State of wonder Walter Feldman’s creative life BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

A half-century of creative output revisited in the finger snap of an art show? Not easily. The retrospective Walter Feldman: The Work of Five Decades packs so much into the David Winton Bell Gallery that it has to spill into the lobby. It could as readily spread out the door and down College Hill.

Apart from the impression any particular work of his makes, the sheer breadth of Feldman’s approaches is telling. The media and the visual personalities on display are more varied than the usual output of paintings and drawings. Over the years, in addition to works dabbed and scribbled, Feldman has created etchings and prints, sculptures and collages — lots of collages — as well as many books that he has both illustrated and printed by letterpress. The retrospective displays a mask, mixed-media reliquaries, an abstract tapestry — any medium, it seems, that could convey inner urgencies that warranted expression.

The styles vary. They’re not stifled by the usual academic and commercial gallery brow-furrowing that equates frequent abrupt departures in style or subject matter as frivolous.

The most consistent visual element that recurs here is his inclusion of alphabet letters. Not whole words, molecules of language, but atoms of significance. Actual and imaginary, recognizable and invented glyphs. "Alphabet House" (1981), the image the artist chose for the show’s announcement card, contains stenciled letters, A to L, over water-stained correspondence that looks to be hundreds of years old, written in fine fading cursive, all under a roof peak. A bold white on black X and Y stand sentinel on each side, chromosomal commentary on the cultural edifice written words have constructed.

As typically, a sort of inchoate proto-language rises like a visual murmur. In the painting "Stele of the Jaguar #12" (1963), from a muddy background containing mysterious runes a vaguely animal shape, comprised of the same symbols, emerges. A shaman couldn’t have expressed natural awe better.

Sometimes Feldman maintains a tension between language and meaning by devising imaginary letters. "Ancient Glyphs" (1991-92) is a whole syllabary series of his invention, the letters having the stocky solidity of Hebrew. Wood type blocks he made for his 2002 "Colophon" book are on display. Not only do the letters have a sprightly grace to them, they appear to sprout leaves. The title card whimsically notes that scholars have deciphered part of the text they were used for and discovered it to be a prayer to peace in the 21st century.

In such works, Feldman reminds us of the mystery of both inner and visual experience. Words are inadequate, and all that. Treading similar territory, Feldman’s debt to German Expressionism is evident in some work from the 1950s, such as an anguished untitled (words fail) black plaster head, fist to forehead, that stands in homage to Kathe Kollwitz and Ernst Barlach.

Works containing human figures are a lonely minority in this exhibition, but they are hardly absent. The earliest piece is an untitled gouache from 1946, a skull-faced soldier in formal uniform on a barren landscape. Two years later, in "Flowering Desert," a slumping Holocaust victim is shown the hopeful sign of a blooming cactus by two other persons.

But for Feldman, abstracts can reach where literal depictions fall short. "In Memorium" (1964) is a collage on a graphite-smeared muslin field, a circle — for which you don’t have to be a Jungian to sense wholeness, resolution. There are numbers and again stenciled letters, those militaristically precise symbols for understanding what ultimately is incomprehensible. They surround and dapple a rusted steel rectangle, which a welding torch has scarred and stippled with undecipherable marks and wound-like cutouts, a metal plate that looks as old and indestructible as the pyramids.

Affirmation in the face of arguable hopelessness keeps coming up in this life’s work, as the above examples indicate. But Feldman’s pure abstractions can be powerful as well. The painting "The Red Event" (1960) looks anomalous amid all the hard edges of his collages. No J.M.W. Turner storm at sea of a century ago was more visceral than this crimson smear under a roiling and stormy black "sky," if you choose to make the event representational.

The exhibition would be full and varied even without the many examples of beautiful books which Feldman has painstakingly printed by letterpress, having founded the home-based Ziggurat Press in 1985. He also has done the books’ art work — not illustrations but "accompaniments," he likes to say — mostly block prints, mostly black but sometimes in color, for poetry by Michael S. Harper, Denise Levertov, C.D. Wright, and George Monteiro. They are usually abstract evocations rather than representational imagery — again he’s reluctant to be explicit. Sometimes there is even prose, clamoring for the clarification of accompanying illustration. But Walter Feldman will have none of that. He’d rather remind us that we can understand far more when we’re kept in a state of wondering.