge. Also present are overt art historical references, notably in The Beautiful Gabrielle and the Marechale de Balagny after the 1594 painting attributed to the Ecole de Fontainebleau. Also referenced is Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe. As in the Manet painting, these unnerving group portraits portray the females often nude while the men remain in their Cheeveresque attire of coat and tie. Set against the close woods these intensely psychological works suggest both a real milieu and a fantasy. There is a kind of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf feeling afoot.

Welliver has said of this work: “It seemed the natural thing to do. I think the nudes were part of a kind of erotic free association, free flowing, erotic impulse that was involved in those pictures; that is a guess, since I don’t know. But anyway, those early paintings of the nudes in the landscape really have to do with painting nature, and, for me, the figure was part of nature.”

Most of Welliver’s paintings from the 1950s, 60s and early 70s were lost in a devastating studio and home fire in 1975. This event was followed in the same year by the death of his wife Polly and their infant daughter. In the years following these tragedies, Welliver moved on to work solely from the Maine landscape, devoid of people.

Welliver was born in rural Pennsylvania in 1929. After receiving an MFA from Yale in 1955, he was appointed to the faculty by his mentor Josef Albers. Welliver taught at Yale for ten years. In 1965 he became Chairman of the School of Fine Art at the University of Pennsylvania, commuting weekly from his farm in Maine and teaching until his retirement in 1989. Neil Welliver died in 2005.

For further information and/or images contact the gallery at 212-755-2828 or at [email protected]