Once again, he reduced the forms to their essence, to rectangles of building and stripes of highway, to the very edge of abstraction, but never beyond recognition.
The work was masterful and painterly, bordering here on folk art, there on surrealism, and now and then on the pictograph, yet always recognizable as San Francisco and as Thiebaud. And it was largely ignored by the East Coast establishment that once loved him. In a footnote to his essay, Dr. Nash discusses the problem: "He has received over the years a fair amount of the critical cold shoulder, which has to do in part with the traditionally difficult times that West Coast artists have in East Coast media and also with ingrained modernist biases against realism per se."
Thiebaud feared that works such as "Pies, Pies, Pies" (1961) would be "the end of me as a serious artist." Instead, they became his signature.
"River and Farms" (1996) typifies Thiebaud's most recent work.
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Through January 14, 2001 (817) 738-9215.
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
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True enough, as far as it goes. But Nash uses the wrong Latin phrase, and thereby misses the biggie: The problem isn't realism per se so much as realism in rem. Every age has its hierarchy of painting subjects, and post-Mondrian, the 20th was a very bad century for landscape painters. To be sure, everyone dallies in it, and a few brave or lucky souls--fellow Californian Richard Diebenkorn springs to mind--have even managed to build careers at the intersection of landscape and abstraction. But, by and large, to specialize in contemporary landscape painting is to condemn oneself to art-world obscurity. Since the '30s, the cityscape is no better a career option; ditto for regionalism.
To his credit, Thiebaud never gave a rat's rear end. He taught. He painted. He had shows. And over 30 years, he has created a body of work that is a paean not only to California but to neo-Emersonian individualism. He ventured out to the 'burbs, creating lyrical masterpieces such as "Freeways" (1975-1979) and "Urban Freeways" (1979), songs both of himself and of American car culture. He continued to evolve, in the late '90s striking out in yet another vein: rural landscapes, at once vaguely recognizable and utterly unlike anything you've seen. Large canvases such as "River and Farms" (1996) seem to depict fantastic alluvial plains as you might see them from a prop plane. They draw you in through obvious devices: the river leading into the picture, the luminous color. Thus lured, you begin to notice little oddities: trees and shadows at different angles, from different perspectives and times. He's mildly disorienting the viewer, presenting little puzzles of meaning and emotion, creating paintings resolutely modern and ancient, lightly covered and suavely impastoed.
His work sold well in galleries and at auction, appreciating in the eyes of all but the art world's critical machinery. By the '80s and '90s, Thiebaud became, if not quite a neglected painter, at least one on whom the rap was that he had nothing more to say. For what, exactly, is the significance of one man's struggle with a quirky topography?
Plenty, and hopefully this show will stir some art-world revisionism. Thiebaud has placed his bets on the right side of historical wagering: Painting is more important than much of what passes for contemporary art. And at the end of the 20th century, Thiebaud's exploration of the image, especially of California farmland, can look like the only fertile ground left.
