Wayne Thiebaud

Acquired directly from the artist

This painting is in excellent condition. The surface is slightly soiled overall from airborne dirt and dust. Under Ultraviolet light, there are no apparent restorations. The canvas is framed in a brown stained wood strip frame with a small float.
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Brown River, 1996 and the series of late 1990's river-scapes were a fresh adventure for Thiebaud that retained links to his previous work in both cityscapes and rural scenes, and memorialized his deep connection with California's Sacramento River Delta where he has lived for decades. In the catalogue for the Walker Art Center's exhibition Wayne Thiebaud: Paintings, Graham Beal writes, "The [landscapes] represent his most sophisticated use so far of that special tension that exists between observation and memory." (Exh. Cat., Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, Wayne Thiebaud: Paintings, 1981, n.p.) Inspired by Chinese and Japanese painting and their influence on the spatial innovations of Cezanne and other modernist painters, Thiebaud's Brown River demonstrates another sort of tension in the artist's urban and rural landscapes: a compression of expansive space into a foreshortened perspective.

Beginning with a military tour near Sacramento in the early 1940s, Thiebaud returned to the area to earn his B. A. (1951) and masters of arts (1953) at the city's California State College. He began a long relationship with the E. B. Crocker Art Gallery in Sacramento which held his first one-artist show in 1951 and continued to exhibit and collect his work over the years. Thiebaud was appointed an instructor of art at Sacramento Junior College (1951-1960) and in 1960, Thiebaud began his long career as a professor at University of California, Davis (1960 until his retirement) outside of Sacramento.   More fundamentally, the source for Brown River is in fact a combination of the artist's direct observations of the region and his memories of family farms of his youth. Thiebaud used the basic outline of Northern California's fertile Sacramento River Delta to plan this painting. He then layered it with elements of his boyhood experience of visiting his relatives' farms in Southern Utah and Orange County in Southern California. As he recalled, "I plowed, harrowed, dug and hitched up teams...and planted and harvested alfalfa, potatoes, corn. ... and I loved it. ... It was a great way to grow up. These paintings have something to do with the love of that and in some ways the idea of replicating that experience." (Exh. Cat., San Francisco, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective, 2000, p 33). In Brown River, the sights and smells of the past have been transmuted into the vibrant colors on the canvas, the heat of the sun and the tang of alfalfa made visible in bright yellow, green and orange.

Immediately preceding his most recent landscapes, Thiebaud's subject matter took as its focus the San Francisco cityscape. Brown River and the other Sacramento River paintings are a drastic departure from the "steep manneristic perspective" that can be used to describe the impossibly elongated and vertiginous proportions of Thiebaud's paintings of San Francisco (Exh. Cat. London, Faggionato Gallery, Wayne Thiebaud Paintings, 2005. p. 8). With the shift in focus from city to country, Thiebaud uses a slightly more aerial point of view to take in the expansive flatness of the agrarian terrain. Adam Gopnik locates the viewer's position in paintings such as Brown River as, "not so much of a satellite, as of a small crop dusting plane. The world it sees is fantastically rich, almost psychedelically colored."  (Exh Cat. San Francisco, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective, 2000, p. 62) However the artist has cautioned against a reading of these works as strictly aerial, attesting that compositions like Brown River contain several different viewpoints, requiring perspectival flexibility to gain a cohesive whole. (Oral history interview with Wayne Thiebaud, 2001 May 17-18, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution).  The bright colors of Brown River emphasize the interlocking geometry of a composition that verges on abstraction. Thiebaud uses his medium to modulate our understanding of the details. Dabs of paint suggest rows of crops, but the amount of detail does not correspond to a system of perspective that diminishes the information perceived in the furthest distant field. Some sections near the center of the canvas have no objective detail at all. It is only Thiebaud's build up of paint that suggests the horizontal rows of crops or diagonal furrows of the fertile Sacramento river valley. Thiebaud is working with the tools of spatial abstraction, but he never surrenders entirely to the flatness of the non-objective. The bridge in the upper register of the canvas is a pictorial device of realism, used to draw the eye back into the depths of the fields and to create an anchor from which the entirety of the canvas can be explored.

This play between abstraction and realism in Brown River calls to mind the work of California artist Richard Diebenkorn. Both with roots in the Bay area, Thiebaud and Diebenkorn met in the mid 1960's and became friends with a shared love of painting and a refined sensibility of the tension between figuration and abstraction. It is in Thiebaud's landscapes that the subtle affinity with his colleague is most strongly felt. Brown River's blocks of color are interrupted by horizontals and diagonals as witnessed in City Scape I (1963, Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art).  As in Diebenkorn's works, Thiebaud's diagonal lines – reminiscent of the sinuous bends of the river itself – organize Brown River's composition. But it is difficult to find a 90-degree angle in the work, let alone unpack the perspectival tools that Thiebaud has chosen to apply to the Sacramento Delta's flatlands. The horizon line pushed far to the top of the canvas appears as a bright blue foil to the interlocking patchwork of fields and solidifies the earth-ground orientation that ensures the shapes and vivid colors are not perceived as merely abstractions.  Thiebaud's distinctive painterly technique and un-naturalistic colors pay homage to the vibrant tones of a California sunset reflected in the fields in Brown River, telling the tale of an enduring romance with the California countryside's sun-bathed slopes and bountiful farms that extends back to Thiebaud's youth while enriching the production of his career to date.