Wayne Thiebaud's California Dream

Pasadena’s romance with Wayne Thiebaud, an important California painter who helped birth the Pop Art movement here, crescendos this month at the Pasadena Museum of California Art. On Oct. 4, the museum unveils Wayne Thiebaud: 70 Years of Painting, a major retrospective of a self-effacing master considered one of the country’s most important living painters. The solo exhibition overlaps with Sweets & Treats, the Norton Simon Museum of Art’s show of Thiebaud works in its collection, which runs through Nov. 2.

Thiebaud began making his mark in Pasadena as early as 1962, when he joined an all-star cast of artists — including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jim Dine and Edward Ruscha — who participated in New Painting of Common Objects, a groundbreaking show at the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon). The exhibition, one of the country’s first heralding the arrival of Pop Art, was curated by PAM’s then-chief, Walter Hopps, later dubbed “a gonzo museum director” by the Washington Post. With an exhibition that conferred perhaps the ultimate SoCal art circle imprimatur on its participants, Hopps helped alert the world beyond to the creative ferment in the region’s art scene. Six years later, PAM gave him his first one-man show here.

By midlife, Thiebaud, now 89, was in excellent company. Not bad for a self-taught unknown who had been a sign painter, cartoonist, Walt Disney Studios apprentice, illustrator and longtime teacher at UC Davis (where he now enjoys emeritus status). His brightly colored paintings of baked goods eventually became his widely recognized signature, though his work also embraced vibrant Northern California landscapes and cityscapes as well as beach scenes, reflecting the state’s sunny optimism back at itself. Thiebaud revels in the luxuriant use of pigment, using heavy impastos and bright colors as he renders the everyday with as much affection for his medium as he has for his subject.
Only the year before his Pasadena debut, Thiebaud had visited New York — rolled canvasses under his arm — and presented his work to one gallery owner after another. He’d painted eight or 10 cakes and rows of pie slices. The painterly frosting actually looked like frosting, thick and creamy, right down to the bas-relief rosettes. Bold slivers of color peeked out from the baked goods’ edges. In fact, these were studies of color and light, not pastry. Still, the result was unanimous rejection.

By chance, the discouraged painter rested in the Upper East Side doorway of the new Allan Stone Gallery, which became famous for representing such New York School luminaries as Willem de Koonig and Barnett Newman. Stone asked Thiebaud to show him the work and was almost shocked by it, though also strangely fascinated. “My first reaction to his painting was, this guy must be nuts, because they were just these rows of pies and cakes, silly looking,” Stone later told CBS Sunday Morning. “And after a while, there was a kind of insistence and integrity about them that was undeniable.” Stone agreed to show Thiebaud’s work and, at his first show at the gallery, sold a piece to the Museum of Modern Art. The legendary art dealer’s keen eye was given thundering posthumous affirmation in 2007, when Christie’s auctioned off his collection, bringing in $4.52 million for Seven Suckers, Thiebaud’s 1970 painting of two rows of lollipops.

But in the 1980s, the New York art establishment had yet to fully appreciate its counterparts in the West. When Thomas Hoving, Connoisseur’s editor and a former Metropolitan Museum of Art director, called Thiebaud “America’s best overlooked painter” in the magazine in 1985, he was damning the artist with faint praise. Still, the modest San Francisco resident probably didn’t mind. As he told Hoving: “I’ve been called a Pop artist, a ‘commonist,’ a ‘kitchnik’ and a member of the ‘sign-painting’ school. I guess that one should be thankful when they call you anything.”

70 Years of Painting comes to Pasadena from the Palm Springs Museum of Art, where it was curated by museum Director Steven Nash. Nash greatly expanded a 2007 show of the same name that had been organized for the Laguna Beach Art Museum by guest curator Gene Cooper, former director of Cal State Long Beach’s University Art Museum. With more than 120 paintings, the current retrospective is more than double the size of its Laguna Beach predecessor, augmented with works from private collections and those of the artist and his son, Paul (who became Thiebaud’s San Francisco– and New York–based art dealer after Stone’s death in 2006).

Cooper, whose original essay is reprinted in the catalog for the new show, sat for the painter more than once (the discreetly titled Player is in the exhibition) and photographed the progress of one of his portraits. Cooper likes to show the spectrum of slides, revealing Thiebaud’s modus operandi, to his classes. The artist starts painting with lemon yellow and then continues on through the remaining warm colors, all the way to the darkest purples.

Nash considers Thiebaud’s ascendance in the early 1960s a mixed blessing because he is often lumped together with Pop Art painters, although it’s not a perfect fit. “Thiebaud emerged simultaneously with the Pop Art movement and was swept along in its publicity,” he says, speaking by phone from Palm Springs. “He does share certain values — interest in informal properties of common objects, stylization of these objects, strong and sometimes brash color, etc.

“But the differences are actually stronger than the similarities. Thiebaud always says, ‘I was never a card-carrying Pop artist!’ and he doesn’t like to be called one. The biggest difference is that Pop takes an ironic or satirical or critical view of consumerist culture, while Thiebaud has no such judgmental attitude. Further, he notes that the Pop artists exploited mass-media techniques like photo transfer, offset lithography, silkscreening, etc. and actually downplayed pure painting, which is Thiebaud’s greatest love.”

A happy childhood in Long Beach provided ample subject matter for Thiebaud. He’s renowned for his graphic recall, and the cakes, candies and displays of goodies are based on memory. The Long Beach Pike, where he sold newspapers and hot dogs in his youth, must have offered a visual banquet. His observations of beachgoers on the sand below seem reflected in the recent aerial beach scene series.

Even with Thiebaud’s earliest food paintings, he engaged in a kind of visual sleight-of-hand. While objects — be they candy apples, cupcakes or pies — are placed in the center of the canvas, the viewer sees them from above. But the surfaces those objects sit on have high horizon lines, so those planes tilt dramatically downward. Cezanne’s tabletops may have had more than one plane; in three dimensions, Thiebaud’s would tip all their contents onto the floor.

He’s a wizard at using multiple perspective points, and spatial dislocation seems to be Thiebaud’s own long-running private joke. Since the end of the 1970s, he has been painting San Francisco cityscapes. Dramatic roller-coaster views of that town’s plunging and jutting urban hillsides can be breathtaking, but the visual elements don’t always add up. Streets that run from foreground to background seldom have a diminishing taper. Verticals like telephone poles or tall buildings are the same width at the bottom as they are at the top. It can all induce a touch of vertigo in the viewer.
Few colorists since Gauguin can match the electric vibrations Thiebaud creates by juxtaposing cold and hot colors. The sleek, subtle outer contour of a woman’s leg in Swimsuit Figures (1966) is orange, until it turns into cobalt blue at the foot.

The artist himself has never been given to long-winded explanations of his work, and he declined interviews in anticipation of the Pasadena retrospective. But in an appearance on CBS Sunday Morning last year, Thiebaud made his intentions clear: “I’d like for [viewers] to laugh a little. If we don’t have a sense of humor, we lack a perspective.”

Wayne Thiebaud: 70 Years of Painting runs from Oct. 4 through Jan. 31, 2010, at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, 490 E. Union St., Pasadena. The museum is open from noon to 5 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday. Admission (free for members) costs $7 for adults and $5 for seniors and students. Admission is free for everyone on the first Friday of the month. Call (626) 568-3674 or visit pmcaonline.org.