Wayne Thiebaud

As others have observed, Wayne Thiebaud learned from Paul Cézanne and Giorgio Morandi, not to mention Giorgio de Chirico and Edward Hopper—artists who reinvented particular genres, such as still life, landscape, and cityscape, through their attention to the picture plane and cropping. What has been less emphasized, but in my mind is no less important, is how much Thiebaud learned about color from the Fauvists (“wild beasts”), particularly Henri Matisse and André Derain, who had freed their use of raucous color from the purposes of description.

WAYNE THIEBAUD’S INCONGRUITIES John Yau

By 1961, when Thiebaud began exploring and defining a territory, which from the outset was recognizably his, he had so clearly internalized lessons and cues from these two early, innovative approaches to art that they were already an integral part of his painting DNA. In his synthesis of these divergent strains, Thiebaud conflated the forms and colors of the observable world with those of an imagined one so that they were virtually indistinguishable from each other.

Through his unlikely combinations of the real and the unreal, Thiebaud is able to elevate his work to a state of originality, both in the arrangement of forms in space and in the offbeat colors used to identify them.

In interviews and other public statements, Thiebaud, who is nothing if not Charles Baudelaire voracious in his desire to see and learn from others, has cited a diverse group Once he has found his language, of artists as influences and inspirathe artist finds himself tions, at times alluding to them in his free of the drudgery of the avant-garde. work. In 35¢ Masterworks (1970–72), he Fausto Melotti revealed a small part of his family tree when he depicted a card stand holding a selection of art reproductions arranged in a grid, including works by Thomas Eakins, Piet Mondrian, Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Giorgio Morandi, Henri Rousseau, Giorgio de Chirico, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso—heady company.

This is the group of artists and historical mentors Thiebaud elected to embrace when he committed himself to painting, the party he wished to be part of. Instead of regarding these figures as a burden to overthrow, escape, or deny, he sees them as permissions. Painted with a focused energy, as if Thiebaud were aspiring to have reproductions of his own work on the card stand alongside theirs, 35¢ Masterworks helps establish the perimeters of his ambition.

The Beautiful is always strange.

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One thing that Thiebaud, much like Morandi, got from Cézanne was a reconsideration of the tabletop, the warped plane on which the Post-Impressionist’s ginger pot and apples sit. Thiebaud’s sensitivity to the implied dimensions and tilt of the tabletop, the plane on which, in his case, perishable objects rest—from pies and lipsticks to freeways and high-rises—enabled him to transform the observed world into artifice, a fictive place synonymous with painting.

Although Thiebaud is best known for his impasto paintings of frosting-slathered cakes, thickly crusted pies, and sticky pastries, with the earliest ones dating from 1961, around the same time he began depicting dramatic rural and urban landscapes. But I don’t think of him as either a still life painter or a landscape artist. In his paintings, the lipsticks and intersections are like players in a silent but fraught drama. Seen this way, Thiebaud becomes the unrivaled master of emotionally charged pictorial tableaux consisting of ordinary objects.

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Measuring 14 ´ 18 inches, the intimate scale of Boston Cremes (1962) challenged the prevailing taste for large works inherited by the Pop artists and Minimalists from the Abstract Expressionists. Ostensibly topped with a thick layer of gooey white frosting, the triangular wedges in Boston Cremes are edged in red and blue. The white oval dishes the slices sit on are edged with pastel greens, sharp reds, and different shades of blue. The dishes rest on a beige plane—which is made of creamy, unbroken and broken horizontal brushstrokes—that has been tilted up toward the painting’s top edge.

Coloristically, the beige ground echoes the yellow and turmeric-colored pies, which are made of double-stacked yellow parallelograms divided by a creamy brown line. The painting constantly shifts along tonal and optical trajectories, with neither of them taking precedence. The other shift is between the representational (cherry-topped slices of pie on dishes) and the abstract (circles, triangles, parallelograms, and ovals). The pie wedges are like the sharp, high prows of battleships sailing toward the picture plane, with their aggressive arrangement and pointed shapes belying their gooey, sweet content.

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