‘A self-described art thief': how Wayne Thiebaud channeled other artists
Probably the most famous thing that Pablo Picasso never said was: 'Good artists copy, great artists steal.' The quote, which has been widely misattributed to the Spaniard, as well as TS Eliot and even Steve Jobs, among a long list of famous thinkers, is so popular because it encapsulates a seeming truism about artists: if your influences are ascertainable, you must not be very good at what you do.
The fantastic new show at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art, neatly reverses this equation, showing more than 60 of the Californian's best pieces – alongside reproductions of the paintings he cribbed from to make them. The implicit argument is that placing Thiebaud into a personal canon of artistic mentors and influences doesn't diminish him but actually makes him better than ever before.
'Thiebaud was a self-described 'art thief',' the show's curator, Timothy A Burgard, told me as we walked through the exhibition together. 'And I am a curator-detective, pursuing a thief.' For Burgard, the show was a complete no-brainer. Long a Thiebaud scholar, he spent months compiling a PowerPoint outlining many of the artist's major works, along with their possible artistic antecedents, and one day sent it over to his director at the Legion of Honor for consideration. Within an hour he had a green light. 'I think that's the fastest I've ever seen a museum director approve a show,' Burgard told me.
The list of influencer artists that Burgard has assembled is wide-ranging and fascinating. It includes fairly obvious choices, like Thiebaud's good friend and fellow California artist Richard Diebenkorn, as well as old masters such as Rembrandt and Velázquez, modernists who at first blush may not seem like the best fits (among them Rothko, Joan Mitchell, and both Willem and Elaine de Kooning), and even an anonymous follower of the 19th-century landscape painter Thomas Hill.
The show sets the tone up front with 35 Cent Masterworks, for which Thiebaud painted a shopping case of a dozen postcards of various masterpieces, each selling for 35 cents. Among the greats he pays tribute to here are Mondrian, Monet, De Chirico, Picasso, Degas and Cézanne. As well as being a kind of crib sheet to Thiebaud's mentors, the work is also widely viewed as a critique of the commodification and consumerism that was then beginning to entrench itself in the art world. These are forces that Thiebaud's work itself has become subject to, as the asking price for original works has shot up in the past decade.
In addition to exhibiting the magnificent 35 Cent Masterworks and a stunning portrait of the artist's wife, Betty Jean Thiebaud and Book, the show's first gallery is packed with original works of art that Thiebaud collected, as well as copies that he made of masterpieces by the likes of Rembrandt, Frans Hals and Velázquez. This copying work helped Thiebaud figure out his own solutions to artistic problems. 'To paraphrase, Thiebaud said: 'I look to other artists for inspiration. I look to them for problem-solving,'' said Burgard. ''Sometimes I'm having a problem with a painting, and I'll go look at another artist to see what they did if they're encountering a similar issue.''
According to Burgard, Thiebaud's art collection decorated his home, while his copies were nested away in drawers, largely unseen until this show. Burgard speculated that as a young, impoverished artist, Thiebaud probably acquired his impressive collection through his longtime dealer, the art collector and gallerist Allan Stone. 'Probably when the accounting was due from Allan Stone, he did something like a trade,' Burgard told me. 'Stone knew a lot of the abstract expressionist artists and dealt a lot in William de Kooning, Franz Kline, Elaine de Kooning, all artists that are represented in Thiebaud's collection. Otherwise, it would have been hard to acquire all this art, especially raising a family.'
Moving past that opening gallery and through the show, Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art shows itself to be impressive in its size and range, showing aspects of Thiebaud not widely known. Yes, there are pies, vertiginous cityscapes and a delicious portrait of gumball machines, yet viewers also see Thiebaud doing a rendition of abstract expressionism, pastoral landscapes, nudes, still lifes, even a Kafkaesque electric chair. A intimate, late-career self-portrait that Thiebaud made in 2020, the year he turned 100, is poignantly titled One-Hundred-Year-Old Clown and shows an ageing, lonely Thiebaud saying his goodbyes to the art world. 'When you walk through the show, all the series, the figures, the still lifes, the mountains, the [Sacramento] Delta paintings, the clowns, you can't pin down any one subject or emotion or tenor or whatever,' said Burgard. 'The thing he most wants you to do is just to feel them, to feel the paint, to feel the light.'
Speaking of light, there is so much glorious negative space in these paintings, largely taken up by whites as thick and delicious as a wedding cake, ranging across so many subtle differences in hue and texture as to be an exhibition within an exhibition. 'It's a symphony of whites,' Burgard enthused again and again as we walked the show's galleries, pointing out the radiant greens, yellows, blues and reds that Thiebaud subtly layered into the ostensibly 'empty' space in his paintings, making his trademark halo effect. 'It's every single white known to humankind is practically how it feels,' Burgard said. 'It's a sea of white that you could fall into. If you tried to replicate it with a palette, it would take something like 100 colors. It's one thing to do that many colors with a painting of a forest or something, but with just a woman in a bathtub. It's absolutely magical.'
As luscious and transporting as it can be just to bliss our over the surface effects that Thiebaud was able to conjure, Art Comes From Art encourages viewers to pore through the centuries of art history embedded into these works. 'Thiebaud's paintings are so sensual and so tempting to viewers that there's a tendency to stop there on the surface and not dig deeper,' said Burgard. 'Part of my job is to make more apparent the breadth and depth of our historical knowledge, our visual memory bank in these works. I think Thiebaud lets everyone in immediately on the surface, no matter who you are. And I hope that this show is a way of letting them understand that Thiebaud is deeper than that, he's a thinking, feeling human being, and that it opens a window to art history.'
Opening a window on to art history, and to the psyche of a great postmodernist, is key here. 'I think he is really channeling those other artists while he's working,' said Burgard. 'I think that viewers walking through the exhibition are getting a chance to see Wayne Thiebaud think.' His hopes are that in leaning into the Californian's artistic mindset, audiences will develop their own set of impressions, and draw their own conclusions about just what made Thiebaud's artist brain tick. And if they disagree with the leaps and comparisons that Burgard has come to as curator, all the better. 'I am making a case, and I am thrilled if somebody disagrees,' Burgard told me. 'Because then they're engaged. Then they win, the artist wins, we all win, because at that point they're engaged. Apathy is the enemy of art.'
Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art is on show at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco until 17 August
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