I remember the first time I saw one of the slathered-on-pigment paintings by Wayne Thiebaud, who died on Christmas Day at age 101 in his modest, longtime home in the Land Park area of Sacramento.
In my early 30s at the time, I was walking around, somewhat aimlessly, no doubt, on a hot, early 1980s summer day in the old Crocker Art Museum on O Street in downtown Sacramento.
The painting was fun to look at, the color stroked on like melting pats of butter on canvas, in purplish blues, pastel pinks, orange-peel orange, canary yellows, creamy whites and luscious tar black. It was probably one of his marquee pie or cake paintings from the 1960s. Another, clearly memorable, was of his second wife, Betty Jean Thiebaud, a filmmaker, looking pensively at the artist, her dark eyes seemingly following anyone who walked by.
Here and there in the galleries — and in the gift store books — were paintings of gumball machines, deli counters, hot dogs on a tray, cosmetics, too, works for which he is best known and the reason why he is lumped into the pantheon of Pop artists, like Warhol and Lichtenstein in their 1960s heyday, though he was not really one of them, and, over the years, has said so. Yet he still often used Pop art currency in his work, the everyday consumer items and commonplace objects for subject matter and his own profound commentary on the modern American experience.
Life happened and I moved around while writing for several community newspapers in Northern California, including The Reporter, beginning in 1994 as a full-time arts and entertainment reporter.
An admirer of his work, I first heard Thiebaud (pronounced “T-bow”) speak in the mid-1990s in a barn-like structure on the University of California, Davis, campus, where he taught art for decades, remembering that he said he had no real idea what art was, how to define it, but he understood what painting was, the placing of one color next to another and reveling in the interaction.
Luckily, in those more financially flush times for newspapers and with features editor Mary Lou Wilson at the Reporter department’s helm, I was able occasionally to write about major art exhibits in the Bay Area, including “Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective” in 2000 at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.
The connection for Reporter readers, I argued, was Thiebaud’s popular art classes at UCD and Nut Tree graphics designer Don Birrell of Vacaville, who, as the Crocker Art Museum curator in 1951, gave Thiebaud his first solo show, “Influences on a Young Painter,” essentially launching the Mesa, Ariz., native’s career after, following his Army discharge in the mid-1940s, working for several years as a free-lance cartoonist, illustrator and layout designer.
The Legion show was a revelation for me because it included some mind-boggling works from the early 1990s, his oblique perspectives on San Francisco streets, among them “Diagonal Freeways” and “Park Place,” taking viewers on a chromatic roller-coaster ride of cityscapes. It also included a series of truly poetic and riotously colored paintings of Sacramento Valley farmland, such as “River and Farms” and “Green River Lands,” sun-splashed scenery in Popsicle colors of Delta sloughs, fruit orchards, and tilled land that may have recalled his teenage days during the Great Depression on the family farm in Utah.
Seeing him in a Legion hallway before he spoke to a crowd of arts journalists and museum officials, I asked him if the landscapes translated into statements about nature in crisis or humanity’s destructive impulses toward a planet in dire need of protection.
In person a slender, modest man given to dry humor, Thiebaud said no, they were just paintings.
Years later, in 2016, in another example of his well-known generosity, the former UCD professor donated four oil paintings to the then soon-to-open Shrem Museum of Arton Old Davis Road on the university campus. Valued at more than $3 million, the four works, including “Unfinished Portrait of Betty Jean,” brought the total of Thiebaud oil paintings in the museum’s permanent collection to nine. As a group, they provided a nearly complete retrospective glimpse of his long and storied career.
In brief remarks, asked to define art, Thiebaud replied, “Art is something of the imagination,” representing “hopes and dreams. It’s transcendent. I hope it stays that way.”
His art, like a favorite master of his, the 18th-century French artist Chardin, is not about grandeur. It is about the ordinary, the familiar, objects that tug at our memory with the use of globbed-on pigment, gooey stroke after gooey stroke, until the cake frostings or pie cherries look immediately edible.
Ever the democratic observer, Thiebaud gives viewers not real food objects, but the idea of food, with, as we linger, a tumbling mix of pleasure, longing, memory, humor and sadness. Thiebaud, if you look long enough, has less in common with, say, an artist like Edward Hopper and, after casting a glance at “Portrait of Betty Jean,” more in common with Vermeer. He was a master of the everyday thing and its subtle symbolism.
— Richard Bammer is a Reporter staff writer.
