WAYNE THIEBAUD

Celebrating an American icon.

This comprehensive catalog of a major exhibition of Thiebaud (1920-2021) at the Museum of Fine Arts San Francisco gathers four essays, a bibliography of publications by and about Thiebaud, and an appendix of notes from Thiebaud’s lessons in figure drawing. Contributors include Timothy Anglin Burgard, the museum’s senior curator; Rachel Teagle, founding director of the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at the University of California, Davis; Eve Aschheim, Thiebaud’s teaching assistant from 1985 to 1987; and Burgard’s colleague Lauren Palmor, associate curator of American art. Both Burgard and Palmor address Thiebaud’s self-proclaimed penchant for appropriating and reinterpreting other artists—even his students. “I see myself as a total thief,” he once boasted. Yet, Burgard notes, although he freely admitted that he was influenced by others’ work (“I feed on it,” he remarked), among his prolific output—up to 100 works each year for 70 years—only a small percentage are appropriations; all reflect the capaciousness of his artistic interests. Although he spent most of his life in Sacramento, in 1956-57 Thiebaud took a year’s sabbatical in New York, with the goal of meeting leading figures of abstract expressionism, and he came away impressed by those artists’ engagement with European and American art traditions. At UC Davis, where he was a professor from 1960 to 1991, he taught painting, drawing, and art theory and criticism. Even after he retired at age 70, he returned to teach his lecture course and to offer private lessons in his studio almost until his death at age 101. Teagle and Aschheim, drawing on interviews with his former students, portray a vibrant, provocative teacher who brought to his classes, and his work, a broad knowledge of art history and an energetic spirit of invention.

A beautifully produced, authoritative volume.