The Brooklyn Rail

Wayne Thiebaud referred to himself as a “formal realist”, but these words fail to capture the lively, colored geometry of his food counters, and the robust sensuality of his more realistic figures. Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art, a survey combining Thiebaud’s paintings with copies and interpretations of other artists’ works, conveys his connection of everyday visual experience to the works he loved in museums. Curator Timothy Anglin Burgard included works from Thiebaud’s personal collection, from de Kooning and Balthus to George Herriman, along with quotes and documents of his teaching—a generative component of his work—to set out the full range of his six-decade career (he died in 2021 at 101). Thiebaud emerges as a highly disciplined artist with a strong expressive impulse; skeptical of photography, he favors memory for its personal character and praises the power of caricature. His vivid colors constrained by geometry are “caricatures of color” (what Matisse might call “condensations of sensations”) and his complicated landscapes “caricatures of space”.

A tour de force featured in the show’s publicity, 35 Cent Masterworks (1972–74), exemplifies this intertwining of copying and invention. Displayed on a spindly rack with intensely colored shadows, its grid of twelve stacks of postcards features some of Thiebaud’s favorite painters. If he works here from photographic reproductions, it’s in acknowledgement of their ubiquity in mass culture, inflected by memory and the cultural associations of André Malraux’s musée imaginaire. Thiebaud’s background in advertising shows in his skillful formatting of the small copies, from Daumier to Velasquez and Mondrian, on their off-white backgrounds. He tempers their colors in consideration of the painting’s overall effect, but offsets them with vivid, constantly varied blue shadows, highlighted with halations of red, which combine with the tan bars of the shelving to embed his highly refined pictures in a woven abstraction, suggestive of a Donald Judd wall sculpture, each interval between the stacked cards a minor Mondrian. Just as the lime green line at the base of the stand sets the whole composition in a world of its own, curator Burgard had the wall moldings and door frames of the galleries painted in blues, oranges, and greens to frame the show in Thiebaud’s enhanced colors.

Those colors arise from Thiebaud’s interest in Fauvism, documented by his copy of an early André Derain and a small, exquisite transposition of Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte (1884) into the prismatic colors of Matisse: “What the Fauves do when they're successful is they get the value right. If you get the value right, the darkness or the lightness, you can then use almost any color, hue, or intensity, to fit into that value structure. And that's, I think, a really great human invention.” He infuses values with color to generate the lively palette of Nude (Standing) (1976), that sets it apart from the anatomical realism of Thomas Eakins, to whom it pays homage. A similar richness animates the other large figure paintings on view, some rarely seen, like a delicately poised seated figure in Nude of 1963, framed in an abstract grid of colored lines.

It was Judd, in a review of Thiebaud’s 1962 exhibition, who accurately pointed out the ambivalence of his “formal realism”, situating him between the “grossness” of Oldenburg and the “irony” of Lichtenstein—a judgement confirmed by the prosaically titled Eating Figures (Quick Snack) of 1963. Surreally suspended against a white ground, a well-dressed couple in colorful clothes consume hot dogs and soft drinks from paper cups while precariously poised on spindly stools. Burgard links their awkwardness to Degas’ L’Absynthe (1875–76), but given Thiebaud’s interest in poetry, it’s likely he was also thinking of Charles Baudelaire’s Painter of Modern Life (1863), in which he might have envisioned himself, seeking the “mysterious beauty hidden in modernity”. The combination of fine clothes and hair styling with utilitarian furniture and cheap food offers a situation for which we have no conventional model, with sexual innuendos and an undertone of the ribaldry of Frans Hals’ carnival revelers. (Hals is represented here by a copy of a lute player). Art historian Gene Cooper has pointed out the importance of Thiebaud’s early Hollywood experience in set design and lighting and links a similar awkwardness in the overlapping poses of Five Seated Figures (1965) to his interest in the Theater of the Absurd.

While Thiebaud insisted on the fundamental role of observation, there’s abstraction inherent in his fusion of images; if Burgard finds quotations of Frank Stella in his paintings of pinball machines, his use of colored grids reminiscent of Mondrian and allusions to Ellsworth Kelly and Barnett Newman reflect a deeper questioning of the viewer’s bodily relationship to a painting, of an essential empathy transcending categories. As though to make this point, he challenges viewers with spatial disorientation. Toys (1971), which Burgard links to an off-center composition by Sam Francis, places four objects in the extreme corners of its composition, requiring our self-orientation in the central empty space. By adding details of urban life to the abstract works of his friend Richard Diebenkorn, he generates more extreme disorientation and encourages bodily engagement with vertiginous, large-scale cityscapes that deprive us of any stable viewpoint. Window Views (1989–93), one of the show’s most powerful images, with its isolated figure, takes added inspiration from Edward Hopper and Pierre Bonnard.

Viewers are similarly suspended within the large-scale mountain and farm/valley compositions. Burgard boldly includes two large, corner-to-corner “diagonal ridge” paintings, “caricatures of space”, thresholds of abstraction. Linked by Burgard to a minimal Milton Avery (not quite fully corner-to-corner) and to Ellsworth Kelly’s stark, unforgiving Black White (1968), these “caricatures of space” question, “if an abstract artist (or Avery at his most minimal) can do this, why can’t I?” Adding clouds, trees and surfers, reminiscent of his youth in Laguna Beach, to make a diagonal ridge believable as a landscape, is, as Thiebaud himself admitted, not completely convincing, but he persisted in making such compositions, maintaining freedom and ambiguity at the heart of his “formal realism”.

White, ubiquitous in many subtle variations, poses another extreme. In Young Girl (1929), a Guy Pène du Bois painting from Thiebaud’s collection, the colors of the head seem to emerge from white – a luminosity associated with stage lighting, in a different register from the naturalism of wife and friends. Woman in White Hat (2014–15), another color caricature, aspires to a Proustian distillation of pink, green, and gold into pure light, linking the popular artifice of make-up to the project of art itself. Unlike his copy of a Walt Kuhn clown, the clowns of Thiebaud’s later years relate to those he remembered from working as a teenager for the circus near his home in Laguna Beach, doing the heavy labor of unloading and setting up tents. In his valedictory image, One-hundred-year- old Clown (2020) he assumes the poignant, humble role played by the clown throughout art history, responding to Bonnard’s Boxer (1931), abandoning naturalism for something akin to the Post-modern realism of Philip Guston: his face assumes the character of a landscape, with an ironic cherry nose like those on Clown Boots (2018-19).