Wayne Thiebaud at Allan Stone - New York - Brief Article

At the beginning of his career, Wayne Thiebaud was grouped with Pop artists because of his interest in painting commercial displays of cakes and other sweets. But as time went by, one could see that Thiebaud is his own man, rendering, like Edward Hopper, a highly personal realist vision of America. But while Hopper was slitting his painterly wrists over lonely souls at late-night cafeteria counters, Thiebaud was down the street the next morning, soaking up the cozy communal warmth of bakeries and candy shops. This show--which marked the 40th anniversary of Thiebaud's association with the gallery and coincided with the arrival of a full-dress traveling retrospective at the Whitney Museum--offered 26 works, most from the last decade. There were a few genre gems, but the bulk of the exhibition comprised cityscapes and landscapes. In these, America is shown to be a strange Candy Land, reduced by a sweet-tooth Cezanne to basic shapes that seem to be not cubes and cones but slivers, small slices and big pieces of tasty painting.

A few works hint at how Thiebaud came out from behind the pastry counter with his essential style intact. Not only do the forms retain his trademark halo effect, but all of the paintings share a housepainter's delight in how a fresh coat of paint can make the grubby world look great again. Receptionist (1988) is one of the transitional works, a Hopperesque study of a solitary woman at a desk, in which the smooth yellow and blue of the desk lift the workaday mood and make everything serene.

To capture the same tone in landscape, Thiebaud zeroes in on a certain midafternoon hour, when the hazy light whites out everything, leaving only tints or auras of pink and blue and especially yellow around the edges of every surface. In Canal (1997) he captures a full loop of an irrigation channel, when the high sunlight turns the water entirely yellow. A patchwork quilt of colored fields turns the picture into a rainbow. In River Turn (1995) the nearly white, hazy yellow of the river, modulating into soft pinks, lifts the view above mere topographical interest. Within the selection offered here, this painting best exemplified Thiebaud's vision of an American Eden, graced by a cheerful cake decorator of a God. [A Thiebaud retrospective appeared at the Whitney Museum, New York, June 28-Sept. 23.]

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