Considering the painter’s place in the American art continuum
Wayne Thiebaud died on December 25, at the age of 101. He was among the best-known American artists, if not by name then certainly by his chromatically dynamic paintings of hot dogs, pies, gumball machines, heaping ice-cream cones, and cakes with swirls and waves of frosting. Thiebaud did more than tasty delectables. He was an exceptional figure painter and portraitist and did landscapes and cityscapes.
He was what I call a zaftik painter. It’s a term so precise and correct it’s one of my few stabs at Yiddish. In German, saftig means “juicy,” but its Yiddish cousin aims the word at describing a sexy, plump woman, a luscious food, really anything rich and pleasing. “Zaftik” proposes a visual amplitude that might lead us awry and amiss but, hey, life’s short. Rubens was a zaftik painter, though he tempered style with didactic substance. Many of his subjects are religious, after all. Renoir was the zaftik king. Thiebaud is our American Renoir, a hedonist in subject and color.
He painted rigor, too. And discipline and order. He serves us both cake and calisthenics. That’s the Modernist Thiebaud. Peppermint Counter from 1963 is an example. Here, he’s not exactly suggesting a balanced diet but, rather, using candied apples, jelly beans, and peppermint rolls to convey a candy store of balanced geometric shapes on the one hand and dense, textured paint on the other. The picture suggests architecture, even engineering, as much as pleasure.
Peppermint Counter is modern the way Cézanne is modern. It’s a study of circles, spheres, cubes, and rectangles. Cézanne used pieces of fruit or, in his landscapes, lots of little blocks of paint as if he were building a painting. So did Zurbarán, whose still lifes are cryptic and spooky. Many of Thiebaud’s cake and pie pictures are single objects in delicious isolation. Peppermint Counter and Cold Case are in limited, even regimented, environments. Let’s not get too crazy, Thiebaud seems to suggest. Once his sweets are corralled into test-tube conditions, we can look at them as passages of color and groups of form. These are, after all, constructed abstractions.
Thiebaud is a master colorist, and a high-octane one at that. Among American still-life painters, he descends from Charles Sheeler and from him to John Peto and William Harnett. Peto and Harnett are Victorians, so their palette is dark, and there seems to be lots of clutter, but it’s actually very balanced and ordered. Thiebaud is about as inventive, even as daring, a colorist as Matisse. Both used an open palette, with hues from all over the color scale. Thiebaud’s contemporary, Richard Diebenkorn, did, too. Both admired Matisse, and all three were from or lived in sunny places. As a color maximalist, Thiebaud needed to use control or confinement devices so things didn’t get chaotic.
When Thiebaud painted Peppermint Counter, he’d just broken into the New York art scene. The dealer Allan Stone discovered him — or, more precisely, Thiebaud appeared on the doorstep of Stone’s East 82nd Street gallery late one afternoon in 1961. Thiebaud had driven across the country, car packed with his paintings, from California, where he taught art at UC Davis. He’d been doing cakes, pies, and candy since the late ’50s and both wanted and needed New York gallery representation to succeed in the art market. In those days, artists would either hope and pray for a studio visit from a dealer or go from gallery to gallery peddling their art. Thiebaud was finishing a deeply disappointing day. Cold calls are dispiriting, and each of them had ended with a cold shoulder. Stone’s place was, as Upper East Side galleries went, the farthest north.
The New York gallery system, as far as living artists were concerned, dates to the 1920s, but until the late 1950s, dealers who represented cutting-edge artists were rare, and galleries were mom-and-pop operations surviving, like their artists, month to month. Ivan Karp, Richard Bellamy, Virginia Zabriskie, Tibor de Nagy, Leo Castelli, and Stone were some of the pioneers. Stone, in his late 20s, had just started his gallery, leaving a New York law firm to chase a passion for art. In his tiny, messy gallery, still an inchoate, risky enterprise, Thiebaud found a kindred spirit.
Stone was immediately intrigued. Though a young man and new in the business, he had an aesthetic. Like me, he loved zaftik painting. By the mid-1960s, he was representing Willem de Kooning, a zaftik slasher but whose every stroke had the poise, the command, of a dancer. Stone loved rich, tactile paint surfaces. He loved voluminous subject matter, too. One of his early artists was John Chamberlain. He might not have calculated this at the time, but Stone liked outsiders, too.
Now, every bleeding-edge young artist is going to be an outsider. When Peggy Guggenheim discovered him, Jackson Pollock was an outsider. He was from Wyoming, goodness gracious, and poured industrial paint on canvas flat on the floor. Thiebaud was from California, and living in hick Davis in the northern part of the state — in the New York art world he might as well have come from Pluto. The 1950s was the era of Abstract Expressionism, of Pollock, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, and de Kooning. De Kooning’s work is nearly always representational, as dismembered as the subjects are, but among Abstract Expressionists he was an outlier. Avant-garde art in New York prized the annihilation of subject matter.
Thiebaud painted actual things, making him an outsider, too, and though sweets are part of everyday life, he made them the stuff of fantasy. Stone loved that, too. Thiebaud left some of his work with Stone, who put it next to a de Kooning. Thiebaud’s work held its own. Stone promised him a one-man show — the artist’s first in New York. It sold out, and a star was born. Stone represented him for 40 years. The relationship existed on a handshake basis, as did most art relationships before money completely corrupted the field starting in the 1980s.
When a dealer takes a new artist, untested by the marketplace, intuition is a huge factor. For Stone, it was an intuition less about whether or not the artist would sell than about whether he or she was truly good. If the quality was there, he felt the market would respond. Stone discovered lots of artists, but another pure find was Richard Estes, also an offbeat, exotic colorist.
Dealers don’t get the credit as tastemakers and career-builders that they deserve. Art history is written by art historians as well as critics, and, by and large, they think money not coming their way is dirty. As dealers go, Stone was an adventurist. He had a pure, soulful love of art.
I think it’s good to consider Thiebaud’s early life, since he didn’t start painting until he was 30 and was past 40 when Stone launched him. Thiebaud’s a Western painter, born in Arizona, growing up on a farm, and moving to Long Beach as a child. He worked in stage lighting as a young man, which gave him good experience in manipulating light. This was important, as bright California light isn’t easy to paint. He worked for a time for Disney Studios, too. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Disney show at the Met. Bright, bold color, and various incarnations of Technicolor, were Disney staples.
Thiebaud, I hasten to add, taught art to college students for 40 years. Materials and the basics of color and composition were at the heart of each working day. He was also a child of the Depression, which means many things but, as I see it, helped him avoid sonorous fads. He never wandered into sociology, politics, or community-organizing, all distractions from art.
Thiebaud wasn’t a Pop Artist. Far from it. Irony doesn’t figure in Thiebaud’s work, and nor do advertising, celebrities, cartoons, or camp. His paintings look handcrafted, with thick strokes of paint as testaments to the artist’s presence. Andy Warhol’s and Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings are flat and meant to suggest commercial printing. Thiebaud’s are tactile and lush. His subject-matter pleasures — cakes, pies, and ice cream, for instance — are genuinely sensual. They stimulate not just our sweet tooth but our eyes. Pop Art is about what’s slick and mass-produced, so it usually has no taste at all. The one big overlap between Thiebaud and Lichtenstein is cartooning. As one of his many jobs before art, Thiebaud was a cartoonist. Cartoons are linear and easy to read. The primary audiences, after all, are children and young adults. Cartoons are enlivened by saturated color, and that’s their strongest, longest-lasting draw for Thiebaud.
Someone wrote in a Thiebaud obituary that he was an artist of nostalgia. I’m not sure about that. Two Jackpots from 2005 is, I suppose, though when I think of nostalgia I think of things that are cocooned, or captured with gauze fixed to the camera lens. Two Jackpots is more like Machine Aesthetic art to me. The two machines look like shiny new cars in a showroom. Thiebaud painted gumball machines, which seem the stuff of nostalgia now but were ubiquitous in the ’50s, ’60s, and into the ’70s. They were part of the trappings of everyday life. Now that they’re gone and, who knows, some kook might say sweets warm the planet, we can look at Thiebaud’s work and yearn. That’s fine. The best art is open and responsive to new meanings as times change.
A few months ago I panned the Jasper Johns retrospective at the Whitney, not because he’s a bad artist or the show was bad. The artist, show, and book are very good. I thought the exhibition was too big. Johns had a moment in the 1950s and didn’t develop much from it. New York art critics and collectors who think of themselves as in the know can’t gush enough about Johns. Thiebaud is a much better painter, one of the best craftsmen of my lifetime. He is certainly much loved by the public. He’s had dozens of exhibitions and seems to have a retrospective every few years. The artist Barnett Newman, paragon of AbEx style, told Stone to “ditch the pie guy.” Thiebaud’s biggest crime, aside from living a normal, happy life in northern California and never becoming a New York fixture, was giving bourgeois pleasure.
Johns and Alice Neel, another artist whose recent New York retrospective was too much of a good thing, didn’t evolve as much as Thiebaud and weren’t as various. Soon after he teamed with Stone, Thiebaud dived into figure painting. These pictures aren’t well known, but Thiebaud, who taught art, believed mastery of figure painting was an essential arrow in every good artist’s quiver. In the ’60s and ’70s, Alex Katz, Philip Pearlstein, Fairfield Porter, Sidney Goodman, and Thiebaud were among the artists focusing on the figure.
His environments are spare and the lighting intense in these paintings, but these are characteristics of his still lifes, too. Many of his figure paintings are life-size, which can make the viewer uneasy since they have a frank presence, without the affectation of most portraits, but are inaccessible and aloof. Eating Figures from 1963 is as close to a template for Thiebaud’s figure paintings. It was an experiment for Thiebaud, who incorporated hot dogs, early, supersized drinking cups, and a high-keyed palette so as not to stray too far from his aesthetic home base.
On the one hand, both figures feel real. They’ve got weight, bones, and flesh. On the other, they’re detached and self-absorbed. They’re a unity of parts, an assemblage of forms. Thiebaud is close to Edward Hopper in this respect. I’ve never looked at Hopper primarily as a painter of isolation, spiritual defeat, or melancholy, though psychological puzzles are there. I see them first as bands of color, some bold, and rigorous shapes. Neither Hopper nor Thiebaud ever hide form or use form and color to reach goals that are caricature or sentimental. The obvious and the cryptic go hand in hand.
Thiebaud did landscapes and cityscapes, too, starting in earnest in the 1970s, but I think they define his late style. His landscapes are Sacramento Delta scenes, not exact, identifiable places like, say, the spots that the Hudson River School painters — Asher Brown Durand, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Church — would paint, but types of spaces. That means flat. The landscape in Flood Waters from around 2010 is, like much of California’s vast farm belt, flat and mostly man-made.
Flood Waters is an exceptionally good painting. At 48 by 60 inches, it’s big, not quite Bierstadt-scale but big enough to suggest Western sizes. It’s an aerial view but not something he did from a plane. It’s from his imagination, which he maps. His cakes and pies are intensely concentrated in color and paint density. In his agricultural landscapes he can spread things out. His paint surface is thinner. The dense canvas grain is visible. That’s new for Thiebaud. The canvas’s texture gives the landscape an illusory depth. It’s one of his tricks to suggest topography.
Thiebaud’s close-up cakes, pies, lipstick tubes, and candied apples cast shadows that seem to have an exaggerated weight and density of their own. That’s his debt to stage lighting. Some of Thiebaud’s objects are incandescent, as if they have a lightbulb inside of them. Outdoor light is different. It can bleach color, and it can, through humidity in the air, create gauzy contours. I think Thiebaud saw these aerial views as a delightful compositional challenge. His forms, like water features, are bigger, as are his lines. They’re longer and more sinuous.
The big rectangle of water in Flood Waters is a Color Field painting when we look at it in isolation. Uphill Streets from around 1993 is a good Thiebaud cityscape. Here his forms are more geometric, since he’s painting a built environment dominated by sleek modern architecture and roads. San Francisco’s steep streets were another compositional treat.
What is Wayne Thiebaud, then? The best artists are always sui generis, but art historians, being art historians, are in the classification business. Like Winslow Homer, John Sloan, George Bellows, Edward Hopper, and dozens of other American artists, Thiebaud began his career as a commercial illustrator. Illustrators interpret a text, for word and image are intertwined. They’re literal in that respect but literal, too, in their frankness and directness. “Commercial” means money, and time is money, so in commercial illustration artists convey the basic subject fast. Yes, every good work of art is layered, but American art tends to start with the obvious. That’s why realism is the default American style. We like straightforward facts. John Singleton Copley first and famously practiced this in the 1760s in Boston.
The primacy and integrity of the object rule American painting from that point and carry us through the topographical Hudson River School landscapists, who never messed too much with the views they painted, to Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, the Ashcan artists, and the Social Realists. The Abstract Expressionists are an anomaly, as are American Impressionists whenever they allowed objects to dissolve too much. Whistler’s tonalism was an outlier, too. Even though he considered himself an American, there’s not much that’s American in his art. He owes much to Turner, Courbet, and the Barbizon artists and nothing to Thomas Cole. I don’t think Whistler even knew who he was. Thiebaud was part of the big 1960s enterprise that dragged American painting back to realism. Pop Art was part of this. Advancing realism further was the photography boom of the 1970s and the Pictures Generation. Thiebaud, of course, is very different and never wanders from paint, but he’s part of the realist continuum.
