Word: thiebaud
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Where does Wayne Thiebaud fit into modern American painting? You don't have to spend long in his current retrospective at New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art to realize that he fits eccentrically, and that he has been an anomaly for so long that it hardly seems to matter anymore. It seems hardly possible that a painter of this quality should be having his first retrospective in New York when so many lesser talents have been thus honored by the Whitney, but Thiebaud has had to wait a long time to outlive an inbuilt prejudice in Manhattan...
...very grand mountains by Ansel Adams and fuzzy Pictorialist ones of American nudes capering among the redwoods in homage to Isadora Duncan. In sculpture, not a hell of a lot. In painting, sad to admit, not much either. Two shining exceptions are recent - Richard Diebenkorn (1922-93) and Wayne Thiebaud (1920- ). But it should be grasped that one is not dealing with New York City 1900-2000, and still less with Paris...
...very grand mountains by Ansel Adams and fuzzy Pictorialist ones of American nudes capering among the redwoods in homage to Isadora Duncan. In sculpture, not a hell of a lot. In painting, sad to admit, not much either. Two shining exceptions are recent--Richard Diebenkorn (1922-93) and Wayne Thiebaud (1920- ). But it should be grasped that one is not dealing with New York City 1900-2000, and still less with Paris...
...Academic instinct might suggest that the viewer compare each piece in the show with that of a well-known artist of the contemporary canon. A still life by Barnet Rubenstein can be likened to the work of Wayne Thiebaud, or an oil-and-wax painting by David Ortins seems like a disciplined Franz Kline. Yet this exhibit demonstrates that this is precisely not the point; the works are to be judged on their own terms, within their own visual languages. If anything, the most liberating aspect of the show is its unfamiliarity. It is the experience of thinking and seeing...
...early Pollocks, the 1943 Guardians of the Secret. It has good groups of pictures by Clyfford Still and Philip Guston, but strangely enough it is relatively weak where it should be rock solid-in San Francisco art. Most of the top Bay Area names are represented-Wayne Thiebaud, Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, David Park, Manuel Neri, William Wiley and so on-but not always with works of the first quality. The uninitiated visitor would hardly guess how strong a creative center San Francisco has been over the past half-century, or how much of its value lies in its distinctive...