Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective - Hardcover

Nash, Steven A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0500092923 ISBN 13: 9780500092927

Publisher: Thames & Hudson, 2000

Synopsis

Wayne Thiebaud, the California-based painter, has produced works of complexity and distinction that appear deceptively simple in terms of subject matter and in their presentation yet draw on many historical sources.

In fact, Thiebaud is part of the grand tradition of representational art from Chardin and Manet to the American Realist masters such as Eakins and Hopper. Best-known for his deadpan still-life paintings of cakes, pies, delicatessen counters, and other consumer goods, Thiebaud has also explored such themes as figure studies, the topography of Northern California, and cityscapes exaggerating the vertiginous roadways and geometric high-rises of San Francisco. Continuous throughout his career is his combination of the perceptual and the conceptual, of sensuous color, light, and painterly texture with rigorously formal composition, resulting in a highly personalized Americana. Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective is published on the occasion of an exhibition of the same title, the first major survey in fifteen years of work by this famous American figurative artist. Steven A. Nash, Associate Director and Chief Curator at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, has organized the exhibition and provides a biographical essay on Thiebaud. An extended essay by Adam Gopnik, the Paris Journal writer for The New Yorker, links Thiebaud to American writing as a painter in the tradition of Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and John Updike.

About this title

About the Authors

Steven A. Nash's work on modern artists includes books on Naum Gabo, Ben Nicholson, and Picasso.

Adam Gopnik is a staff writer at The New Yorker and has written for the magazine since 1986. He has three National Magazine awards for essays and for criticism. The author of numerous best-selling books, including Paris to the Moon, he lives in New York City.

Reviews

"He is an American painter, someone who paints for a living and whose subject, for all its formal perfection, is what we are to make of American abundance," writes New Yorker art critic Gopnik in his long, in-jokey introductory essay to Thiebaud's oeuvre now touring the country as a retrospective. As Gopnik makes clear, Thiebaud is famous for his lush early '60s paintings of cakes, other sweets and people eating them, but this book and the exhibition it documentsAput together by chief curator Nash of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, who also provides an essayAreveal the painter to be preoccupied with a larger slice of American life. The impossible perspectives and multigraded blues and yellows of the cityscapes here seem more bizarrely true to San Francisco than stills from Vertigo. Heavy Traffic, Deli Bowls, Tie Rack and Rabbit are just what they say they are, yet their surfaces coax us into looking at them harder and longer than such banal objects could possibly entice on their own. Such dressings-up themselves are commonplace in media-saturated American life, and Thiebaud redirects their energy unerringly throughout the 160 illustrations here, most in color. One might wish for a less insidery guide to the work than Gopnik's, but the panache of his biographical prose carries readers right into the paintings, well and comprehensively selected by Nash, whose own essay provides welcome detail on Thiebaud's working life.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Thames & Hudson
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0500092923
• ISBN 13: 9780500092927
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192