Word: thiebaud
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...juvenilia are missing; the show contains nothing earlier than 1961, so that one does not see the transition between the "commercial" artist Thiebaud was--doing cartoons, Rexall ads and Hollywood publicity sets in the 1940s--and the "fine" one he is. Still, this is the fullest look one has yet had at this quintessential California painter. The show will travel to other museums in California and the Midwest, finishing in Kansas City in the fall of 1986. It will not be seen on the East Coast, presumably because it lacks the factitious glamour that might commend it to such institutions...
Which is not to say that Thiebaud, earlier in his career, did not seem to have his own brand of vulgarity. The time was distant--20 years ago, in fact --and the "vulgarity" had to do with food. Jasper Johns had his ale cans, Claes Oldenburg his Brobdingnagian hamburgers. Thiebaud in the mid-'60s was the laureate of pies: spongy peaks, white with coconut frosting and Reddi Wip, dark buttes sliced open to reveal caves of chocolate, pastry craters cupping their unruffled lakes of Key lime gelatin. Since mass food was one of the motifs of pop art, Thiebaud...
...however, untrue. Today it seems clear that Thiebaud's still lifes were far less interested in the manipulation of "cool" admass signs and pervasive cliches (the landscape of pop) than in traditional pursuits of realist painting, especially the celebration of minutiae of texture and light...
...uniformity within glut. But no. Its target is specificity, the peculiar qualities of fluorescent light (no less difficult to convey than those of sunlight or moonlight), the lush mortuary blue of the shadows, the buzzing glitter of the whites. Light is trapped in the dense paint, and Thiebaud extracts a lavish, slightly mocking sensuality from the pun between the depicted work of the cake icer--smearing those layers of sweet goo, drawing arabesques with the forcing bag--and the literal work of the painter's brush. A very conscious part of his style is the way he rings his forms...
...Thiebaud is weaker, because more illustrational, as a draftsman of the human body. He renders it with stolid accuracy, but never endows it with the depth or concision of feeling that infuses the still lifes; the flesh aspires to the condition of vinyl...