Wayne Thiebaud
Wide Downstreet
1994
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Nowadays, many 1960s works by New York Pop artists are
treated like icons. This exhibition, an overview of Wayne
Thiebaud's career, is a reminder of his formidable
contribution to the Pop idiom from a West Coast point of view.
East Coast Pop often seems to have a dirty element to it, in the
form of either naughtiness or grime. But the Bay Area-based
Thiebaud paints everyday objects in clean, luscious, creamy
oil, imbuing them with a kind of innocence and purity.
In Fish Tray, Coffee Cup and Mickey Mouse Cake, the objects
named in the titles all glow with a celestial light, courtesy of
Thiebaud's superb use of bright yellow, blue outlines and
purple shadows. In these works, the artist's world appears to
be a place of order and wholesomeness, yet one that is also
inviting and fun. Where he really lets his hair down is in the
landscapes, of which this exhibition has a number of terrific
examples. The canvas Brown River shows a muddy river
wildly snaking through beautifully rendered fields of yellow,
purple and orange. One of the most striking works on view,
Wide Downstreet, from 1994, is a large canvas showing an
absurdly tilted-up wide road that thrusts upwards from the
bottom of the canvas to the top. In this dramatic work, the artist
seems to redefine the notion of perspective. In Wide DownStreet and
a number of other works on view, Thiebaud makes a bid to
expand his formidable reputation beyond the realm of Pop.
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