No Calorie Diet with Thiebaud

Wayne Thiebaud:

Art Comes from Art

Legion of Honor

March 22 – August 17

Wayne Thiebaud became a household name with his colorful paintings of common everyday objects. Yet, his life’s work cannot be summed up by gumball machines and confections in a bakery window. This exhibition is a major retrospective which highlights Thiebaud’s six-decade career, featuring around 60 quintessential works spanning a range of subject matter including: his celebrated still-lifes of dessert displays and prosaic household objects to portraits, cityscapes, and expansive natural vistas.

Highlighting work from across the beloved artist’s six-decade career, this exhibition features Thiebaud’s inventive reinterpretations and direct copies of famous artworks, as well as objects from his personal art collection that inspired him. These key works by Thiebaud offer an in-depth exploration of one of the most important and overlooked aspects of his creative practice: his passionate engagement with art history.

In oil paintings like *35 Cent Masterpieces*, Thiebaud renders a display of reproductions evocative of postcards or bookshelves in a museum gift shop.

THE ARTIST

Thiebaud worked as an artist from a young age. While still in high school, he apprenticed at Walt Disney Studios drawing "in-betweens" of Goofy, Pinocchio, and Jiminy Cricket, at a rate of $14 a week. In his thirties, he spent a year in New York City, hanging out with the de Koonings, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. These Pop Artists emphasis on every day materials and their use of bright colors would have a lasting impact on his work.

During this time, he began a series of very small paintings based on images of food displayed in windows, and he focused on their basic shapes. Upon his return to California, he pursued this subject matter and style, isolating triangles, circles, squares, etc.

A few years later, Thiebaud found his permanent home in the UC Davis Art Program and settled into a 30-year tenure there. He was part of the cabal of famous artists at Davis at that time, including Robert Arneson (egghead sculptures) and Roy de Forest (with his handmade frames), along with others who turned UC Davis into a preeminent the art program. Even today, UC Davis is considered one of the top 10% of Fine Arts Programs in the country.

Lighting redolent of Edward Hopper, also known for depicting everyday American scenes, contrasts the subjects of *Five Seated Figures.*

ART HISTORY SERVED AS HIS INFLUENCE

Thiebaud acknowledged that he openly drew ideas from and reinterpreted works by others. Some appropriations are more apparent, referencing subjects or poses, while others are more subtle, capturing qualities like mood or meaning. In showcasing Thiebaud’s deep appreciation for his fellow artists past and present, these reinterpretations reveal his perception that the entire history of art was relevant and inspiring to contemporary art.

He was a self-described art “thief,” who openly drew ideas from and reinterpreted old and new European and American artworks. Art Comes from Art showcases how Thiebaud borrowed from the breadth of European and American masterworks, from Henri Matisse and Richard Diebenkorn to Andrea Mantegna, also from Rembrandt, George Seurat, Édouard Manet and many more. “I believe very much in the tradition that art comes from art and nothing else,” the artist said.

Along the way, Thiebaud copied, reinterpreted, mashed up, and transformed art history into his own artistic vision, viewing other artists’ cumulative work as a kind of archive or repository – an encyclopedic “bureau of standards” – that he could “steal” from while simultaneously paying tribute to titans of the Western art canon. He once said, “It's hard for me to think of artists who weren't influential on me because I'm such a blatant thief.”

Spanning decades and genres, here are a few of Thiebaud’s reinterpretations, alongside each work’s art historical inspiration: