THIEBAUD'S PERSPECTIVE

River Pond

THIEBAUD’S PERSPECTIVE

by Sandy Koon

River Pond (75.421) sparkles with the clear blues, lavenders, yellows, oranges and bright light that say California.  A lavender-blue pond encircled by warm earth browns, a sinuous channel to the river beyond lie flat against the picture plane.  In the distance lollipop-like trees cast colorful shadows.  Puffy white clouds float above mountains. Cloud shadows appear on land and are reflected in the pond.  Are we looking out or looking down?  Straight on or bird’s eye view?  It’s a matter of perspective, the Wayne Thiebaud perspective.

The simple shapes of River Pond belie the complexity of Thiebaud’s work. For over 40 years he has worked in a variety of media to create a unique style rooted in his ability to balance apparent opposites:  realism and abstraction, seriousness and wit, immediacy and control of composition.  His subject matter is pure Americana.

Born in Mesa, Arizona, in 1920, Thiebaud has spent most of his life in California. As a youngster, he drew cartoons, designed stage sets and posters. As a teenager he worked in the animation department at Walt Disney Studios, drawing the in-betweens for cartoons; that is, the action between the initial and final poses of a character.  He studied commercial art in Los Angeles and attended Long Beach College, then served in the U.S. Air Force from 1942-45.  After the war, he worked as an advertising layout designer and cartoonist for Rexall Drug Co., but by 1947 he had decided to become a painter. 

To obtain formal art training and a teaching credential, he enrolled under the GI Bill first at San Jose State College and then at California State College in Sacramento, where he received a teaching appointment at Sacramento Junior College.  In 1956 he took a leave of absence from teaching to spend time in New York City where he met several of the Abstract Expressionists.

Long an admirer of Willem de Kooning, Thiebaud visited the abstract painter in his Tenth Street studio. Their conversations about the tradition of painting reinforced Thiebaud’s commitment to putting color on canvas.  Thiebaud saw in de Kooning’s work, “a succinct reductiveness that appealed to me…he seemed to work form-first with an immense vocabulary.”  Thiebaud was drawn equally to de Kooning’s ability  “to light a picture from within.”

Thiebaud says his conversations with de Kooning, Franz Kline and Barnett Newman changed his attitude.  “I had been painting cigar counters and windows and shoes and pinball machines, but they were all kind of articulated and hyped up with Abstract Expressionist brushstrokes--so that when I came back to California, I determined, ‘Well, I’m going to see if I can’t just present something as clear as I can.”

That something turned out to be food. Still lifes of cakes and pies, lollipops, hot dogs—row upon row of them seen as if looking through a store window. Thiebaud painted these objects from memories of work as a food handler in restaurants and of walks along the Long Beach boardwalk peering into pastry shops and delicatessen windows.  Reflecting on a painting of a slice of pie, Thiebaud says, “So it started out just as a sort of crazy problem to set for myself to orchestrate abstract elements with the subject matter. …I couldn’t help but look at it and laugh, ‘That certainly has to be the end of me as a serious painter—a slice of pie’... But I couldn’t leave it alone...It just seemed to be the most genuine thing which I had done.”

The pie paintings had a similar effect on the New York City art dealer Allan Stone.  Stone gave Thiebaud his first east coast show in

1962 and the works sold out immediately.                                                                       

With the food paintings, Thiebaud’s style and vocabulary began to mature.  He isolated objects within a painting, each with a colorful shadow, against a background of muted whites.  The isolation focused attention, gave each thing significance beyond what it was. Thiebaud rendered the cakes and pies with broad brushstrokes, dragging the paint across the surface and around the shapes in a way that seemed to transform the paint into the frosting or meringue itself--a technique Thiebaud calls “object transference.”  Brush -work is important to Thiebaud; he calls it “tempo,” the implied rhythm of the brushstrokes or the “brush dance” of a picture. 

The simplification of form, the brushwork, the rendering of light would be applied next to landscapes of the Sacramento River Valley.  In 1960 Thiebaud had joined the art faculty at the University of California, Davis, where his colleagues included leaders of California art --Robert Arneson, Roy DeForest, Manuel Neri and William T. Wiley.  The farmland surrounding the campus absorbed Thiebaud.  With River Pond, which he worked and reworked from 1967 to 1975, Thiebaud demonstrates a blend of realism and abstraction.  Consider the simplified forms of the pond and the trees, the horizontal band of lavender blue that we see as the river.  Thiebaud calls the thin ribbons of vivid complementary colors that outline the pond and the river “halation,” an effect akin to vibrato in music.  He alternates hot and cool colors to intensify the contrasts of shadow and light. The warm light in the distance shines uniformly across the river bank, and streaks of color alternate with darker cloud reflections on the land.

In 1972 Thiebaud made San Francisco a second home and the subject of new paintings.   His cityscapes and freewayscapes are dizzying.  Streets rise and fall, while buildings hug the side of hills.  He trades Renaissance perspective for an Asian point of view.

While the city offered new subject matter, Thiebaud continued to paint still lifes and figures.  In the late 1990’s he exhibited a new body of work, some 40 landscapes of the delta of the Sacramento River, more patterned, more detailed, more geometric than River Pond.  These new works are large and lush with sweeping brushstrokes, thick impasto, and almost psychedelic color.  The view is entirely from on high, as if one were looking down from a small plane—again, Thiebaud’s perspective.

Thiebaud continues to acknowledge the contributions of other artists to his work. “I’m very influenced by the tradition of painting and not at all self-conscious about identifying my influences…whether it’s Van Gogh, or Morandi or Barnett Newman—they’ve all had terrific impacts on what I wanted to explore in the way of problems, and I actually just steal things from people that I can use.”  But there’s more than plagiarism to Thiebaud’s work.  His ability to portray the scale, topography, colors and atmosphere of California sets him apart. New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman calls Thiebaud “an artist of the American West--of Western light, Western space, Western silences, Western attitudes.”

Writing about art is never easy, as Thiebaud has pointed out.  His statement written for an exhibit of works from the permanent collection of the National Academy of Design which he curated concludes:  “A painter being asked to write about painting [is] akin to a request to paint about writing.  It is a questionable if not impossible task…It only confirms what true lovers of painting already know:  painting is verbally invisible, for it is an autonomous and beautiful language of silence.” 

Source:  Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective, Steven A. Nash with Adam Gopnik, Thames & Hudson, 2000; Wayne Thiebaud: Still Lifes & Landscapes, exhibition catalogue, Associated American Artists, 1993; Wayne Thiebaud: Works on Paper from the Family Collections, exhibition catalogue, Springfield Art Museum, 1998; docent and C.W. Allen Library files.