LA Street Smarts and Wayne Thiebaud

Every LA driver is familiar with them at freeway exits and major intersections: the guys holding bouquets of flowers, bags of peanuts, net bags of oranges. The prime spot for these men (they’re usually males) is on the median at a major intersection, because they’re right next to the drivers’ windows. With drivers stopped for the left-turn signal, the vendors work their way back away from the light, waving the flowers or peanuts or fruit, and, as the signal turns and the cars move on, they head back up toward the end of the median near the light and repeat, over and over, the livelong day. If they DON’T have that prime spot, they work other places, busy suburban stop sign intersections, or, worst of all, the right turn lane, where the driver is on the other side of the car from them, and cars keep moving ahead, even on red lights. Watching a guy with this gig, I learned a new technique. If you’re stuck with one of these right-turn beats, as you get back to the light, you punch the pedestrian crossing signal, maximizing the number of times the light turns red to stop traffic for you. Sure, over the course of the day, a couple hundred motorists are inconvenienced, but you’re trying to earn a few bucks here.

We made the hour drive north today to the Pasadena Museum of California Art to see an exhibit of the work of Wayne Thiebaud, an iconic painter of the pop-art generation whose name you may not know, but whose work you’ve probably seen. We saw a smaller version of this same show a few years ago in Laguna Beach, and an even earlier iteration nearly a decade ago at Pepperdine University.  If you know Mr. Thiebaud’s work, you’ve seen his heavily-painted depictions of bakery cases full of lusciously iced cakes, toothsome wheels of cheese, or displays of merchandise including shoes or cupcakes or candied apples. Thiebaud’s paint-rich impasto technique makes Van Gogh look as though he knew nothing about getting medium on the canvas. Cakes literally drip with icing and landscapes are slathered with deep bodies of water and full, rich trees whose leaves have a full third dimension.

What this exhibition —  which includes some paintings we’ve never seen, mostly taken out of Mr. T’s studio, but missing some notable works previously present, including some of his classic pastry and food images — lacks is a truly wide-ranging look at the scope of the work for which he his renowned. We get an extremely well-curated look at the progression of his work from simple, pop-like renditions of pies, cakes, desserts and fruits on display, balanced against his accomplished figural work early in his career, and proceeding to his fascination with the landscape of San Francisco and central California to his sunny seashore images. What we lack is a well-rounded look at the images that made him famous in the first place. Where are the racks of shoes, the pies, cakes, pastries, fruit and toys in glorious profusion that proliferate in hundreds of his paintings? Sorry to say, this exihibition is, essentially, a years-long road show promoting Mr. Thiebaud’s son’s gallery in San Francisco, drawing heavily on the gallery’s own stock, supported by loans from the family collection and a few borrowed pieces from friends, but lacking significant representation from what must be hundreds of private collectors who hold the prime pieces.

Wayne, we love the work, and want you to live and paint forever. Tell your son to round up some of the catalogue pieces and put them on show. Oh, and, by the way, fire whoever created the catalogue for THIS show and hire someone with the gumption to demand that the catalog prints LOOK like the actual paintings. This one is disappointing. That’s a common problem in the business of attempting to depict painting in print. Mr. Thiebaud’s style is so texture-rich and dependent on his impasto treatments that one immediately misses that visceral connection on the printed page that one sees in the work itself.

© Brad Nixon 2019, 2018