Wayne Thiebaud

Allan Stone Gallery, New York
Jack Glenn, Corona del Mar, California
Private Collection, Kansas City
Sotheby's, New York, Contemporary Art, May 7, 1992, lot 284
Acquired by the present owner from the above

 

    

Long Beach, University Art Museum, California State University, Wayne Thiebaud, 1950-1972, November - December 1972

This painting is in excellent condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art Department at 212-606-7254 for a condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. This work is framed in a dark stained wood strip flame with a half inch float.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Wayne Thiebaud's career strikes an independent and contrary path despite the relevance of traditional genre painting at its core. While the masters of Abstract Expressionism grappled with the elimination of objects, figures and landscapes, others such as Andy Warhol exploited the ubiquity of known imagery in popular culture. In paintings such as Hillside, Thiebaud is closer to the spirit of Jasper Johns: he paints the known world in order to focus on the means and materials of art. Hillside is neither allegorical, romanticized or even narrative. It is a formal investigation of the properties of light, color and space as depicted in paint.

As Thiebaud stated in 1983, ``I'm not just interested in the pictorial aspects of landscape - see a pretty place and try to paint it - but in some way to manage it, manipulate it, or see what I can turn it into.'' (Gail Gordon, ``Thiebaud Puts a Visual Feast on Canvas'', California Aggie, University of California, Davis, 1983, p. 2).  In 1966, Thiebaud began painting the rolling hills of the Sacramento Valley, but brought to them the same steep, foreshortened space of his San Francisco street paintings that followed in the 1970s and 1980s. The drama of ridges such as Hillside, as it meets the sky, was echoed by the intense coloration of Thiebaud's palette with its deep saturation of blues and greens. Repeatedly in the late 1960s, Thiebaud radically cropped a single ridge or series of cliffs, creating a plunging linear abstraction. The startling geometry of Hillside is modern and avant-garde with no figures or animals to detract from the visual aesthetics. As Thiebaud stated, ``Landscape for me took on the problem of composition. I wanted to eliminate the horizon line, to see if I could get a landscape image that didn't use a horizontal fixation. Instead, I try to establish a positional directive for the viewer - whether it's up, down, helicopter view, world view, valley view - to try and get some sense of loss of the convenience or comfort of standing and looking at things, to throw people off a bit.'' (Ibid., p. 2) Grounded as they are in reality and physical observation, paintings such as Hillside are as subtly unorthodox as they are visually sumptuous.