ART SERVICES WRITING
Written for Thea Westreich Art Advisory Services for Private Collection 21 November 1998.
Wayne Thiebaud (1920-)
Steep Street, 1989
Etching and aquatint in colors
34 of 50, signed and dated in pencil
38 1/2 x 30 1/2 inches unframed, 33 x 41 5/8 inches framed
Wayne Thiebaud is among America’s finest artists, a Californian painter whose resistance to mainstream art fashions and trends has somewhat obscured this artist’s international importance as a master painter. Not unlike a host of his contemporaries and predessors the likes of Diebenkorn and David Park, Thiebaud sits atop a pinnacle of West Coast masters who have grown into full maturity and thrived away from the epicenter of the contemporary art world, Manhattan.
This of course does not mean that Thiebaud has never been welcomed by the big city, as his early success confirmed. The lifetime West Coast Thiebaud achieved instant celebrity in Manhattan by selling out his first one-man show put on by Allan Stone in 1962. The show featured his now famous still lifes depicting rows of cakes, pies, candy and lipstick. Thiebaud’s work was embraced fervently by the Manhattan art world, which was busy recruiting talent to promote the new Pop Art sensation. Unimpressed by the commotion and hype surrounding Pop Art, Thiebaud remained in California to paint and continue teaching, a post he continues to uphold with great pride and enthusiasm today.
The artist insists that he is a formalist by nature, and that his works should be looked at through the lense of formalism that emerged in the fifties while Thiebaud was making his way as a commercial artist and developing his own unique artistic philosophy and painting technique. Thiebaud embraced formalism in a fashion that contrasted with the Pop artists he became associated with, as artists like Lichtenstein and Warhol employed their commercial sensibilities on canvas by utilizing elements associated with the printed image; ben-day dots, silkscreening, photographs. Thiebaud has always delighted in the painterly process, and though some of the humor and playfulness of his subject matter and approach in his earlier work may be associated with Pop, he rigorously maintains that the subject matter has always acted as a shell under which to engage his formal interests in painting and art.
Thiebaud’s career long fascination with the formal elements of line, color, and composition spring to life in his luscious cityscapes and landscapes, a series he began in the late 1970’s. His regional loyalty shines clearest here, as the paintings and etchings created in this important series are unmistakably Californian in nature. The vertical streets of San Francisco are captured brilliantly in Steep Street, a title which invokes the element of danger as compellingly as the painting evokes the angles and beautiful rhythms that are Thiebaud.
Thiebaud builds depth and tension by meshing an assortment of perspectives to stabilize the composition he has created in a given work. In Steep Street, Thiebaud manages to blend so many perspectives seamlessly that the viewer may have trouble distinguishing where one side of a mountain begins and one side of a street ends; at any given point in the picture, if the viewer was to stand on one of Thiebaud’s streets, the viewer would question whether he was facing north or south, right or left, up or down. Far from being destabilizing or disorienting, however, Thiebaud’s cityscapes establish a balance and fluidity out of presumably nonlinear perspectives whose connections with one another depend upon their formal relationships in terms of color and composition. Consistency of spacial illusion between the streets Thiebaud paints creates a taught interior rhythm, as the streets represent completely different perspectives and work together best when the viewer abstracts his or her comprehension of perspective into the broader realm of overall composition and tension between line and color. This of course pays tribute to Thiebaud’s primary interests as a formalist.
The artist’s vision is unique yet instantly familiar, undeniably American yet rooted firmly in the traditions of modernism and formalism. Thiebaud places a body of water on top of the hill we are looking at to reinforce that the body of water exists behind the hill, much the same way Picasso puts two eyes on one side of a profile portrait of Dora Maar to reinforce the notion that there is an eye on the other side of Dora’s face. The juxtaposition of flatness and three-dimensionality in Steep Street is highlighted by a sublime color sense, one of Thiebaud’s greatest gifts, and dramatic shadowing effects, as seen clearly on the center street which glides through the middle of the etching. Thiebaud’s work moves on its own so the viewer’s sensibilities dance between a superior compositional harmonization of line and color and a unique style of meshing perspectives in a cityscape while viewing panoramic space painted somehow vertically. Thiebaud’s quiet and simple nature serve to compliment his great talents at capturing the energy of city and land on canvas in a fusion of representationalism and formalism, which makes him one of the most significant painters in contemporary art.