At the beginning of this focused retrospective, Wayne Thiebaud’s portrait of his wife Betty Jean from 1965–69 depicts her seated, a book before her open to reproductions of drawings by Seurat and Manet. Betty Jean’s head-in-hand pose suggests several possible sources: Dürer’s Melencolia I, 1514; Ingres’s Louise, Princesse de Broglie, Later the Comtesse d’Haussonville, 1845; Degas’s Portrait of Edmond Duranty, 1879; or even Picasso’s Woman with a Book, 1932. The open book before Betty Jean, in turn, seemingly alludes to the importance of drawing to Thiebaud’s appropriation and/or transformation of masterworks in support of his own practice.
As hinted by this show’s title, “Art Comes from Art,” the focus here is on Thiebaud’s lifelong practice of artistic homage. In ninety-one works chosen from throughout the beloved Bay Area painter’s extraordinarily long and prolific career, three versions of his “artist-to-artist appreciation” are highlighted. As enumerated by the exhibition’s curator Timothy Anglin Burgard, these include overt theft or the direct copy of some aspect or element of another artist’s work; covert appropriation, in which the source imagery is less obvious but can ultimately be identified; and an intuitive transformation of subject matter, consciously or unconsciously, into something completely different. Labels throughout the show include images of the works from which Thiebaud borrowed, allowing viewers to appreciate his dedication to the old masters even as they gain a new understanding of his own place in history.
Though Thiebaud was long considered a Pop artist because of his focus on modern-American subjects, from diner cakes and pies to guns, guitars, and women in miniskirts and bikinis, this exhibition situates them as vehicles for his passionate engagement with pictures by dozens of his predecessors and even contemporaries. After spending his twenties working at various commercial-art jobs that included stints as a cartoonist and a layout artist, Thiebaud returned to school, completing first a bachelor’s and then a master’s degree in art, art history, and education. He would teach for most of the rest of his life, continuing his largely self-guided study of the greats as he described their achievements to his students. In 1956, he spent a sabbatical in New York, meeting many of the important artists and critics of the time. He experimented with abstraction; some of those early works have been included here. By the early 1960s, however, he had largely developed the manner of painting he would use for the next sixty years: thickly applied, sometimes expressionistic brushstrokes describing familiar subjects casting strongly defined shadows (a characteristic of the era’s ads), with accents and outlines of pure color in a startlingly shallow space.
Whether featuring people, places, or things, Thiebaud’s canvases returned to the same themes or subjects again and again, probing them for new ways to find innovation. Offering a lesson for the show’s visitors, three paintings of food created decades apart hang next to each other. Burgard describes the relationship between the earliest (and sparest) of the three, Display Cakes, 1963, and Degas’s The Millinery Shop, 1879–86, with the desserts in the former painting and the hats in the latter perched on similarly tall stands. Buffet, 1972–75, a larger and more complicated tablescape, offers a defter handling of space and objects (the tiny pineapple! the disproportionately giant bowl of mounded meringue!) but also invites a kind of mild horror at the excesses pictured, a reflection on the bounty of sixteenth-century Flemish still life as well as, possibly, the Thanksgiving dinner table. In the last and largest, at more than six by five feet, Cakes & Pies, 1995, absurdly long-stemmed cake plates evoke sixteenth-century painter Sánchez Cotán’s still lifes of vegetables hanging on strings.
One room of the show features Thiebaud’s personal art collection, including many of the fine works on canvas and paper by other artists that were bought and traded for over many decades and hung in his home. Still, most of his borrowing was done from reproductions. The composition of a supine portrait of his daughter Twinka from 1963 is seemingly a nod to Manet’s dead toreador (itself inspired by an unattributed picture of a dead soldier owned by the British National Gallery), but Thiebaud likely only knew the Manet work from pictures in books. Astonishingly, he turned this handicap into an advantage, exploiting the way the flatness of photographs accentuates composition and form rather than the texture of brushwork, reconfiguring elements freely as he distilled and abstracted his subjects.
