“You can do art history backwards or forwards; you can take your choice. Progress is not part of it. Variation, yes, and extension and all that, but progress? Phew. I don’t know how you’d beat any of that stuff, even from the cave period.”
— Wayne Thiebaud
Artist Wayne Thiebaud will be the subject of a retrospective at the Legion of Honor, opening on March 22. Included are works from the artist’s personal collection, including two recently gifted by the Wayne Thiebaud Foundation, on view for the first time. His thoughtful reinterpretations of masterworks will be viewed alongside images of the original paintings that served as source material. Thiebaud’s extensive engagement with art history throughout his six-decade-long career will offer crucial insights into the artist’s process.
Pop Art, Realism, and the ‘thief’
The world of Wayne Thiebaud conjures images of neatly organized cakes displayed in windows, landscapes, and figurative works that despite their vivid Pop Art color schemes provoke a sense of realism. Thiebaud is the kind of painter that seems part documentarian. In Art Comes from Art, Thiebaud is painter turned art historian. This exhibition consists of 60 of Thiebaud’s wide-ranging reinterpretations of old and new European and American artworks and insights provided by Thiebaud about the artists he drew inspiration from.
“As a self-identified ‘thief,’ who mined the work of his predecessors and contemporaries, Wayne Thiebaud’s practice was deeply rooted in his study of art history, but this aspect of his work has never been explored,” said Thomas P. Campbell, director and CEO of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “Over the course of the next year, as we reflect upon the Legion of Honor’s legacy as a center of art historical research and inspiration, Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art couldn’t be more timely.”
A salon-style tribute
A salon-style gallery will feature around 30 of Thiebaud’s copies after other artists, spanning from Rembrandt van Rijn to Edouard Manet to Giorgio Morandi, as well as approximately 40 original artworks from Jean–Auguste–Dominique Ingres to Henri Matisse to Joan Mitchell, which he acquired for his personal collection. These copies were largely made from reproductions while his art collection enabled him to own and study original works by some of his heroes in real life. Model for the Bar at the Folies Bergère (after Édouard Manet) depicts a woman in profile, modeled in Manet’s style. The homage is most evident in his loose brushstrokes and pastel palette, both indicative of Manet’s style and era, and yet something essentially Thiebaud is still elementally present.
What artists brings to tributes is themselves, once again evident in Supper at Emmaus (after Rembrandt van Rijn). The figure of Christ at the table and surrounding onlookers are painted in bright blue, a signature of Thiebaud’ s Pop Art canvases, and the architecture is rendered in loose earth tone brushstrokes.
The same color schemes and loose brushstrokes are repeated in A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (after Georges Seurat), 2000; the Pointillist masterpiece is reinvented in bright brush strokes and the signature blue shadows that can be seen in Thiebaud’s cake paintings.
A painting legacy
Thiebaud’s orderly abstract representations of the real world — tightly arranged cityscapes, figures, bakeries, delicatessen cases, portraits, expansive landscapes and poignant performing clowns —challenged viewers to decide whether his perfectly posted subjects were worthy of admiration, criticism, or both.
The artist’s influence extends into education: Thiebaud was an admired art and art history professor at Sacramento Junior College (now Sacramento City College) and later at the University of California, Davis. His legacy as an artist, teacher, and mentor significantly influenced the evolution of American art in the post-World War II decades.
Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art is an essential part of the Legion of Honor 100-year celebration that references the museum’s permanent collection. The exhibition will be on view through Aug. 17.