Word: thiebaud
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...opening of his retro spective in San Francisco last month, Wayne Thiebaud gave an aw-shucksy wriggle of the shoulders and declared, "I'm just a sign painter gone uppity." One may, with respect, demur. At 64, after decades of painting in the Bay Area, Thiebaud is one of the most gifted realist artists in America. At a time when so much new art leaves an iridescent slick of depletion on the eyeball, the group of 89 of his paintings and drawings, assembled by Curator Karen Tsujimoto at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is the real thing...
...Thiebaud, 43, won notoriety in the first flush of Pop art because he painted still lifes of cakes, pies and other frosted delights. Although he was as much concerned with Russian icons ("I see myself as a very conservative artist connected with tradition"), he rapidly became known as the laureate of the lunch counter...
...times, Thiebaud has been a gag cartoonist, a cinema director, and an advertising art director. Now he teaches painting at the University of California's Davis campus. "New realism," says Thiebaud, "certainly relates to advertising art-cropping, directness, noninvolvement with the product. Abstract expressionism said you had to be involved, to search for individual consciousness and sensibility. The new realists, or Pop artists, say it's possible to be cool, not have a personal feeling for the object. The new artist is saying maybe you can do your art with ease, without any involvement...
...frontality of Thiebaud's figures (see opposite page) outdoes that of the Sphinx. Each personage-a hulking pro football player, symmetrical in size and numeration, or Thiebaud's wife posing as a bather with a double-dip strawberry ice-cream cone-juts forward like a sculptured relief from a general porcelain-white background. The whiteness helps isolate the image; the garish fluorescent lighting that commercialism loves bathes everything in its frigid glare. Thiebaud makes long, curling highlights out of polychromatic contours that do not exist outside...
...Realism depends on your assumptions, how you sense it," says Thiebaud. "For rne, it's the evidence of what happens in a clean, well-lighted white space, or what happens to reality divested of its literary conditions." His figures dawdle endlessly with their food, hesitant whether to spring to life or to remain contentedly paint...