Wayne's world: from tasty still lifes to breathlessly pitched landscapes, Wayne Thiebaud's paintings body forth a realm of inexhaustible visual delight. A comprehensive retrospective followed the half-century career of this durable figure of American painting

Art in America, Feb, 2002 by Edward Leffingwell

Wayne Thiebaud started a lifelong romance with paint in the 1950s, revitalizing representational subject matter with a bold palette and the bravura brushwork of the Abstract Expressionists he most admired. The few paintings of that decade included in the Whitney Museum's hanging of a major retrospective organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco have much gesture and little of the raking light and deep shadow that would soon follow in Thiebaud's work. Cluttered and exuberant in their abstraction, these early paintings--a David Park-like beach scene, displays of cigar boxes and ribbons, an early pinball machine--scarcely propose the pared-down, nearly sculptural leap in technique he was poised to make.

Thiebaud was born in Arizona in 1920 and has spent most of his life in California. Attracted to commercial art and illustration while still in high school, he apprenticed at the Walt Disney studios one summer and studied at an L.A. trade school the next. Odd jobs followed, as did graphic design and film projects for the Army, and postwar stints of freelancing in L.A. and New York. Teaching and commercial work supplemented his income as Thiebaud began to paint in earnest during the late 1940s. With a few exhibitions to his credit, he returned to New York in 1956. Among the artists and critics he met at the Cedar Bar and Eighth Street Club were Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Philip Pearlstein, Wolf Kahn, Harold Rosenberg and Thomas Hess.

On his return to California in 1957, Thiebaud put aside his relatively abstract and painterly canvases of jukeboxes and pinball machines and launched the work that would make him famous. In an interview with the exhibition's curator, Steven A. Nash, Thiebaud straightforwardly defines his involvement with the formal problems of depicting food, the representation of color, shape and light. Earlier on, though, he offered more revealing insights on the subject in a San Francisco Sunday Chronicle article (which was later cited by Nancy Mariner in her chapter on California Pop in Lucy Lippard's 1966 Pop Art). He liked to see "what happens when the relationship between paint and subject matter comes as close as I can get it--white, gooey, shiny, sticky oil paint spread out on top of a painted cake to `become' frosting. It is playing with reality--making an illusion which grows out of an exploration of the propensities of materials." In Thiebaud's practice, that confident handling of paint-as-matter is not confined to the portrayed object, but extends to the air around it and to the surfaces of walls and floor.

Thiebaud's depictions are believable in ways that have nothing whatever to do with the camera's truth. A shadow from a chair or a wheel of cheese is rendered in the dark blues and purples associated with the reductive conventions of winter scenes. Thiebaud has confronted baked goods with a singularity of purpose that recalls the seriality of Giorgio Morandi, and with an intense focus on the actual and tactile that evokes Claes Oldenburg's celebration of materiality (both in Oldenburg's works and in his 1961 manifesto in which he declares, "I am for the art of crayons and weak gray pencil-lead, and grainy wash and sticky oil paint").

Having arrived at a style distinctly his own, in 1962 Thiebaud enjoyed solo exhibitions at the Allan Stone Gallery in New York (where he still shows) and the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco. That same year Walter Hopps included Thiebaud in the group exhibition "New Paintings of Common Objects" at the Pasadena Art Museum, through which Hopps helped articulate a relatively inclusive version of the new phenomenon of Pop art in America and attempted to situate Thiebaud in its embrace. Later that year, Thiebaud was included in another landmark exhibition, "New Realists" at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York.

The artists included in the rosters of such exhibitions (among them were Jim Dine, Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, Oldenburg and Andy Warhol) were reinventing and expanding both medium and subject matter. For his part, Thiebaud set out to recover the expressive possibilities of figurative art, which had been obscured by the dominance of Abstract Expressionism. He was as yet untrammeled by any perceptions of his role as a Pop confectioner; in fact, his subsequent association with Pop did not endure, incompatible as his paintings were with the movement's embrace of mechanical techniques and ironic cool. But in 1992, Thiebaud was once again claimed for the vanguard of Pop, this time via the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art's revisionist exhibition "Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition, 1955-62," in which curators Paul Schimmel and Donna De Salvo isolated and investigated a prelapsarian moment, an edenic era of proto-Pop possibilities.

The recent retrospective was clearly divided into three sections by subject matter--still lifes, figures or portraits, and cityscapes and landscapes--though a degree of overlap preempted too strict an allegiance to category. The rank and file of Five Hot Dogs (1961) developed from Thiebaud's first ventures into a more celebratory still life and anticipate later, related formal excursions such as Five Hammers (1972). Like sunbathers by a pool, the frankfurters sit firmly but lightly on a white expanse of ground, each one edged by a shadow and marked by a perfect ribbon of mustard worthy of a vendor's expert touch. At the same time Thiebaud adopted grids plotted out like suburban tracts for the representation of a variety of pies and cakes, silent phalanxes of appetite and desire, imbued with the palpable silence of Hopper. The fields are lavishly painted in bold strokes, sufficient to establish a ground on which the objects seem to both rest and rise, at the pure pleasure of the painting. As though to accentuate the feat of legerdemain--paint that physically approximates the object or condition it is intended to represent--the title figures of Cakes (1963) are set on spikelike stands, thrust forward in supernumerary display yet each accorded a singular and individual presence.