Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective [Hardcover]

Steven A. Nash (Author), Adam Gopnik (Contributor)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2000

Wayne Thiebaud, the California-based painter, has produced works of complexity and distinction that appear deceptively simple in terms of subject matter and in their presentation yet draw on many historical sources.

In fact, Thiebaud is part of the grand tradition of representational art from Chardin and Manet to the American Realist masters such as Eakins and Hopper. Best-known for his deadpan still-life paintings of cakes, pies, delicatessen counters, and other consumer goods, Thiebaud has also explored such themes as figure studies, the topography of Northern California, and cityscapes exaggerating the vertiginous roadways and geometric high-rises of San Francisco. Continuous throughout his career is his combination of the perceptual and the conceptual, of sensuous color, light, and painterly texture with rigorously formal composition, resulting in a highly personalized Americana. Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective is published on the occasion of an exhibition of the same title, the first major survey in fifteen years of work by this famous American figurative artist. Steven A. Nash, Associate Director and Chief Curator at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, has organized the exhibition and provides a biographical essay on Thiebaud. An extended essay by Adam Gopnik, the Paris Journal writer for The New Yorker, links Thiebaud to American writing as a painter in the tradition of Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and John Updike.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Famous for his dreamy 1960s paintings of cakes, Wayne Thiebaud began his career as a commercial artist and cartoon illustrator like many other artists of the period, including Andy Warhol. And like Warhol, Thiebaud became tied to pop art since he was making images of popular American products like food, lipsticks, and toys. Yet unlike many of his pop peers, Bay Area-based Thiebaud wasn't interested in poking fun at the establishment. He's a painter's painter, a real traditionalist. Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective covers a career of rendering still lifes, cityscapes, landscapes, and the figure. His cake paintings are formally beautiful in their color, shadow, and composition. They are perfect specimens of the good life in America, the paint lovingly applied in places like thick frosting. His cityscapes of San Francisco fiercely exaggerate the hilly landscape, capturing a perspective from the ground and air simultaneously while utilizing the light that the Bay Area is famous for.

Thoughtful essays by Steven A. Nash, associate director and chief curator for the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, and Adam Gopnik, a writer for The New Yorker, discuss Thiebaud in relation to his peers, pop, modernism, and abstract expressionism. This book serves as a catalog for Thiebaud's major retrospective, which opened in San Francisco and travels to Forth Worth, Texas, Washington, D.C., and ends in New York in the fall of 2001. Besides their beauty, these works truly capture a period of American life in a way that feels free of irony but not without commentary about nature, the city, and how we've lived. --J.P. Cohen

From Publishers Weekly

"He is an American painter, someone who paints for a living and whose subject, for all its formal perfection, is what we are to make of American abundance," writes New Yorker art critic Gopnik in his long, in-jokey introductory essay to Thiebaud's oeuvre now touring the country as a retrospective. As Gopnik makes clear, Thiebaud is famous for his lush early '60s paintings of cakes, other sweets and people eating them, but this book and the exhibition it documentsAput together by chief curator Nash of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, who also provides an essayAreveal the painter to be preoccupied with a larger slice of American life. The impossible perspectives and multigraded blues and yellows of the cityscapes here seem more bizarrely true to San Francisco than stills from Vertigo. Heavy Traffic, Deli Bowls, Tie Rack and Rabbit are just what they say they are, yet their surfaces coax us into looking at them harder and longer than such banal objects could possibly entice on their own. Such dressings-up themselves are commonplace in media-saturated American life, and Thiebaud redirects their energy unerringly throughout the 160 illustrations here, most in color. One might wish for a less insidery guide to the work than Gopnik's, but the panache of his biographical prose carries readers right into the paintings, well and comprehensively selected by Nash, whose own essay provides welcome detail on Thiebaud's working life.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Thames & Hudson; First Edition edition (June 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0500092923
• ISBN-13: 978-0500092927
• Product Dimensions: 12.3 x 9.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #155,452 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #6 in Books > Arts & Photography > Schools, Periods & Styles > Realism

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Color Quality, December 17, 2000

By 

Irene Brady Thomas (Alameda,, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective (Hardcover)

I purchased this book right after walking through the Thiebaud retrospective at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. I usually don't like to buy books after I've seen the work firsthand as the color never compares with the paintings I had just seen. In this case, though, I was impressed with the reproduction color. As an artist I get to use this book to study how Thiebaud makes his works "sparkle" by painting one color next to another.

31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enlightening!, November 24, 2000

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective (Hardcover)

I own lots of art books, but this is already one of my favorites. I stare and stare at these pictures and marvel at what he has done. The painting is so simple at first glance, and so much more complex and fascinating the longer I look. If you are a painter, there is very much to be learned from these paintings. The phrase "paint lovingly applied" in the editorial review is most apt--and as a result, one loves looking at it. This man is really a PAINTER, an artist who revives one's faith in painting here at the turn of a century that has seen more than its share of charlatans and feeble talents. Everything he paints looks profoundly delicious, and the landscapes and cityscapes from the 80's and 90's are like thrilling dreams. The book is a revelation!

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars amazing artist, gentle spirit, and wonderful book, September 25, 2001

By 

Greg Cooper (NY, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective (Hardcover)

After working this past summer in the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC and being there for the opening of the Thiebaud show, I can certainly say that I have become filled with a nostalgic longing and a love for both Thiebaud's art as well as the manner in which he comports himself as an artist and as a person. I could have received no better gift from my supervisor at the end of my summer employment than this beautiful and gentle book. Though certainly there is nothing like looking at the works of art themselves, this book was fully capable of stirring my memory...much the same way as Thiebaud's art itself had a few weeks prior. This book is a highly treasured part of my collection of art books...truly a high point of my books in general, and I would highly recommend it to those well versed in the works of this gentleman as well as those who have not yet had the pleasure of his honest and warm friendship. ~greg