If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Wayne Thiebaud (1920-2021) knew how to appropriate most ardently. The renowned artist once said, “It’s hard for me to think of artists who weren’t influential on me because I’m such a blatant thief.”
Next month, a major retrospective highlights Thiebaud’s six-decade career, featuring around 60 quintessential works spanning a range of subject matter. From his celebrated still-lifes of dessert displays and prosaic household objects to portraits, cityscapes, and expansive natural vistas, Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art takes a deep dive into the artist’s engagement with art history.
Thiebaud spent time in the 1950s with abstract artists like Franz Kline and Elaine and Willem de Kooning in New York City, where he also met Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns whose mixed-media practices incorporated found objects in conceptual, proto-Pop Art paintings and assemblages. While in the city, Thiebaud made small paintings of food displayed on windows, which he further explored when he returned to California.
Thiebaud’s career originated with a focus on illustration and cartoons, which aligned with the emergence of Pop Art in the U.S. in the early 1960s. A response to the austerity of the First and Second World Wars, the movement celebrated bold colors, repetition, and everyday objects and commodities.
Art Comes from Art showcases how Thiebaud borrowed from the breadth of European and American masterworks, from Henri Matisse to Richard Diebenkorn to Andrea Mantegna. “I believe very much in the tradition that art comes from art and nothing else,” the artist said.
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.
In oil paintings like “35 Cent Masterpieces,” Thiebaud renders a display of artwork reproductions evocative of postcards or bookshelves in a museum gift shop. And lighting redolent of Edward Hopper, also known for depicting everyday American scenes, contrasts the subjects of “Five Seated Figures.” Along with Thiebauld’s vibrant, buttery portrayals of meals and treats with characteristically glowing blue shadows, additional pieces reference Rembrandt, George Seurat, Édouard Manet, and many more.
Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art opens at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor on March 22 and continues through August 17. The show is accompanied by a catalog published by UC Press slated for release in mid-April. Find your copy on Bookshop.
