"Three Machines," Wayne
Thiebaud, 1963. Oil on canvas from the collection of the Fine
Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Wayne
Thiebaud:
By Stephen May
NEW YORK CITY - Wayne The fact that he has worked for half a
century in California, far removed from the major art
publications and critics of the East, has clearly put one of the
finest painters of his generation at a disadvantage. The warm
reception his current exhibition has drawn around the country
suggests that Thiebaud is gaining the kind of delayed recognition
accorded earlier to his California colleague Richard Diebenkorn.
"Wayne Thiebaud: ," comprising over 100 paintings, watercolors
and pastels, does full justice to the wide range of the artist's
achievements. Organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
and astutely curated by the museums' associate director and chief
curator, Steven A. Nash, it celebrates the artist's 80th birthday
last year.
Thanks to stops in San Francisco, Fort Worth and The Phillips
Collection in Washington, D.C., the superb display has brought
Thiebaud's remarkable and endearing work to the broader audiences
and wider critical attention it deserves. The exhibition will be
on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the last stop on
its tour, through September 23. Funding has been provided by the
National Endowment for the Arts.
The show includes, of course, numerous examples of Thiebaud's
famous still-life canvases of everyday objects, especially cakes
and pies, painted with a brilliant palette and luscious
brushwork. Also on view are splendid, lesser-known, recent
paintings featuring San Francisco cityscapes and California
landscapes. Much of this new work, undertaken well into the
artist's mature years, reveals an adventurous soul willing to
switch gears and take on fresh aesthetic challenges - with amply
rewarding results.
"Man Sitting - Back View," Wayne Thiebaud, 1964. Oil on canvas
from the collection of the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, St
Joseph, Mo.
It is important to see this exhibition in person if possible
because reproductions hardly do justice to the rich, succulent
handling of paint that gives Thiebaud's canvases a palpable
physicality. He is, moreover, a great colorist, a quality not
always reflected accurately in reproductions.
Born in Arizona in 1920, Theibaud has spent most of his life in
California. Inspired by cartoons and comic strips, he became a
cartoonist as a teenager, worked briefly as an animator for Walt
Disney Studios, and drew a comic strip during a World War II
stint in Army Air Force.
Utilizing the GI Bill, Thiebaud took art courses after the war at
San Jose State College and California State College in
Sacramento. But he is basically a self-taught artist who has
studied the old masters and other titans of world art with care
and perception. Thiebaud has taught for a half century at the
college level, most recently at the University of California at
Davis, where he continues to instruct on a part-time basis.
A knowledgeable, witty, articulate and self-deprecating speaker,
he is a joy to listen to. In his 80s, he still plays, says Nash,
a "mean game" of tennis.
In 1956 and 1957 Thiebaud spent time immersed in the New York art
scene, meeting Willem de Kooning and other artists associated
with the Abstract Expressionist movement. For a brief time, in
works like "Ribbon Store" (1957), he employed bold brushstrokes
and vivid colors in a manner reminiscent of the radical East
Coast style.
Before long, however, his style became more realistic as he began
the series of brilliantly colored paintings of prepared food,
consumer goods and everyday objects that put him on the map.
Intrigued by the ubiquitous yet anonymous objects of American
culture, Thiebaud applied both a wry sense of humor and a
colorful precision to depictions of familiar, humble items. "Star
Pinball" (1962) and "Three Machines" (1963) raised pinball
machines and gumball dispensers to unexpected artistic
prominence.
Even more famously, his cheerful portrayals of luscious cakes,
pies and ice cream, as exemplified by "Confections" (1962) and
"Cakes" (1963), both in the exhibition, gained immediate
popularity. "Cakes," in the collection of the National Gallery of
Art, is a showstopper.
"Tie Rack" (1969), which shows three rows of colorful ties neatly
arrayed on an isolated rack, puts one in mind of the color-stripe
art of Morris Louis.
The simple geometric shapes of these works highlighted by intense
light and vibrant colors, linked Thiebaud, in the public mind,
with the Pop Art movement of the 1960s. Actually, his paintings
were quite unlike Pop Art, which often sought to satirize the
consumer society and blur the distinction between fine and
commercial art.
For one thing, Thiebaud's bravura brushwork and thick application
of paint is significantly different from the slick surfaces and
sleek commercial look favored by most Pop artists. In addition,
Thiebaud's paintings grew out of a respectful nostalgia for his
middle-class boyhood experiences, evoking simplified aspects of a
vanishing scene.
His fond memories of a passing, popular culture are accessible
and exceedingly well executed. Rather than adopting the mocking
tone of Pop Art, Thiebaud celebrated material objects from the
past.
Close examination of these orderly images suggests his concern
for the more formal interests of still-life painters,
specifically the balance, light and tension between surface
arrangement and the illusion of space.
Affinities to the geometric rigor of Dutch painter Piet Mondrian,
the simplified compositions of Italian still-life artist Giorgio
Morandi, and the stark isolation of Edward Hopper's work are
apparent. Thiebaud readily acknowledges a debt, in addition, to
artists who are as varied as Vermeer, Chardin, Eakins and de
Kooning.
"I am a real visual bandit," says Thiebaud cheerfully. "I steal
from ... many people. It depends a little on what I happen to be
working on at the moment."
Whatever the sources, Theibaud's images of consumer goods are
memorable. As Eric Denker, the Corcoran Gallery of Art curator of
prints and drawings, has observed, "Great art, as great writing,
fundamentally alters our view of the world around us. Once you
have seen one of Thiebaud's brilliantly arranged and colored
images, of seemingly humble, everyday objects, you can never view
those objects again in the same way." Denker organized a Corcoran
print show earlier this year that demonstrated Thiebaud's gifted
work in etchings, lithographs and monotypes.
In the late 1960s Thiebaud started to focus primarily on the
varied landscape of California, executing a dazzling series of
out-of-the-ordinary images. "Diagonal Ridge" (1968), featuring a
steep incline to which trees and vegetation cling tenaciously,
grew out of his familiarity with the dramatic cliffs and bluffs
of the Sierra Nevada foothills not farm from his Sacramento home.
After acquiring a house/studio on San Francisco's Potrero Hill in
1973, Theibaud began a string of innovative urban views inspired
by the precipitous hills and dramatic vistas of that city. They
clearly reflect the influence of Diebenkorn's topographical urban
images of a decade earlier.
Seeking to capture the singular terrain of the city as well as
its special perspectives, Thiebaud often combined different views
to create composite cityscapes that reflected the tension and
vertigo of the City by the Bay. Later he compressed space,
distorted plunging angles of roadways, exaggerated inclines of
hills, altered the scale of buildings and changed the size of
cars and trees to add drama to his compositions.
The overhead view and changing perspectives in "Hill Street (Day
City)" (1981) exaggerate San Francisco's steep hills, to which
structures cling precariously. Thiebaud's wit - as exemplified by
what he called "the most devilish complicated freeway exchanges"
in some of his works - help animate these idiosyncratic, stylized
city views.
In the 1990s, the septuagenarian artist, unwilling to rest on his
laurels, turned to a fresh subject - the waterways and flat
agricultural fields of the Sacramento River Delta near his home.
Taking on a new challenge, Thiebaud used hot, rich,
phosphorescent colors in creating complex, creative, panoramic
landscapes.
The brilliantly hued vistas, depicted in large, semi-abstract
canvases, reflect a new intensity in the painter's distinctive
use of light, patterns and perspectives. "Waterland" (1996), a
bird's-eye view of cultivated land abutting waterways, is one of
a number of the new, kaleidoscopic images in the show.
Praise for the recent works has been widespread and emphatic. The
paintings, never before seen in the East are, as curator Nash
puts it, "strong and audacious."
"Waterland," Wayne Thiebaud, 1996. Oil on canvas courtesy of
Betty Jean Thiebaud.
"[Thiebaud] keeps coming up with extraordinary ideas," says Eliza
Rathbone, chief curator at The Phillips Collection, "which ...
attests ... to the richness of his imagination and his love of
painting," as the artist's old New York dealer, Allan Stone,
observed, this new work has "the bravado of a young painter."
Thiebaud's willingness to try new subjects, executed with
boldness and the sure hand of a still potent, mature artist,
makes one look forward with anticipation to future works by the
painter, who will be 81 in November.
As his consistently delightful and often stunning display
underscores, Thiebaud's paintings represent a major achievement
in Twentieth Century American art. His familiar images of
pastries and consumer products continue to make rewarding
viewing. His later landscapes, challenging orientation by
cleverly mixing the actual and the imaginary, will come as a
revelation to many East Coast viewers - and provide lasting
memories.
This long overdue, comprehensive exhibition properly reminds us
that, throughout his prolific career, Wayne Thiebaud has managed
to blend modernity with respect for artistic tradition. Striking
a delicate balance between realism and abstraction and employing
vivid colors for all their worth, he has created a large body of
highly personalized art that guarantees him a lasting place as
one of the most important American painters of his generation.
The exhibition catalogue is a handsome, beautifully illustrated
volume that includes numerous color reproductions and essays by
Nash and critic Adam Gopnik, as well as an artist chronology.
Nash's chapter, which traces Thiebaud's career, assesses his
place in the history of American modernism and the tradition of
realism, and examines the wide range of his art historical
sources, is especially well done. Co-published by the Fine Arts
Museums of San Francisco and Thames and Hudson, the book belongs
in any comprehensive library of American art.
The Whitney Museum of American Art is at 945 Madison Avenue.
For information, call 212-570-3676.
