Fondation Beyeler - Wayne Thiebaud

 

1. Wayne Thiebaud, Flood Waters, 2006/2013, Oil on canvas, 121.9 x 152.4 cm, Private Collection, Courtesy Acquavella Galleries, © Wayne Thiebaud Foundation/2022, ProLitteris, Zurich

The "Ice cream" guy

    For its first exhibition of the year, the Fondation Beyeler in Basel present the American artist Wayne Thiebaud. After an exhibition dedicated to Edward Hopper in 2020 and to Georgia O'Keeffe in 2022, the Fondation continue is quests and rediscovery of unknown and popular American artists. 

    The artist who is born on the 15 November 1920 in Mesa, Arizona, grew up along the beach of California. After having a classical childhood, the artist attends high school, where he drew caricatures of his classmates and teachers, this will lead to his first summer job in Walt Disney Studios’ animation department.

    While serving in the US Army, he worked on the Aleck comic series for the bulletin of Mather Air Force Base and designed posters and murals, this is where he started to think about studying art, professionally. After the Second World War, he starts studying at the San José State University and California State University in Sacramento.

    During his university years, he had the chance to have his first solo exhibition at the Crocker Art Gallery in Sacramento in 1951, and the same year he started teaching at the Sacramento City College. He later had his second exhibition in 1962 at the renowned Allan Stone Gallery in New York City. 

    During his years as a teacher, Thiebaud trained several generations of artists, such as Bruce Nauman, who for a time worked as his assistant. At the time the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art just started the preparation of the first museum exhibition of the artist, titled "Wayne Thiebaud: Recent Work". Almost 30 years later, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York held a retrospective of his work.

The exhibition concept

2. Wayne THIEBAUD, PIE ROWS, 1961, Oil on canvas, 55.9 x 71.1 cm, Collection of the Wayne Thiebaud Foundation, © Wayne Thiebaud Foundation/2022, ProLitteris, Zurich , Photo: Matthew Kroening

    The exhibition of the Fondation Beyeler is divided into thematic sections, including still life, drawings, landscapes, cityscapes, etc. The first room of the exhibition is an introduction to the whole oeuvre of the artist, on the left you encounter two important works, which represent his inspirations. First a medium format picture titled "35 Cent Masterworks", where the artist present us his main source of inspirations presented on a newspaper rack: Mondrian, Monet, Morandi, Matisse, etc. In this work, Thiebaud is also questioning the value of those "blue-chip" art, worth millions due to their popular authors.

    Beside this work, you can find his depiction of "Mickey Mouse" dating from 1988. With this work, the artist is going back to his childhood and his first internship in the Walt Disney Studio. It's also one of the most recognisable cartoon characters in the traditional Western canon of art and is the very quintessence of “pop”. 

    On the other wall, you find two different works, which are two genres in which the artist is famous for: his portrait and his still life. First of all, "Student" from 1968 present a life size portrait of a student writing an essay on a school table, beside this work you find another icon "Three cones" from 1964, which present three ice creams waiting on a ice cream stands.

    Those four works have something in common, time. In the work of Thiebaud and like the one of Hopper, it fell like time was paused. 

3. WAYNE THIEBAUD, TWO PAINT CANS, 1987, Oil on paper mounted on cardboard, 34.9 x 50.5 cm, Collection of the Wayne Thiebaud Foundation, © Wayne Thiebaud Foundation/2022, ProLitteris, Zurich, Photo: Matthew Kroening

    The followings rooms of the exhibition are dedicated to themes and body of works of the artist: still life, game, landscape, portrait, californian landscape, drawing, the atelier and the cityscape of San Francisco. A few of my favourites works are "Fruits, Melons, Vegetables" from 2008, "Dressing Room Figure" from 1994 and the triptych "City Views" from 2004.

Thiebaud in Europe

    Wayne Thiebaud is an important figure of American art. His been collected by many art institutions, such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (which gave the artist first important exhibition) to the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Met and the MoMA. In Europe, his quite unknown in public collections... Only the Voorlinden Museum in Wassenaar have a painting of him. Even tho Thiebaud participated in three exhibitions of his paintings in Europe, at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne in 1975, at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol in 1976 and at the Voorlinden Museum in Wassenaar in the Netherlands in 2018.

    The exhibition catalogue which was designed by the design studio "Bonbon" in Zürich was published in German and in English by the German publisher Hatje Cantz Verlag. With its large but fine profile, the exhibition catalog present all the works of the exhibition with close-up details of the works, it also contain essays by Janet Bishop and Ulf Küster as well as Wayne Thiebaud’s last interview, a conversation with Jason Edward Kaufman in 2021.

Informations about the exhibition

Place: Fondation Beyeler

Date: 29.01.2023 - 21.05.2023

Curators: Ulf Küster and Charlotte Sarrazin

Ticket: Available online OR at the front desk of the museum

Informations about the Fondation Beyeler

Baselstrasse 101
CH-4125 Riehen/Basel

Phone: +41 61 645 97 00

Fax: +41 61 645 97 19

Mail: info@fondationbeyeler.ch

© Lucas GASGAR / Lucas Art Talks 2023