Wayne Thiebaud: 70 Years of Painting

By The Week Staff

last updated 8 January 2015

Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, Calif.

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Wayne Thiebaud “was seen as a pop artist” when he first rose to fame in the 1960s, said Robert L. Pincus in The San Diego Union-Tribune. “The label doesn’t quite fit.” Though many of the 87-year-old’s most well-known paintings are of everyday ephemera such as cakes and cafeteria displays, they aren’t intended as comments about art and commerce. In fact, he’s more or less a realist, painting pies and bakeries and salad bars because that’s what he sees around him. “If these pictures are as American as anything by Norman Rockwell, they just as strongly bear comparison to the still lifes of the great early 20th-century Italian painter Giorgio Morandi.” But they always wear their erudition lightly, and “his paintings never forget to charm the viewer.”

This exhibition reveals Thiebaud to be a traditionalist in other ways, said Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times, working “in traditional categories of still life, landscape, and figure.” There are plenty of canvases showing confections with “licked surfaces, painted with chromatic creaminess.” But most of the paintings here render scenes of everyday life on the California seashore. Kids and dogs play on the beach, men and women in bathing suits shimmer in the “nearly squint-inducing light” that suffuses all the work. “Wavy lines of thickly scumbled color record tide-line residue of the water’s organic ebb and flow.” The subject matter of these seaside portraits recalls Cézanne’s seminal 1885 work, The Bather, and subsequent variations on the theme by Picasso and other artists. But “the tone of Thiebaud’s depiction couldn’t be more different from Cézanne’s.” Where the French master’s painting communicates tension and instability, “Thiebaud’s rough-hewn version exudes a joyful confidence.” He’s clearly still a California boy at heart.