WAYNE THIEBAUD | UNTITLED (CITY EDGE)

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

New York, Allan Stone Gallery, Wayne Thiebaud: Paintings and Works on Paper, November - December 1988

New York, DC Moore Gallery, Pastels by Ten Contemporary Artists: Janet Fish, Mary Frank, Yvonne Jacquette, Wolf Kahn, Cynthia Knott, Jacob Lawrence, Lucas Samaras, George Segal, Wayne Thiebaud, Jimmy Wright, September - October 1996

Wayne Thiebaud moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s, where he discovered the unique topography and landscapes for his investigations of the modern American cityscape. Thiebaud has described his encounter with this terrain thus: "I was...fascinated by those plunging streets...a sense of displacement, or indeterminate fixed positional stability...this sense of 'verticality'...It's a very precarious state of tension, like a tightrope walk" (Karen Tsujimoto, Wayne Thiebaud, Seattle, 1985, p. 25). These uniquely San Franciscan qualities have engaged him ever since, resulting in a very dynamic and inventive body of work spanning his whole career.  

Untitled (Cityscape), 1988, embodies all the inventive qualities of Thiebaud's uniquely vertiginous portrayals of city scenery, heightening the waterfall-like plunge of a central avenue with a cliff-face and precarious tier of building on the sides. The cliff in the right foreground serves as a counterpoint to the illusionistic space and simultaneously draws your attention to the surface of the work itself. Like the cars plunging downward, the viewer is virtually swept into the "valley" of this work on paper, only to be brought back out again by the concrete, factual nature of the work's fabrication. As with all of Thiebaud's themes, his cityscapes are "a variation on the underlying thread that weaves his extensive and varied explains, 'I'm not just interested in the pictorial aspects of the 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'" (ibid., p. 121).

In an attitude similar to artists such as Degas, Gaugin, and Munch, Wayne Thiebaud often sees the discarded trial proof "as the beginning point of experimentation with the use of hand coloring" (Bill Berkson et. al., Revision: Hand Colored Prints by Wayne Thiebaud, San Francisco, 1991, p. 99). A trial proof by definition is a kind of experiment in the development of a print edition, and so focuses the artist's eye on possibilities and directions for development. For Thiebaud, "it is this potential for change that captivated me" (ibid., p. 11). In Untitled (Cityscape), 1988, Thiebaud has enhanced a spit-bite aquatint with vibrant pastel and watercolor, lending the same subtlety, nuance of light and shadow, changing moods of color, and aura as he lends to his paintings and directly drawn works on paper. As Bill Berkson states in Vision and Revision: Hand Colored Prints by Wayne Thiebaud, "taking a discarded or trial proof of a print one step further by adding colors and adjusting details is more than a matter of mere touching up or busy work: the modified object elaborates upon a set theme and reveals aspects that previously might have been omitted" (ibid., p. 94). As Thiebaud elaborates he also illuminates, inviting us to be fully in touch with a reality more vivid than what we take for granted, Thiebaud makes us look, and look again, to see "with new eyes that which we thought we knew" (ibid., p. 100).