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By Kent Larsen
NYC's Whitney Museum Exhibit's Retrospective on Mormon Artist
NEW YORK, NEW YORK -- One of New York City's most prestigious art museums,
the Whitney Museum of Art, opened a major retrospective recently on Wayne
Thiebaud, an Arizona native who grew up in a devout Mormon family. Over his
career, Thiebaud has become a well-recognized artist whose reputation is
ranked among the most important in Modern art and whose work is represented
in major art books.
The exhibit, titled "Wayne Thiebaud: A Painting Retrospective" originated
with the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, where it appeared last year at
San Francisco's Legion of Honor. The New York City installation has been
augmented from the collections of New York Museums and private collections
on the East Coast. It is the largest exhibit ever of Thiebaud's work, and
the first major exhibit on the East Coast since a 1962 show at Allen Stone's
gallery.
Thiebaud is best known for his paintings of pies, gumball machines and other
representations of everyday life. The choice of pies and gumball machines
has sometimes led critics to label Thiebaud's work as pop art -- like that
of Andy Warhol and Roy Liechtenstein. And while Thiebaud rejects that label,
he is still considered one of the more important Modern artists.
Thiebaud was born November 15, 1920 to a devout Mormon family in Mesa,
Arizona, but grew up in Southern California and Southern Utah, working at
times on family farms. As a teenager his principle activity in the arts was
designing sets and lighting for high school productions. But his interest in
art picked up after he broke his back playing sports and he used his time
while recuperating to take up cartooning. One biographer says that Thiebaud
was able to draw Popeye simultaneously with both the left and right hands.
With that skill he went to work briefly in the animation department of Walt
Disney Studios, but was later fired when he tried to organize a labor union
there.
In 1942, Thiebaud entered the US Air Force, but ended up painting murals for
the Army instead of fighting in World War II, and was discharged in 1945. By
1947 he was gainfully employed as a commercial artist, working for Rexall
Drug Company where he created an original comic strip for the company.
It wasn't until 1950 that Thiebaud decided to study art seriously. After a
year at San Jose State University, he went to study at California State
University at Sacramento, from which he graduated in 1953. Along the way he
had his first art show, in 1951, at Sacramento's Crocker Art Gallery. Soon
after, Thiebaud took the first of several extended trips to New York City,
where he met and befriended Modernist painters such as Willem de Kooning and
Franz Kline.
While de Kooning and Kline had their influence on Thiebaud, he never quite
fit in with their abstract expressionist views, instead rejecting their
taste for bombast and for grand tragic-historic themes for more modest
subjects -- ribbon shops, pinball machines and, eventually, pies. "I had
been put off by the churchy feeling of a lot of New York painting, and I saw
de Kooning was too," Thiebaud told one interviewer. "He disabused me of it,
and, as much as anyone, suggested to me that painting was a lot more
important than art."
He then looked around for subjects that fit his views, "I'd worked in food
preparation. So I'd always seen ... the way they line up food, sort of
ritualistically, and I thought, 'Oh, I'll try that.' So I started painting
these ovals for the plate and then put a triangle on it. And I mixed up a
pumpkin color, maybe, I'd put it on and it was so far away from pumpkin
color that I though, 'oh, I've got to put other colors in there." So I added
blues and other colors to see if it could enliven it, but then I realized
I'd painted this row of pies and started laughing and said, 'well, that's
the end of me as a serious artist. Nobody's going to take this seriously.'"
But the reaction to Thiebaud's pies was just the opposite. The New York art
world loved the pies, just at the time that it discovered Jasper Johns'
flags and Warhol's soup cans, leading Thiebaud to be grouped with them as
"pop artists." He dislikes that label, however, saying that his work is
representational. Instead of making his subjects seem surreal, like Warhol
or Johns, Thiebaud instead had a keen sense for seeing the surreal in
everyday life -- the "goofy," odd nature of everyday "ritualism."
Theibaud returned to California where he soon got a position teaching at
Sacramento City College. Ten years later he joined the faculty at the
University of California, Davis, where he is still on the faculty as an
emeritus professor. His long time residence in California has led some
critics to call him a 'California' artist. But when asked by the Sacramento
Bee about that label last year, Thiebaud rejected the label, "There are
aspects of California in [my] work - the landscape of San Francisco and the
Sacramento River. But the food things are not more California than elsewhere."
Likewise, given that he has left the LDS Church, Thiebaud would likely say
that he is not a Mormon artist. But yet there are aspects of religion and
Mormonism in the philosophy he uses in his art; modesty, simplicity and
straightforwardness. Last year he told PBS' Newshour with Jim Lehrer that he
doesn't really call himself an artist, saying, "Isn't it something for other
people to make a decision about? I think it's just like, as I say, it's like
a priest referring to himself as a saint. ... It's decided apart from you
and that's the way it should be."
This modesty also appears in his subject matter, where Thiebaud prefers to
work with modest, everyday things, realizing that "even though you're
working with everyday things, modest subject matter, that doesn't have to be
minor. Those kinds of things, I think, can mean a lot to us." As a result,
he sticks with the things he has experience with: teaching, raising a
family, having a good life. He looks at the ritual of the everyday, "I don't
know what other cultures do, but in America, the preparation and ritual of
banquets and ... Mormon picnics are fascinating. Every little American cafe
or restaurant or cafeteria always says they have the best hamburger in the
world. I don't know how they know that. So they paint these pictures of them
with gigantic pieces of meat and lettuce. Big Boy!"
Thiebaud also rejects the use of irony in his work, instead preferring to
show things in a straightforward way, "I've never trusted irony very much
because it's very confusing. You never know where you are. It's like a big
Jell-O or marshmallow world. It's hard to get a foothold. ... I don't
usually think [paintings that use irony are] very effective." And he feels
that simple objects are the subjects he does best, "People ask my why I
don't do a nice pretty Viennese cake or spaghetti. I don't know anything
about it. I'd have to be Jackson Pollock to do spaghetti."
The retrospective of Thiebaud's work has attracted a lot of media attention
over the past year, since it first appeared in San Francisco. Major
newspapers in San Francisco, Sacramento, Dallas, Washington DC and now New
York have covered his work as the exhibit has gone on display in their
areas, and the national PBS TV program the Newshour with Jim Lehrer also
interviewed him. The exhibit is on display at the Whitney until September 23rd.
Sources:
Wayne Thiebaud: Wistful Joy in Soda-Fountain Dreams
New York Times 29Jun01 A2
By Michael Kimmelman
Whitney Show Takes the Cake
New York Daily News 28Jun01 A2
By Celia McGee: Daily News Feature Writer
N.Y. embraces Western artist
Wayne Thiebaud: The Painter of Pies Knows the Real Thing, Too
New York Times 27Jun01 A2
By Regina Schrambling
Wayne Thiebaud: Still Generating Art Rooted in Respect for Painting
New York Times 2Jan01 A2
By Stephen Kinzer
Gotta Be Me
Dallas TX Observer 5Oct00 A2
By Christine Biederman
Through four decades of masterful painting, Wayne Thiebaud remains true to his vision
The Sad and Painful Truth of Thiebaud's Art
Suite101.com 1Jul00 A2
By Tricia Dake
A Feast for the Eyes
PBS Newshour 30Jun00 A2
Interview by Elizabeth Farnsworth
Thiebaud Retrospective Captures Art's Paradoxes
San Francisco Chronicle pgC1 9Jun00 A2
By Kenneth Baker: Chronicle Art Critic
Curator turns detective to reel in the years
Sacramento CA Bee 4Jun00 A2
By Victoria Dalkey: Bee Art Correspondent
Thiebaud on Thiebaud
Sacramento CA Bee 4Jun00 A2
By Victoria Dalkey: Bee Art Correspondent
Sacramento's pre-eminent painter, Wayne Thiebaud, talks about his career and a major retrospective of his work
Websites:
Whitney Museum of Art
Wayne Thiebaud
Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden
Wayne Thiebaud
Artcyclopedia
Wayne Thiebaud
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