Farewell Walter de Maria, force of nature who lit up the art world

Walter de Maria, whose death is being reported, knew how to take hold of imaginations – not with cheap shots, but profound encounters.

It does not matter if you have never visited The Lightning Field, an array of 400 steel rods in the New Mexico desert that he installed in 1977. Of course, it is worth a pilgrimage to experience it over time, with or without lightning, as the artist intended. But the briefest glimpse of it in colour photographs, the sky illuminated by streaks of electricity drawn to the vast field of attracting rods, communicates so much, so eloquently.

Here is a romantic vision of nature that uses modern means – the almost clinical arrangement of a grid of poles – to achieve the awe-inspiring effects the American Hudson River school of landscape painters sought to elicit with paint.

In her recent book, Picturing the Cosmos, art historian Elizabeth A Kessler argues that US physicists processing photos from the Hubble Space Telsecope are influenced by the sublime grandeur of the American landscape – the idea of the open spaces of the west is so deep in American culture that it shapes Nasa images of the stars. That same sense of natural grandeur gripped Walter de Maria. He found a new, mind-blowing way to reveal the majesty of nature. For it is not a picture of land and sky that he exhibits in The Lightning Field. It is the phenomena themselves.

At a time when the human destruction of nature was becoming ever more visible – and we're still in that time – De Maria teased into being a spectacle that displays the power and mystery of our planet. The Lightning Field is an ecological masterpiece.

He brought nature inside, too, in his series of Earth Rooms, one of which survives and can be viewed in New York. In Kassel, Germany you can see – or rather, not see, except for a small metal circle – his Vertical Earth Kilometre, a 1km-long brass rod planted upright in the earth.

This artist, who once played drums for Lou Reed and John Cale, has left a moving legacy. His art urges us to cherish the earth we inhabit and its sheltering sky.