Art review: "Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes From Art"

A 1963 painting by Wayne Thiebaud titled 'Cakes'

Thiebaud's Display Cakes, a signature 1963 work, echoes Edgar Degas' still life of hats at a milliner's shop

(Image credit: Robert Alexander / Getty Images)

published 7 May 2025

Wayne Thiebaud always admitted being a thief, but the extent of his magpie proclivities "might come as a surprise even to ardent fans," said Judith H. Dobrzynski in The Wall Street Journal. The latest retrospective focused on the beloved California painter (1920–2021) gathers plenty of the "sunny, brightly colored, impasto depictions of everyday life" that made him famous. But in a move that separates Thiebaud from the pop art movement he's often associated with, the show highlights how often his images borrowed from past greats. "Behind many of his paintings," in other words, "there's another painting." His Display Cakes, a signature 1963 work, echoes Edgar Degas' still life of hats at a milliner's shop. Thiebaud's cupcake still lifes evoke Claude Monet's haystacks. The show "presses the case that Thiebaud was a painter's painter." Rather than seeking to be coolly ironic, he was "mining art history, luxuriating in the physicality of paint, intent on imparting and eliciting emotion."

"Thiebaud considered all artists, living or dead, to be colleagues," said Hillary Louise Johnson in Sactown Magazine. "He would discuss George Herriman's Krazy Kat in the same breath as ancient Egyptian art and Plato," and he saw art as inescapably collaborative rather than an expression of individual genius. His outlook is most apparent in 35 Cent Masterworks, an early-1970s painting depicting a rack of card-size reproductions of works by Cézanne, Picasso, Velázquez, and other giants. It's both homage and "a slyly subversive act of radical humility." In the current Legion of Honor show, 65 of Thiebaud's original paintings hang alongside reproductions of masterworks that influenced him, works by others that were part of his own collection, and 28 of the copies of various predecessors' paintings that he made throughout his career. "Art is not delivered like the morning paper; it has to be stolen from Mount Olympus," he once quipped. This show is "like a map of the route to that mythical summit."

"Yes, there are pies, and a delicious portrait of gumball machines," said Veronica Esposito in The Guardian. But because of the focus on imitation, "viewers also see Thiebaud doing a rendition of abstract expressionism, pastoral landscapes, nudes, even a Kafkaesque electric chair." In One- Hundred-Year-Old Clown, a self-portrait he painted at 100, he's arguably imitating himself. In a gathering of this sort, the suggestion is that placing Thiebaud in the context of influences "doesn't diminish him but actually makes him better than ever before." This beautiful show does that, "opening a window onto art history, and to the psyche of a great postmodernist."