Yes, I know. San Franciscans insist that this is not a real intersection, but as Wayne Thiebaud says of his work, he makes “conscious decisions to include or exclude details, put in personal experiences and perceptual nuances to give the paintings more of a multi-dimension…” artnet.com. Here one has to say that the “perceptual nuances” carry the day. Being able to look downhill onto the top of a building as your brakes burn while your car slides down this precipice is a distinctly San Francisco experience, as well demonstrated by Thiebaud here. My personal experience involved the hill at Taylor and California, a hill so steep that the accompanying sidewalk has steps to help pedestrians climb. I remember anxious moments when my car had to stop for the red light before I crested the hill. There I would sit with both the brakes and the handbrake engaged to help fight gravity. A grand view of the sky was all that was before me while I endured an interminable wait for the green light.
But back to Thiebaud’s painting, where we can see the combination of all of his fine skills, as well as his perceptions and experiences. Thiebaud started as a youngster with stage design and poster art, even doing a summer apprenticeship at Disney Studios. Born in 1920, by the time he was ready to start a career, the Great Depression had been going on for quite a while, so his original love for fine art turned to the practicality of commercial art. It wasn’t until after World War II and when he was in his 30s that he decided to go into fine art, earning both a B.F.A. and an M.F.A. from what are now California State Universities at San Jose and Sacramento respectively. That commercial art background, however, can be seen in the finely drawn buildings and in the design of the painting above. Thiebaud expresses great respect for commercial artists, saying, “Those wonderful people showed me what to do – sign painters, women’s fashion illustrators. There’s lots of craft in it and that is admirable.” (quote from theartstory.org)
Thiebaud gives the viewer much more than a look at the dizzying heights. His use of a sharp diagonal from left to right, with that “catch your breath” flat intersection before you continue on downhill, slips the eye quickly across the whole painting. As you look straight ahead, your upcoming descent is cut off from view by the sharp gash 24th street makes through the descent of the hillside, which echoes that of the street (Mariposa?) that crosses in front of you. Looking straight ahead is what you must do to keep any sense of balance when viewing this painting. If you let that sharp diagonal catch you, you begin to slide right off the edge of the picture plane. No wonder Vertigo was partially filmed in San Francisco.
Thiebaud does give us a bit of a break by his use of rather calming colors. The streets are in pale green-gray or blue-gray, and the sky is an overcast beige with a hint of pearly gray. Nothing to further excite the nerves there. The yellow double lines on the street indicate that there was some order intended in the construction of these streets. The power lines add another touch of humans imposing themselves on nature, as do the buildings. Yet, the whole thing is precarious as only a few grasses, four trees and these concrete streets hold that hillside in place. The slightest rumble in the earth (this is San Francisco, after all) could bring the whole thing crashing down. However, in the meantime, some semblance of order is maintained by the grid of the streets, which serves as a trailblazing marker telling drivers, “Yes, you can do this.”
The Ripley Street Ridge (1976) is another of Thiebaud’s vertiginous San Francisco landscapes. In someways, the fact that he represents this day of sunshine on pastel colored houses backed by a bright blue, fogless sky seems more like a reminiscence of his childhood in Los Angeles. Yet we have that San Francisco touch of the hillside that disappears into thin air. The street is populated by shadows, each outline indicating the distinct personality of the dwelling involved.
Wayne Thiebaud spent time in New York in the mid-to-late 1950s where he came to know Wilhem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Franz Kline, and Jasper Johns. It was there where he began the works that he is most famous for, paintings of cakes, pies, and other sweet treats. However, his work can’t really be classified as part of the Pop Art that came in the 1960s. That has to do with his fine selection of details to leave in and ones to leave out and the creation of that feeling of multi-dimension. “This results in a kind of abstraction and thus avoids the pitfalls of mere decoration.” (Thiebaud quote from artnet.com)
In recent years, Thiebaud has done a wonderful series of California paintings that include rivers, mountains and cities. In terms of the diversity in his painting, which also includes figures and portraits, Thiebaud says, “I don’t make a lot of distinctions between things like landscape and figure painting because to me the problems are the same – lighting, color, structure and so on – certainly traditional and ordinary problems.”theartstory.org
My first love, as a former San Franciscan, will always be his wonderful paintings of The City. No one captures its unusual topography and that particularly San Franciscan idea of living on the edge better that Thiebaud. One painting that can give a full appreciation of this wild and unusual mix is Civic Center (1986). Tall buildings, tall hills, the “Crookedest Street” and everything vertical, welcome to San Francisco!
There are some wonderful articles on Thiebaud’s new series of paintings like “City, River and Mountain: Wayne Thiebaud’s California” editions.lib.umn.edu For a discussion of his other work, as well as the San Francisco paintings, here is a video done by Smithsonian Magazine youtube.com To see Thiebaud talk about another artist’s work, see this video of the artist talking about The Horse Fair by Rosa Bonheur (1855), which he did as part of The Artist Project. youtube.com
Images’ copyright Wayne Thiebaud and used here according to Fair Use Policy only for purposes of critique, review and discussion.
Marjorie Vernelle is an artist, writer, college professor, and traveler. For more see the Pages at ofartandwine.comor her author page at amazon.com and her art at Vernelle Art Boutique vernellestudio.com.
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