Wayne Thiebaud

John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1979

Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, Automobile and Culture, July 1984 - January 1985

This work is in very good condition. The surface is generally clean and the colors are vibrant. There are no apparent condition problems with this work. Under ultra-violet inspection, there is no evidence of restoration Framed in a wood frame with a silver face.
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Cross Roads demonstrates Thiebaud's dramatic shift from still-lifes and figurative painting to the urban landscape, signaling a major development in his oeuvre and his growing assurance in his own brand of modern realism. Thiebaud has lived in California, from Long Beach to Davis, for almost all of his life, and he observed first hand the profound changes in post-war California, with its urban growth and expanding car culture. Thiebaud's grasp of the vernacular of California urbanism informs the complexity of his composition and design. 

The improbable geometry of the San Francisco cityscape, with its steep hills and dramatic horizons, is the perfect location for exaggerating spatial dynamics and investigating the complexities of form and composition.  Since his move there in 1972, Thiebaud had been fascinated by the dichotomy of the energy of city life co-existing in a scene of extreme foreshortening and shifting perspectives. Thiebaud's cityscapes would become the perfect forum within which to explore the opposing tensions between modern abstraction and classic representation. As he observed, ``There is an element of oriental art in them, that kind of flattening out of planes - and a lot of playing around. ...San Francisco is a fantasy city. It's easy to make it into a pretend city, a kind of fairy tale. There's an almost Australian sense of quick riches, of hills and precipitousness,'' (Exh. Cat., San Francisco, Fine Arts Museum, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Wayne Thiebaud: a Retrospective, 2000, p. 58).

Thiebaud's reference to `fantasy' is telling since his street scenes are not mere acts of observation rendered in attractive and aesthetic form. As visually accessible and easily recognizable as Cross Roads and other streetscapes are to us, they are foremost a study of form and composition for Thiebaud. He exercises any number of manipulations in the arrangements of elements, from color to light to paint texture, to produce paintings that are first and foremost artistic constructions. Their role as descriptive depictions is only secondary. The primacy of process and composition is reflected in the evolution of the artist's practice. In the first urbanscapes of the 1970s, Thiebaud worked on the very street corners he was describing, but he found the results too limiting. Inspired by the example of Edward Hopper, Thiebaud moved back to his studio, relying on memory and imagination, leading to increased complexity and freedom of invention.  In paintings such as Cross Roads, Thiebaud's streetscapes are networks of faceted, interlocking planes of light and color, which convincingly portray the dramatic vantage points and pitched perspectives of San Francisco, while verging at the same time on pure abstractions through the collapse of perspective and simplification of form.