A Rich, Feisty Eventfulness

By ROBERT HUGHES

At the opening of his retro spective in San Francisco last month, Wayne Thiebaud gave an aw-shucksy wriggle of the shoulders and declared, "I'm just a sign painter gone uppity." One may, with respect, demur. At 64, after decades of painting in the Bay Area, Thiebaud is one of the most gifted realist artists in America. At a time when so much new art leaves an iridescent slick of depletion on the eyeball, the group of 89 of his paintings and drawings, assembled by Curator Karen Tsujimoto at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is the real thing, a distinct and bracing pleasure to see.

The juvenilia are missing; the show contains nothing earlier than 1961, so that one does not see the transition between the "commercial" artist Thiebaud was--doing cartoons, Rexall ads and Hollywood publicity sets in the 1940s--and the "fine" one he is. Still, this is the fullest look one has yet had at this quintessential California painter. The show will travel to other museums in California and the Midwest, finishing in Kansas City in the fall of 1986. It will not be seen on the East Coast, presumably because it lacks the factitious glamour that might commend it to such institutions as New York City's Whitney Museum. Reflective art of this kind evidently cannot compete ( with toilets decorated by post-graffitists.

Which is not to say that Thiebaud, earlier in his career, did not seem to have his own brand of vulgarity. The time was distant--20 years ago, in fact --and the "vulgarity" had to do with food. Jasper Johns had his ale cans, Claes Oldenburg his Brobdingnagian hamburgers. Thiebaud in the mid-'60s was the laureate of pies: spongy peaks, white with coconut frosting and Reddi Wip, dark buttes sliced open to reveal caves of chocolate, pastry craters cupping their unruffled lakes of Key lime gelatin. Since mass food was one of the motifs of pop art, Thiebaud's diner-and-deli still lifes caused him to be misunderstood into fame: here was yet another ironic hierophant of American excess, and the idea that Thiebaud was a secondary pop artist still lingers on.

It is, however, untrue. Today it seems clear that Thiebaud's still lifes were far less interested in the manipulation of "cool" admass signs and pervasive cliches (the landscape of pop) than in traditional pursuits of realist painting, especially the celebration of minutiae of texture and light.

At first glance, a painting like Cake Window (Seven Cakes), 1970-76, might seem to reflect the familiar Warholian message of pop: uniformity within glut. But no. Its target is specificity, the peculiar qualities of fluorescent light (no less difficult to convey than those of sunlight or moonlight), the lush mortuary blue of the shadows, the buzzing glitter of the whites. Light is trapped in the dense paint, and Thiebaud extracts a lavish, slightly mocking sensuality from the pun between the depicted work of the cake icer--smearing those layers of sweet goo, drawing arabesques with the forcing bag--and the literal work of the painter's brush. A very conscious part of his style is the way he rings his forms (plain geometrical ones, as a rule: rectangles, cones, cylinders) with zips of relieving color, orange, yellow or vermilion. When these work--and often they are little more than a graphic mannerism--they lend his images an indefinable air of instability, an apparitional flicker, a distant cousin of the twitching, fluttering profiles in Giacometti. But it is the density of the paint that anchors the image every time. It gives the surface a rich, fiesty eventfulness. It makes one feel the subtle breaks in an array of cakes or cold-cream jars, rather than the boredom lurking in their repetition.

Thiebaud is weaker, because more illustrational, as a draftsman of the human body. He renders it with stolid accuracy, but never endows it with the depth or concision of feeling that infuses the still lifes; the flesh aspires to the condition of vinyl.

His landscapes, particularly the views of urban San Francisco that form the larger part of his output in the '80s, are an altogether different matter. The bright city on its blue bay has always been a happy hunting ground for purveyors of seagull-and-cable-car kitsch. But Thiebaud's paintings give it a weird, flattened intensity, as though its switchback hills and plunging spaces had been crushed flat against the canvas, in a parody of cubism with overtones of Canaletto.

In part this is an optical effect--that of the telephoto lens, which replaces perspective recession with the layering of planes. Thiebaud keeps a telescope in his house, and prompts himself by looking through it. In paintings like Curved Intersection, 1979, streets rear up like the skycrapers that line them; pavements snake at terrific speed down the canvas; wires and yellow traffic lines cut and chop; everything seems to be on the point of falling, flaking or sliding into the Pacific, and the city becomes a meticulously ordered metaphor of anxiety. No one has ever painted this allegedly laid-back town in this way before; and after seeing Thiebaud's disturbing images, it is hardly possible to see the place in the same way again. Whether the tourist business will thank him for it remains a moot point.