Wayne Thiebaud: American Master

The best artists can change the way we see the world. If we look at enough still lifes by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin or Paul Cézanne or Giorgio Morandi, to name three obvious masters of the genre, we begin to measure our experience against their vision, testing our observations of actuality against their inventions. The banal kitchen bowls, apples, pottery, and bottles that populate these painters' canvases can seem more significant when we encounter them in works of art than when we see them on the kitchen table, so that when we focus on real objects, we find them wanting, in comparison to the artists' inspired fictions. Yet those objects can also resonate in new ways when we come across them in reality because we've been educated by the painted embodiments of the artists' perceptions; we notice what we might otherwise have ignored.

The works that first established Wayne Thiebaud's reputation—forthright "portraits" of candies, pastries, diner meals, delicatessen counters, toys, soda fountain treats, and the like—have irrevocably altered our responses to these undistinguished emblems of ordinary America. Knowing that Thiebaud has spent most of his long life in California—he's a vigorous, tennis-playing 97, active in the studio—allows us to read these paintings as casual, modern-day, West Coast versions of Chardin's investigations of domestic objects and Morandi's meditations on oil pitchers and bottles. Thiebaud's deadpan images compel us to look with fresh eyes at a whole range of ubiquitous, uniquely American vernacular phenomena, from gumball machines to donuts, illuminated by the glare of commercial lighting.

Yet if Thiebaud alerts us to the importance of the fragments of ordinary modern-day reality that triggered his improvisations, he also insists that we acknowledge the importance of their new fictive existence determined by the presence of the artist's hand and the transformations that hand has wrought. Part of the fascination exerted by Thiebaud's best known works, with their neatly presented catalogues of desserts and soda fountain specials, their gorgeous touch, and delectable palette of colors, comes from his conflation of pure pictorial willfulness and apparent accuracy. He makes us believe in the truth of his observations, while presenting us with an alchemical transubstantiation of generously applied oil paint; unctuous pigment becomes something at once visually alluring and seemingly edible. Thiebaud's apparently inevitable placement of individual objects, his rigorous deployment of shadows, and his minimal suggestions of settings, along with his subtly intensified color, played against expanses of neutral background, all function abstractly. We can ignore the appealing, often witty subject matter and read these good-humored paintings without identifying the familiar things that Thiebaud has brought to our notice, concentrating instead solely on the pictures' faultless sense of structure and their super-charged, frequently pastel hues.

The fantastic cityscapes and landscapes Thiebaud has made in the last three or four decades—vertiginous evocations of San Francisco streets, looming cliff faces, space-shifting allusions to the rivers and lakes near Sacramento—are compelling for similar reasons: a powerful sense of light, seductive color, rich surfaces, and a fusion of observation and invention. They embody the mood and affect of finding ourselves on steep urban roadways trapped amid tall buildings or viewing a landscape and waterways from a high vantage point, yet the more time we spend with these works, the more aware we become of Thiebaud's departures from actuality and the potency of his inventions. His San Francisco streetscapes are not accurate depictions but inspired departures from casual notations made on the spot, and it turns out that he has never looked at the area around Sacramento, where he lives, from above. Like his San Francisco improvisations, Thiebaud's arresting images of the region are extrapolations from the cumulative experience of traveling through the landscape—experience and observation freely reconstituted as images of unstable spaces, mentally fragmented and reassembled in surprising but convincing ways. At times, we feel we're hovering over a river and its banks; at other times, we're sighting along the flat plane of the water, and more.

Thiebaud's...