Word: thiebaud
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...1950s, De Kooning was surrounded by imitators; there was a "look," a gestural rhetoric fatally easy to mimic, that they got from him and reduced to parody. (The artists who would really make something of his legacy were not in New York but in California: Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud.) Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns reacted against him, sons against the parent; but Rauschenberg's now classic Oedipal gesture of rubbing out a De Kooning drawing could not erase the obvious fact that the paint in his combine-pictures came straight out of the older Dutch master, drips, clots...
...white, now gray, plaster-cast figures in relation to mass culture; today they seem even more attached to solitude and individual grittiness than they did in the '60s, sculptural materializations of the urban mood of Hopper. You could make some kind of case for that excellent California painter Wayne Thiebaud as a Pop artist because he painted hot dogs and angel-food cakes; but artists have always put the food of their time in their still lifes, whether a jamon serrano by Velazquez or a baguette by Manet, and with Thiebaud the formal qualities of the paint now seem...
...haven't felt so worked out in years," smiles the willowy Twinka Thiebaud, a caterer in Los Angeles who abandoned her mountain bike and health club when she was told that gardening might work just as well. Unlike a jog or a sit-up, she found, gardening is a purposeful exercise, a lung-cleaning, muscle-toughening activity that also decorates her house and stocks her pantry. "Every visit to the garden is the same," she says. "I'm just wiped out in a wonderful...
...landscapes, particularly the views of urban San Francisco that form the larger part of his output in the '80s, are an altogether different matter. The bright city on its blue bay has always been a happy hunting ground for purveyors of seagull-and-cable-car kitsch. But Thiebaud's paintings give it a weird, flattened intensity, as though its switchback hills and plunging spaces had been crushed flat against the canvas, in a parody of cubism with overtones of Canaletto...
...part this is an optical effect--that of the telephoto lens, which replaces perspective recession with the layering of planes. Thiebaud keeps a telescope in his house, and prompts himself by looking through it. In paintings like Curved Intersection, 1979, streets rear up like the skycrapers that line them; pavements snake at terrific speed down the canvas; wires and yellow traffic lines cut and chop; everything seems to be on the point of falling, flaking or sliding into the Pacific, and the city becomes a meticulously ordered metaphor of anxiety. No one has ever painted this allegedly laid-back town...