“Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art,” which opened at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco on March 22, is organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and curated by Timothy Anglin Burgard. Its premise, spelled out in the title, is straight forward enough and firmly based on the artist’s own ideas about painting. Wayne Thiebaud (1920–2021) spoke about his debt to other painters on numerous occasions, half-jokingly calling himself an “obsessive thief.” Those who studied and wrote about his work, as well as his students of many decades, are already well aware of Thiebaud’s inextricable connection to art history. Unfortunately, that is not yet true of the public, delighted as they are by his familiar subject matter and the bright palette of his paintings and prints.
While admiring his luscious renditions of deli or haberdashery counters, typical museumgoers (and even some art critics) are still largely content to see his work as a West Coast variety of American Pop Art—a more painterly version of the East Coast’s obsession with hand-rendered imitations of mechanical reproduction (Warhol and Lichtenstein) or commercial cornucopia (Rosenquist and Oldenburg). Despite the painter’s vociferous objections to being called a Pop artist, there are plenty of Thiebaud lovers who pine for comprehensive exhibitions of his “greatest hits” accompanied by reassuring platitudes about the uniqueness of California Pop.
The Legion of Honor exhibition disabuses any attentive visitor of the idea that Thiebaud, although he spent most of his life in California, was a regional painter, a Pop artist, or a popularizer of Americana disconnected from the art of other places and other times. Its portrayal of Thiebaud is familiar to those who had the privilege of knowing him: a worldly, curious intellectual, an art connoisseur, a man of supple mind and a lively sense of humor, and, above all, a “practicing art historian” (his own description of Picasso), whose painting was nearly always a response to the art that captivated him. Thiebaud’s stated goal was to create painting of a “different visual species”—different from the real world and from all other painting, yet informed by both, as well as by the individual world of the painter. “Art Comes from Art” takes the viewer behind the scenes, into Thiebaud’s studio, his classroom, and even his home (where most of his art collection was kept), showing how, according to Tim Burgard, the painter’s “overt homage, covert theft, and intuitive transformation” led to the creation of what Thiebaud himself called his unique and “different visual species.”
The show opens with a salon-style section containing art from Thiebaud’s personal collection (drawings by J. A. D. Ingres, Paul Cézanne, Rosa Bonheur, George Herriman, Oscar Bluemner, Franz Kline, Richard Diebenkorn, Manuel Neri, and Henri Matisse; paintings by Henri Fantin-Latour, Henri Rousseau, Joaquín Sorolla, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, David Park, Joan Mitchell, Balthus, and Giorgio Morandi) and copies he drew or painted, mostly from reproductions. Throughout the show, the wall texts feature long quotations from Thiebaud. The focal point of the first room is the tongue-in-cheek anthology painting 35 Cent Masterworks (1970, 1972), a partial account of his art-historical pedigree, and his guilty plea to the charge of “art theft.” Although he came from the generation that produced Abstract Expressionism, Thiebaud maintained that modernism had “ruined the academic enterprise” by suppressing tradition in favor of innovation. His own painting unapologetically relied on the former to produce the latter, and his indulgence in both “overt homage” and “covert theft” was an important part of the process.
The first room also introduces the device of thumbnail images placed next to relevant wall texts. While these are not meant as visual substitutes for the works they reference, they still give an idea of the correspondences that Thiebaud sought to conjure up. Among the more unexpected pairings is Sucker Tree (1962) and Marcel Duchamp’s familiar Bottle Dryer (1914), the two conical structures bristling with upturned spikes made for a totally different purpose. The theme of influences is explored in the next room, dubbed “Art History as a ‘Bureau of Standards’”—Thiebaud’s jocular moniker for the global art museums that contain “art of great stature and masterful beauty.” In the following section, the focus shifts to “empathy transfer,” largely neglected by modernism with its obsessive “emphasis on the so-called self.” This anti-narcissistic impulse is key to Thiebaud’s outward orientation, propelling his desire to “become one with others,” to share in the human experience through painting. Perhaps this is why his subjects are often reincarnations of earlier models: The Art Historian (G. C.) from 1971 references Daumier’s 1865–68 Advice to a Young Artist, and Thiebaud’s uncharacteristically tenebrous 1961 painting Half Salmon is a pendant to Manet’s 1864 The Salmon.
The next section, “Tradition and the Self,” addresses Thiebaud’s stance on abstraction. He had little in common temperamentally with the tempestuous and almost universally alcohol-addicted Abstract Expressionists, and little use for the fashionable, Jungian analysis of the darkness within, but he still incorporated formal elements of abstraction into his figuration. This tendency is most pronounced in the vertiginous San Francisco cityscapes and Sacramento Delta paintings. There is no escaping the similarity between Thiebaud’s 1968 Diagonal Ridge and Ellsworth Kelly’s Black White from the same year, once seen together. Abstraction even seeps into the exhibition design. In a touching curatorial homage, Thiebaud’s signature use of halation—the outlining of object in pure intense colors—is picked up in the use of color throughout the installation: the side surface of baseboards is painted periwinkle, with a double stripe of orange and chartreuse on the top surface.
The show closes, appropriately, with Thiebaud’s thoughts on his relationship with art history. He conceived of art history as a non-linear practice, within which “you can do art history backwards or forwards; you can take your choice. Progress is not part of it.” Thiebaud saw himself as a kindred spirit of painters long dead, his art creating a new “visual species” informed by his predecessors. He would take a motif or even an entire composition from elsewhere, and, by means of what the Russian formalists called “estrangement” force the viewers to engage with the familiar in a new way. The Bottle Dryer is based on that principle, as is Woman in the Tub (1963), which in turn has an unmistakable affinity with Pierre Bonnard’s The Bath (before 1947). But whereas in Bonnard’s painting the bather’s entire body is fully exposed beneath the bluish water, while her facial features are obscured, Thiebaud’s bather is disembodied, with only her head and neck visible to the spectator. By flipping the original sight/imagination ratio in his painting, Thiebaud effects an “estrangement,” inducing the spectator to reconcile his Rockwellesque portrait of the model’s head with its abstracted surroundings.
This affinity between Bonnard’s and Thiebaud’s bathers is one of many discoveries made in the process of preparing this exhibition by its curator, Tim Burgard. His essay “Wayne Thiebaud, Art History, and the ‘Bureau of Standards’” provides a thoroughly researched account of the painter’s relationship with art history. It is one of four texts in a handsomely laid-out catalogue, which also contains recollections of Thiebaud’s teaching by his former students. The book closes with a stylish and informative essay, “Smugglers and Thieves: Modern American Painting and Art History,” in which Lauren Palmor informs on various other famous art thieves, including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Fairfield Porter, Alice Neel, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Richard Diebenkorn, and Alex Katz. In addition to the works in the exhibition, the catalogue also contains full-scale versions of the thumbnail images on the walls, as well as an essay on Thiebaud’s figure-drawing lessons, citations of his quotes, and the most complete artist’s bibliography to date. In defiance of usual practice, I recommend reading the catalogue before seeing the exhibition.
“Art Comes from Art” is a much-needed development for our understanding of Thiebaud’s work in appropriate depth. It provides both art-historical and primary-source context, relying on the painter’s own words, the art in his collection, and his own renditions of others’ art to make a compelling case that he was indeed “a practicing art historian.” My only gripe is that after the show closes on August 17, it will not travel to any other venues. That’s a real pity, given how much it advances our understanding of Wayne Thiebaud’s oeuvre.
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