Wayne Thiebaud

In an aesthetic that appears completely unassociated with the work of Abstract Expressionism or European Modernism, Wayne Thiebaud is nevertheless an artist true to his time.  The realism of his oeuvre is instantly accessible and clearly identifiable as still life, landscape or portraiture.  Yet despite this seemingly modest and direct approach to subject matter, the nature of his art becomes more complex when his technique and his craft are fully analyzed in paintings such as Tie Rows.  In the tradition of post-war avant-garde art, Thiebaud continues to test the tense balance between “likenesses” of figuration and the formal concerns of the “abstract” in Twentieth Century art.

By painting objects that are consumer goods, presented just as they are by merchants, Thiebaud has often been confused with the concurrent Pop Art trend of the early 1960s.  Thiebaud is rather a wholly individual artist with a signature style of viscous paint application and frontal presentation in foreshortened space.  Like the Pop artists, Thiebaud was sensitive to the prevalence of pop culture and its omnipresence in our visual environment. 

Still life painting was the key to Thiebaud’s evolution and this traditional motif signals his unselfconscious willingness to reference art history.  A great affinity with the work of Giorgio Morandi is apparent in Thiebaud’s paintings, as he isolates the objects in a simple harmonious progression of basic formal units.  Modulated light casts shadows that should imply volume or modeling, but are in fact extensions of a strict alignment with the picture plane.  In the work of Thiebaud and Morandi, there is the same palpable quiet and sense of contemplative observation conveyed through seemingly minimal means of organizational structure and discrete brushstrokes.

In Tie Rows, painted in 1970, the simple, vertical lines of the subject push the image toward the abstract, presenting them to the viewer in a shallow Modernist space of two dimensionality.  These painted boundaries organize the objects on display into rigid formations, most notably with the compartmentalized ties that fill the composition from edge to edge.