Michael—

I just spent a pleasant, if somewhat hungry, hour in the company of Wayne Thiebaud at an exhibit of his works from 1955 to 2003 at the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University.

This is the first time I have seen a large amount of Thiebaud’s art "in the flesh." Although I’ve long admired his work in reproduction, Thiebaud’s canvases, with his exuberant, almost gluttonous approach to applying oil paint, are much easier to read in person. Thiebaud puts his butter-creamy oil paint on very, very thickly, and then pushes it around with stiff brushes so the manner of its application is still visible, like frosting on a cake. Or he applies it thinly, in which case it is gloppy, drippy, so diluted with medium that it gleams out of the final painting like a glaze on top of a fruity desert. In short, Thiebaud is a kind of highly intellectual pastry chef of a painter.

W. Thiebaud, Bread, Butter and Knife, 1962; W. Thiebaud, Rosebud Cakes, 1991-5

Since he evidently wants to eat his own paintings, he tends to be a bit fastidious, even when things get messy. The discipline in Thiebaud’s paintings—which they desperately need—is his confident and assured drawing, which is fortunately up to the task of organizing his “oral id.” Thiebaud began his artistic life as a cartoonist, animator, designer and commercial artist, and many of his drawings still have the relaxed authority of the noodlings of the more talented art directors I’ve known.

W. Thiebaud, Cafe Flowers, Caged Condiments, Cream Pie, Java and Sinkers, etc., 1995

Since the “gut-level” aspect of his art is so completely unambiguous, Thiebaud’s conscious mind has been quite free to develop fairly complex rationales regarding his art. For example, he refers to his tendency towards inventive distortion in drawing as caricature. According to Thiebaud, however, he doesn’t mean caricature in the ordinary sense—i.e., mere disproportion of body parts, which has a deliberately comic effect. Caricature to Thiebaud means “specific formal changes in size, scale, etc., relationships that combine the perceptual with the conceptual.” Thiebaud opposes his idea of caricature on the one hand to “simple cartooning” and on the other hand to what he terms “taxidermy”:

By taxidermy I mean the redundant visual recording of a dead image. The downside of realism is taxidermy. The way to escape that, it seems to me, is to collate a series of different perceptual responses into a single image.

The horror of creating a dead image is fairly understandable if one assumes, on some level (as Thiebaud clearly does) that one is going to have to ingest everything one paints. While Thiebaud is clearly fascinated by the technical facility of great Baroque painting, one presumes that he would be physically ill at the thought of tackling Caravaggio’s subject matter. The dominance of “frivolous” subject matter—deserts, food, fashion, still life, pretty girls—in his work is obviously safe ground for an artist of his compulsions.

Thiebaud’s artistic influences are an eclectic bunch, incorporating the Macchiaioli, the Bay Area Figurative Painters, Joaquin Sorrola, and—one not commonly recognized—Grant Wood.

W. Thiebaud, Swimsuit Figures, 1965; G. Wood, American Gothic, 1930

I want to elaborate on these connections in the context of Thiebaud’s most ambitious work, his landscapes.

W. Thiebaud, Towards 280, 1999-2000; R. Diebenkorn, Citiscape I, 1963; G. Wood, Iowa Landscape, 1941

The sheer physical distance involved in Thiebaud’s landscapes, which are always viewed from high up and far away, suggests a relaxing of his oral fixation. (Interestingly, he started painting landscape seriously only in his fifties—perhaps his bodily imperatives were slowing down a bit.) Thiebaud’s work had always played with spatial ambiguity—manifested in a variety of ways from subtly (but firmly) out-of-whack perspective schemes in his still lifes to the extreme picture plane frontality his exuberantly painterly treatment insists on. (It’s hard to have much sense of depth when both figure and ground are so clearly creamy paint, smeared back and forth across the picture plane.) But now, for the first time, Thiebaud gave himself a third dimension to play with, and he went a little crazy with it. The obvious source of his distortions is Richard Diebenkorn, but I would offer that floating behind Diebenkorn are the landscape paintings of Wood.

W. Thiebaud, Hill River, 1998

G. Wood, Spring Turning, 1936

I make the connection with both Diebenkorn and Wood to bring up the issue of provinciality. All three painters deliberately chose not to work in the world art capital of their day (Wood in Paris, Thiebaud and Diebenkorn in New York.) All three painters, nonetheless, were or are extremely sophisticated game players in the space that runs on either side of the abstract/representational boundary. But all three seem to have wanted to engage issues that pure abstraction didn’t offer them, and this seems to have been connected with a desire to remain involved with the geography and society they grew up in. All of them, have, of course, received considerable critical abuse (or, alternatively, been ignored) for this annoying provincialism. Nonetheless, I would offer that, possibly because of this link to the non-art world, these are three of the more interesting American painters of the past 70 years. I don’t want to lean too heavily on this logic, but it seems to me at least suggestive.

Any thoughts on this topic from you?

Cheers,

Friedrich

Excellent post, Friedrich -- I'm convinced! I never thought of a Thiebaud-Diebenkorn connection until now, but you've parsed it very well. For me, I usually thought of Thiebaud more in terms of someone like Philip Guston: not so much working between abstract and representational art as between naive and sophisticated. (cf also Basquiat.) And you're probably right that Thiebaud would have received more (and quicker) critical acclaim had he been based in New York -- not that that stopped him from having a major retrospective at the Whitney. But I think it's easy to overstate the difficulties which Diebenkorn and Thiebaud had in this regard (I can't speak for Wood, I don't know enough about him.) The New York Art World simply finds it easier to recognise and celebrate New York artists: I don't think you can blame these guys' style.

Posted by: Felix on January 27, 2003 10:49 AM

Excellent post, Friedrich -- I'm convinced! I never thought of a Thiebaud-Diebenkorn connection until now, but you've parsed it very well. For me, I usually thought of Thiebaud more in terms of someone like Philip Guston: not so much working between abstract and representational art as between naive and sophisticated. (cf also Basquiat.) And you're probably right that Thiebaud would have received more (and quicker) critical acclaim had he been based in New York -- not that that stopped him from having a major retrospective at the Whitney. But I think it's easy to overstate the difficulties which Diebenkorn and Thiebaud had in this regard (I can't speak for Wood, I don't know enough about him.) The New York Art World simply finds it easier to recognise and celebrate New York artists: I don't think you can blame these guys' style.

Posted by: Felix on January 27, 2003 10:50 AM






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