Wayne Thiebaud (1920–2021) In Memoriam

Abstract

Wayne Thiebaud (1920–2021) In Memoriam Karen Wilkin (bio) When Wayne Thiebaud died on Christmas Day, 2021, aged 101, one month, and 10 days, we lost a national treasure—a brilliant and original painter, an incisive draftsman, a compelling teacher, and a terrific tennis player, all of it until the very last weeks of his long, productive life. Thiebaud’s generosity to his fellow artists and his students was legendary, as was his dedication to working in his studio. “What are you doing to celebrate?” I asked him, when I phoned him on his 100th birthday. “I’m doing what I like best,” he said. “I have a brush in my hand.” Thiebaud’s name is synonymous with a celebration of vernacular American foodstuffs—slices of pie and cake, the contents of deli counters, gumball machines, ice-cream cones—the kind of thing ubiquitous across the continent, presented with brilliantly lit, seductive physicality and crisp simplicity that teeters on the brink of abstraction. Paintings of this type established Thiebaud’s reputation and remain his most familiar works, but they are only part of what has engaged him for more than eight decades. He was an even more adventurous and wide-ranging painter than these now-iconic images suggest. Witness his powerful images of vertiginous cityscapes, tangles of highway, river-laced landscapes, and frighteningly steep mountains and cliffs, images no more literal than the paeans to diners and delis, yet just as evocative of specific places and particular qualities of light, weather, season, and time of day as the pie and cake paintings are of a certain kind of American food served in certain kinds of settings. Like the pie and cake paintings, the landscapes and city views were done in the studio, informed by memory, but firmly rooted in intense observation and occasional drawings. Like the foodstuff images, the landscapes and city views are richly colored and sensuously painted, with layered transparencies and translucencies taking the place of sweeps of luxuriously thick pigment. But this is only part of the story. From the very beginning of his working life, Thiebaud painted the figure. “It’s the most interesting thing to do,” he says, “and the most difficult.” A surprisingly assured and accomplished head of a fisherman, painted in 1936, is testimony to the abilities of the future artist as a precocious 14-year-old. “Eighty-seven years later,” Thiebaud said, “I’m still trying to paint the figure. The figure is really impossible, unless you’re Velázquez. Everything is so subtle but, because we [End Page 81] live in it, we have a special sense of how it is. The figure is an incredible challenge.” Over those 87 years, Thiebaud rose to that challenge by exploring the possibilities of the “impossible” subject in just about every guise, working from life, rather than from memory, as he did with his better-known subjects. He filled notebooks with drawings of people casually encountered and observed, unawares, in commonplace situations, worked from models in the studio, and painted his friends, family, and himself, along with the occasional commissioned portrait. In his last years, there were invented figures of an unexpected type. Unlike his paintings of other subjects, Thiebaud’s figures were always done from observation. Sitting for him was apparently arduous. “Most people I paint are friends or relatives or fellow painters,” he said. “But they’ll only pose once.” The protagonists of Five Seated Figures (1965) sat together for about 10 days, a proximity that is belied by the way that painting’s two women and three men are all seemingly lost in their own thoughts, while, at the same time, appearing to consciously present themselves for scrutiny. They seem locked into a kind of contradictory self-conscious introspection, remaining aware of the artist’s presence but not of each other’s. No one looks at anyone else. The two women turn away from one another. The tense affect, heightened by the dynamics of a composition in which the upper two-thirds of the painting is far denser and more full of incident than the lower third, completely subverts the apparently straightforward situation depicted and makes the painting both uncanny...