Wayne Thiebaud

Campbell-Thiebaud, San Francisco
Acquired by the present owner from the above in May 1997

San Francisco, Fine Arts Museum, Bay Area Art from the Morgan Flagg Collection, October 1997 - January 1998, cat. no. 48, p. 2, illustrated in color

River and Levee, 1996 demonstrates Thiebaud’s dramatic shift beginning in the mid 1970s from still-lifes and figurative painting to both urban and rural landscape painting, signaling a major development in his oeuvre and his growing assurance in his own brand of modern realism.  Thiebaud’s grasp of the vernacular of the California landscape as well as urbanism informs the complexity of his composition and design.  In paintings such as River and Levee, Thiebaud balances representation with geometric abstraction, touch and control, rendering rural scenes into aesthetic fantasies, almost surreal in their effect.

The improbable geometry of the Northern California landscape, with its steep hills and dramatic horizons, is the perfect location for exaggerating spatial dynamics and investigating the complexities of form and composition.  Since his move there in 1972, Thiebaud had been fascinated by the dichotomy of the beauty of rural life co-existing in a scene of extreme foreshortening and shifting perspectives. Thiebaud’s landscapes would become the perfect forum within which to explore the opposing tensions between modern abstraction and classic representation.

Thiebaud’s reference to fantasy is telling since his scenes are not mere acts of observation rendered in attractive and aesthetic form. As visually accessible and easily recognizable as River and Levee and other landscapes are to us, they are foremost a study of form and composition for Thiebaud. He exercises any number of manipulations in the arrangements of elements, from color to light to paint texture, to produce paintings that are first and foremost artistic constructions. Their role as descriptive depictions is only secondary. The primacy of process and composition is reflected in the evolution of the artist’s practice.  Inspired by the example of Edward Hopper, in the 1970s Thiebaud worked in his studio, relying on memory and imagination, leading to increased complexity and freedom of invention.  In paintings such as River and Levee, Thiebaud’s paintings are networks of faceted, interlocking planes of light and color, which convincingly portray the dramatic vantage points and pitched perspectives of the California country side.

The startlingly vertical inclines and the varied forms of the open fields and gently winding levee at the center of the composition provide soft linear accents that hold the composition to the flat picture plane. The tall palm trees, the flat agricultural fields represented by pastel colors as well as the central levee, which divides the composition further collapses our sense of depth.  As crisp as blank sheets of paper, these solid areas of planar color serve to visually halt the eye of the viewer, balancing the softer pools of shade that heighten the heart of Thiebaud’s design.