Wayne Thiebaud: Green River Lands, 1998.

In this ongoing series, writers are invited to discuss a contemporary work that has special significance for them.

It cannot be emphasized too often that a number of the great pioneers of modernism - Monet, Cezanne, Matisse, Mondrian, Braque, Kandinsky, Miro - were by formation not only landscape painters, but landscape painters of a very special kind. They were topographical painters, who aspired to capture, not just the physical lineaments of the terrain they depicted, but its very genius loci. They wanted to enfold into their paintings the aromatic smells of Provence, or the warmed breezes of Corsica and the south of France, or the brisk sea-winds of the Dutch coast, or the harsh textures of Catalonia. It was this confidence that painting could do justice to more than the narrowly visible that, as the century progressed, mutated into the pursuit of expression, or the conviction that visual equivalents could be found for something else that wasn't strictly visible: the mind, or spirit.

It would therefore be a natural expectation that, once it was felt that painting could not live by abstraction alone, a new art of landscape would arise that had at once absorbed the lessons of modernism and revived those aspirations of turn-of-the-century painting which formalism cannot acknowledge. I believe that we find such an art in the most recent work of Wayne Thiebaud, who, in his late seventies, is at the height of his powers.

Since 1993, Thiebaud has been painting panoramic views of the delta of the Sacramento River. Occupying the forty miles or so between Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay, the delta is terra incognita to most Californians, not because it is remote, but because it is inaccessible, traversed by irrigation canals and dirt tracks raised on embankments, rather than by roads. As we can see from Green River Lands, one of the most recent works in the series, and, through its delicious and flamboyant physicality, the grandest, Thiebaud has, in capturing the uniqueness of this isolated countryside, combined pictorial procedures worked out across his life with new forms of tension, from which these paintings gain a remarkable immediacy.

Thiebaud has always been an experimental painter, while sedulously avoiding other, or pictorially unmotivated, forms of novelty. He has experimented with multiple viewpoints; with shifts in size and scale; with motifs that function at once configurationally and representationally, like striation; and with many effects of color. One of these effects, used with great virtuosity, is "halation," or the distribution around the contour of an object of small dots of highly saturated color, generally complementary to its local color. Originating in the practice of approximating to the object by drawing a succession of contours, each in a somewhat darker hue, but letting its predecessor show through, the halo effect induces a sense of levitation. In Thiebaud's earlier still lifts, halation lent to miscellaneous "things," to the flotsam and jetsam of middle-American life, a feeling of simple exhilaration.

But in these later landscapes the problem is different. For Thiebaud, what is distinctive about the delta lies in a contrast between the great oozing majesty of the river, with its variety of channels, and the adjacent harlequinade of water meadow, plow, orchard, pasture, fines of poplars, and fields put to some unidentifiable agro-industrial use. To convey this contrast, Thiebaud evolves a perceptual counterpart of great subtlety. First, he adopts a high viewpoint, or rather a series of high viewpoints, which effectively cuts off the horizon. Then, benefiting from this closure, he drags our eye down the pictorial surface to the bottom edge of the picture. In Green River Lands, when he gets us there, he goes further. Simulating a ride on a ghost train, he pitches us over the edge, and seemingly down, though pictorially it is up, onto the line of phosphorescent trees, which are waiting for us like a safety net. Finally, there begins, for the eye, the long trudge back up the picture, against the downward flow of the water, through the patchwork of fields, each patch lying in some provocative disharmony with its neighbor. The disharmony makes each transition difficult for the eye to effect: The provocation makes it imperative.

From even so perfunctory a description, it is clear that these paintings exhibit a complexity, and, above all, an old-masterish cultivation of detail, completely without ironical intent, that has not been observed in art since the drip paintings of Pollock or the glorious late Ateliers of Braque.

I began by talking of an art that had absorbed the lessons of modernism. The phrase falls glibly from the lips, only to make us wonder whether we really possess any clear idea of what the art of this century has taught art. Certainly much of what the High Priests of modernism, like Fry or Greenberg, picked up on, like the emphasis on surface, are common characteristics of all radical art, of all art that revitalized itself by reconsidering its medium, from, say, Giotto on.

I can think of three things that are, not the essence of modernism, which is something else, but arguably the lessons we have learned from modernism. First, that eclecticism can be a source of strength as well as a sign of weakness. Secondly, that works of art can continue to surprise us in ways that survive familiarity with them. Thirdly, that seriousness need not be solemnity. On this understanding, we can see Thiebaud's art as an art that has gone through modernism, but in the reverse direction. It has come out where modernism began.

There are those who proclaim that art is dead, meaning that the history of art has come to an end. A likelier story is that it has stalled. If it has, then an art that stands to that history as Thiebaud's does may be just what is required to give it the jump start that is needed.