If imitation is the sincerest type of flattery, Wayne Thiebaud (1920-2021) knew the way to acceptable most ardently. The famend artist as soon as stated, “It’s hard for me to think of artists who weren’t influential on me because I’m such a blatant thief.”
Subsequent month, a serious retrospective highlights Thiebaud’s six-decade profession, that includes round 60 quintessential works spanning a variety of subject material. From his celebrated still-lifes of dessert shows and prosaic family objects to portraits, cityscapes, and expansive pure vistas, Wayne Thiebaud: Artwork Comes from Artwork takes a deep dive into the artist’s engagement with artwork historical past.
Thiebaud frolicked within the Fifties with summary artists like Franz Kline and Elaine and Willem de Kooning in New York Metropolis, the place he additionally met Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns whose mixed-media practices included discovered objects in conceptual, proto-Pop Artwork work and assemblages. Whereas within the metropolis, Thiebaud made small work of meals displayed on home windows, which he additional explored when he returned to California.
Thiebaud’s profession originated with a concentrate on illustration and cartoons, which aligned with the emergence of Pop Artwork within the U.S. within the early Sixties. A response to the austerity of the First and Second World Wars, the motion celebrated daring colours, repetition, and on a regular basis objects and commodities.
Artwork Comes from Artwork showcases how Thiebaud borrowed from the breadth of European and American masterworks, from Henri Matisse to Richard Diebenkorn to Andrea Mantegna. “I believe very much in the tradition that art comes from art and nothing else,” the artist stated.
Thiebaud copied, reinterpreted, mashed up, and remodeled artwork historical past into his personal creative imaginative and prescient, viewing different artists’ cumulative work as a type of archive or repository—an encyclopedic “bureau of standards” that he might “steal” from whereas concurrently paying tribute to titans of the Western artwork canon.
In oil work like “35 Cent Masterpieces,” Thiebaud renders a show of paintings reproductions evocative of postcards or bookshelves in a museum reward store. And lighting redolent of Edward Hopper, additionally recognized for depicting on a regular basis American scenes, contrasts the themes of “Five Seated Figures.” Together with Thiebauld’s vibrant, buttery portrayals of meals and treats with characteristically glowing blue shadows, further items reference Rembrandt, George Seurat, Édouard Manet, and lots of extra.
Wayne Thiebaud: Artwork Comes from Artwork opens at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor on March 22 and continues by means of August 17. The present is accompanied by a catalog printed by UC Press slated for launch in mid-April. Discover your copy on Bookshop.
