June Issue 2001
Will Henry Stevens (1881-1949): Meditations on Nature - Realism to Abstraction
by Lisi Raskin
Will Henry Stevens was born in Vevay, Indiana in 1881. As a young painter he studied at the Cincinnati Art Academy and the Art Students' League in New York City. While living briefly in New York he had several one man shows at the New Gallery. In 1921 Stevens moved to New Orleans to become a professor of art at Sophie Newcombe College, now part of Tulane University. During his summer and winter vacations Stevens would take numerous trips into the landscape. These trips fostered his prolific career. Stevens died in 1949 after retiring and moving back to Vevay.
The breadth of Will Henry Stevens' work provides sufficient evidence against the argument that one must live in an urban center, and be slightly ahead of all contemporary trends in order to create art that is historically significant and ultimately moving. In Stevens' work, the experience of an individual communing with nature becomes a colorful dialogue that visually straddles the worlds of representation and abstraction while gleaning information from the development of the artist's own poetic nature. His paintings actualize the zeitgeist of the romantic thought of his own design by taking the viewer on a non-linear voyage from traditional romanticism to transcendental modernism with a timely and notable exploration of "oriental" influence.
What in the past may have been misread as dutiful attempts at Pictorial Realism, the prevailing regional style in the American South, are actually paintings that catalogue various stages of information gathering. For in the representational work, Stevens was communing with his primary source of color, shape and form relationships, as well as the physical spaces that allowed him to practice his spiritualized painting. These pieces of information were then transformed into the language of plastic space that provided the structure for his abstract and non-objective work. One can actually track the development, mutations and appropriations of shapes from the representational paintings to the abstract and non-objective work. In a letter to long time colleague Bernard Lemann, Stevens reveals that during his process of working "I put everything into getting relationships of objects and colors in space. Those small pictures I've been making - they are simply a practice in attaining that impersonal state of consciousness. The picture is a by-product [of the process], you might say..."1
Stevens was adept at conveying this philosophical engagement with the landscape through ". . highly representational terms which capture, like the nineteenth century romantic painters, something of their more picturesque qualities." 2 The practice of painting in such a fashion was undoubtedly influenced by Stevens' creative expeditions to a number of rural locations from the Appalachian highlands of Western North Carolina and East Tennessee to the southern lowlands of Louisiana. Since these areas were mostly unadulterated by development, they were Stevens' world to discover. On his path of discovery, Stevens would take long hikes in order to observe, but mostly to cultivate a sense of connection with the surrounding landscape. "I hoofed it out, sometimes went on long trips and stayed at farmhouses overnight. I liked the activity of hiking; for me it was real entertainment. This was how I got the feel for nature, the sense of being part of it with absolute forgetfulness of self. It was here I became sensitive to things," Stevens wrote.3
But unlimited access and astute sensitivity to the landscape also allowed Stevens to develop a distinct method of abstraction that synthesized his romantic leanings with the transcendental philosophies of Emerson and Thoreau. Through an inspired pattern language of subconscious geometric forms, the proliferation of which was undoubtedly influenced by his representational work, we begin to understand how Stevens' vision could not be limited by one style of painting. "I do not draw a line between objective and non-objective [painting] and have painted in the former way this winter and will continue to do so when I feel I have something to say in that way," Stevens adamantly stated.4 It is clear that the artist chose to express his intimate relationship with the landscape in a variety of visual languages because it was too rich to be contained in one form of expression. All of these approaches to painting reveal an intense commitment to and deeply felt relationship with the natural world. Through this connection, Stevens was engaged in the creation, dissection and recreation of visual puzzles that explored the reoccurring formal elements of the landscape as an entry point into a meditative state of consciousness. Stevens was using color and shape in a way that naturally allowed the images to emerge from the ground; nothing was forced. If a relationship was explored it was because the idea was found in the landscape over and over again and its repetition created a sense of urgency. Because of this approach, his methods of working allowed for the distinct characteristics of each site to organically find their way into his work.
The result is a life long body of work that slowly reveals a lexicon of shapes, largely remnant of the organic relationships found in the microcosms of nature. The evolutions of these subtle ideas naturally pass into Stevens' changing visual perspective. Found and invented shapes like the triangularity of branches that result in delicate line drawings as in "Untitled, No. 1092", are diligently illiterated by Stevens in order to articulate the negative space surrounding abstract shapes. It is no mistake that these same triangular shapes appear over and over again as metaphors for other shapes like the mountains in "Untitled, No. 599". Stevens' usage of these related shapes does not suggest a linear and direct relationship between these two paintings but rather alludes to evidence of an organic and liberal appropriation of found shapes that signified a process-oriented meaningfulness. In this way, Stevens is able to use patterning and repetition to create compositions that refer to spontaneous moments of investigation about design and form and provide visual hints as to the workings of his subconscious. But Stevens' investigations of design and form were not only for their own sake. Stevens admits, "It was the feeling of wonder that comes from being in and seeing life, all of nature. I believed that there was a purpose in it -a design." 5
Because of this singular vision, Stevens was astoundingly prolific both in actual physical count of paintings and in the development of his vocabulary of marks. And although the idea of one man painting nature without concern for the world outside of his transcendental experience is romantic, and in many ways impossible, Will Henry Stevens, in all likelihood, was this figure. The certainty of this fact lies not in the idealized and amorous portraits created by those who wrote about him but rather by the experience of looking at the work itself.
Through his painting, Stevens' understanding of the American transcendental philosophers was continuously augmented by the study of Chinese Taoist writings and Sung dynasty paintings. The aesthetic of the work was greatly influenced by the commingling of these three ideals with the ever presence of European painting. Because of this, the space in Stevens' paintings articulates the synthesis of avant garde cubist space as seen in the work of Paul Cézanne with the space developed by the artists of the Sung dynasty to depict the landscape. In both of these styles of painting, a unique alternative to monocular perspective is offered to the viewer in the form of multiple views. In the painting "Untitled, No. 1686", the viewer is allowed to simultaneously experience the view of a forest floor while looking out onto a hazy distance that is bejeweled with impromptu squiggles and cloudlike potential. These two worlds coexist through the combination of two different perspectival possibilities. As shapes are repeated, the forest floor quickly doubles as possible mountain edges that exist uninterrupted by a number of arching trees. The movement of these trees fluidly leads the eye of the viewer into the background sky or mountain range. Stevens' composition allows the space to unfold slowly, keeping all factions of the foreground, middle ground and background separate; lending a collage like element that gracefully combines three different landscape experiences.
These influences helped Stevens to place himself at the intuitive center of the grandeur of nature with a curious eye and adoring hand. In this way, each painting is about the discovery of a specific literal site whose visceral implications serve as a porthole into a larger visual metaphor for his relationship to his subject matter. This aspect of Stevens' work is deeply felt by the viewer; for we all are connected to the land in an undeniable way.
Even while living in New York City briefly as a young man, Stevens' subject matter was always descriptive of private moments spent in the landscape because he sought out sites in the natural world for inspiration. As art historian Jessie Poesch wrote, "Stevens may have been in the midst of a metropolis, but his paintings at the time recalled the quiet, green, wooded hills of the Ohio Valley."6 Stevens' faithful process of communing with nature began early in boyhood and lasted throughout his life.
Lisi Raskin is the exhibition coordinator of Blue Spiral 1 in Asheville, NC. She is a sculptor and video artists going to Columbia University for her MFA in the Fall.
Editor's Note: "Paintings by Will Henry
Stevens" will be on view at the Blue Spiral 1 in Asheville,
NC, from June 29 through Aug. 25. For further information check
our NC Commercial Gallery listings or call the gallery at 828/251-0202.
Bibliography
1. Lemann, Bernard. Will Henry's Nature: The Pictoral Ideas of
W. H. Stevens. Unpublished manuscript, 1947-48, Howard Tilton
Memorial Library, Tulane University, p. 11.
2. Pennington, Estill Curtis, Will Henry Stevens: From the Mountains
to the Sea. Blue Spiral 1, 1994, p. 16.
3. Lemann, Bernard. Will Henry's Nature: The Pictoral Ideas of
W. H. Stevens. Unpublished manuscript, 1947-48, Howard Tilton
Memorial Library, Tulane University, p. 22.
4. Poesch, Jessie. Will Henry Stevens. Greenville County Museum
of Art, 1987, p. 4.
5. Lemann, Bernard. Will Henry's Nature: The Pictoral Ideas of
W. H. Stevens. Unpublished manuscript, 1947-48, Howard Tilton
Memorial Library, Tulane University, p. 22.
6. Poesch, Jessie. Will Henry Stevens. Greenville County Museum
of Art, 1987, p. 4.
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