Welliver introduction by John Ashbery, text by Frank H. Goodyear Jr. (Rizzoli: $60; 167 pp., illustrated)

“America has not seen a native landscape painter of the genius of Neil Welliver since Frederic Church,” declares Frank H. Goodyear Jr. in the opening line of this beautifully produced monograph. It’s a dramatic beginning, but the proclamation only calls attention to Welliver’s limitations.

“Oh, yeah?” bristles the knowing reader, immediately countering Goodyear’s claim with visions of American landscape permanently etched in memory by Georgia O’Keeffe, Edward Hopper, Arthur Dove and Fairfield Porter. The difference between Welliver and these luminaries is that they have greater range. Despite their distinctive attachment to the land, these better known painters are not confined to it. Welliver focuses so particularly on landscape that he is more in league with, say, Charles Burchfield, who infused nature with melancholy fantasy.

Welliver’s terrain is Maine’s countryside, and his emotional tone is as cold and crusty as the brittle trees that cast blue shadows in his snowscapes. He makes choppy, angular paintings, teeming with nature’s chaos: “By and large I see a mess, it’s always for me unbelievably complicated.”

His nature is not sublime; it is the hard New England countryside. In summer scenes, this land runs sallow; in winter, blue-gray and frigid. One of the most telling passages in the sparse text that punctuates a stunning parade of color reproductions is this quote from the artist: “I love to go in the woods and see the dead trees around the new trees coming out of them and that sort of thing. There is a marvelous, cyclical renewal that goes on there, and my fantasy about dying is always that sometime I’ll fall over in the woods and be allowed just to lie there and disappear into the ground like an old tree.”

Death is a subtext in Welliver’s art, and he feels no need to dress it up in ethereal finery. John Ashbery’s introduction plants the idea that Welliver’s point of view may have been shaped by “a horrifying series of personal tragedies,” but we are never told what they are or how they affected his art, so the suggestion hangs on like a manipulative device in a soap opera.

Whatever the reasons, Welliver is not an ingratiating painter. He is, however, compellingly authoritative in his merger of representation and abstraction. His “genius,” as Goodyear repeatedly emphasizes, is his ability to assimilate a convincing likeness into a modernist awareness of the act and physical nature of painting. Making big pictures that are rather like impastoed tapestries, Welliver weaves descriptive material into the gridded flatness of painted canvas. Never illusionistic in their treatment of space, his works confront their audience with the immediate presence of nature.

Welliver discovered his path at Yale in the ‘50s, working with such champions of abstraction as Josef Albers. While doing his Color Field tour of duty, Welliver caught his “first glimmer of a new approach to figurative painting.”

During the ‘60s, he set himself the task of integrating nudes into natural settings. In his urge to create modern paintings, he aimed to make the figures “collapse” into abstract patterns on a frankly flat canvas. He produced a strange group of pictures featuring a female nude partly immersed in water, her form dispersed into rippling reflections. His self-imposed problem was solved rather awkwardly in paintings that are--by turns--spectral, sullen or wistful.

Since the early ‘70s, Welliver has devoted himself to pure landscape, with convincing results. You can see mature assurance infiltrating his work until the disparate concerns of natural phenomena and modern art mingle with impressive unity.

“What you hope for is something that virtually oscillates, where you go in and there’s a surface and you go in and there’s the surface. And that, I think, is difficult to look at,” Welliver says of his effort to paint representational pictures as undeniably modern as Jackson Pollock’s dripped abstractions.

His paintings are hard to look at, but it’s also tough to ignore art that snows you with powdery flakes as you gaze at a frozen mountain or dapples you with bits of light sparkling through a forest.