Like Paintings of Paintings: Wayne Thiebaud at the Legion of Honor

The clowns made me cry.

Not a great start for a serious assessment of Wayne Thiebaud’s life and work, but his heartbreaking coda stuns. I chuckled as expected, delighting in luscious brushstrokes, sagaciously nodding and fiendishly chortling at his sometimes hokey art-historical allusions, “appropriations,” according to curator Timothy Burgard.

I was unprepared to cry at the clowns. But I did.

I moved back to California in 2020 and studied Wayne Thiebaud’s cityscapes and mountain paintings over that next year. Cut off from the rest of the world, his landscapes helped me make sense of the dusty topographies and misty microclimates here, mostly devoid of people. That year many had ample time to read and think about art, but scarce art to actually see. So, Thiebaud was the chromatic filter of this new lens through which I saw the Bay Area. Over that time of intense but distant engagement with his reproductions and words in books, I learned that the one connective thread in his multivalent oeuvre was the idea that color, often artificial, is determined by light.

His cakes and cafeteria buffet desserts, already colored with artificial dyes (like paintings of paintings), almost glow under electric display light and the very pigments he uses to render them. Examining his cityscapes, one has to remind themselves that Thiebaud isn’t only painting the washed out pastels characteristic of the stucco and terracotta surfaces out here, but also how these colors change through different veils of sunlight and fog as they pass through San Francisco’s vertiginous canyons. His painted women wear makeup and, when clothed, are dressed in bright synthetic fabrics. Color is a tricky clown on Thiebaud’s brush.

Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes From Art  is at the Legion of Honor (not the de Young, where his work usually hangs) because this exhibition catalogs some of the mellifluous art-historical references that stick to and sweeten Thiebaud’s work, and that brood of Old Masters and 19th century Parisians is more at home on Land’s End. No shade here, but a highlight of the show is Thiebaud’s personal art collection, inaugurated with an exquisite Ingres graphite Portrait of the Honorable Ms. Fleetwood-Pellew  from 1817. This show unto itself leads to 65 Thiebauds, each scrupulously paired with didactic labels and color illustrations of his many recursive influences. So much of the art that lived with Thiebaud in his mind, covertly emerging in his work, is work found in collections outside of California. That might be the most California thing ever: to co-opt ideas from elsewhere and suit them for this place.

Those poignant clown paintings began after the death of his wife, Betty Jean Carr (1929 - 2015) and son, Paul Thiebaud (1960 - 2010). Clown With Red Hair  (2015), references Edward Hopper’s own allegorical coda with clowns, The Two Comedians (1966), whereby Hopper ushered himself and his wife off the stage. Thiebaud’s pathetic clown stands alone, glowering under greasepaint, burning beneath white spotlight. His 100 Year Old Clown (2020) may look back to Bonnard and van Gogh, but it also references Thiebaud’s own work: beneath a cap that recalls Half Dome at Yosemite (and his many paintings of mountains) cowers a big-eared, red-nosed clown whose vanilla makeup clearly covers Wayne’s lachrymose profile. Always the teacher, he departed with one last lesson: a life spent loving art, as he did, ends with art being all that is left.

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