The Art of Appropriation
A new museum retrospective spotlights the late Sacramento painter and professor Wayne Thiebaud as a master student of art history. From da Vinci to Picasso, great artists have always studied and copied their predecessors on the way to creating their own singular masterpieces. As this exhibit shows, Thiebaud is still teaching. The lesson: Imitation truly is the sincerest form of flattery.
Thiebaud’s 35 Cent Masterworks pays tribute to artists like Picasso, Monet and Mondrian. (© Wayne Thiebaud Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY)
“I think we have a misconception about where painting comes from,” the late, great painter Wayne Thiebaud told Artweek in 1998. “It’s not a hermetic activity. It doesn’t come from an individual. It is a communal, commemorative, very layered activity that comes from groups of people.”
Nowhere is this philosophy more apparent than in his winking 1970-72 painting 35 Cent Masterworks, depicting a display rack of small-scale reproductions like those you’d see in a museum gift shop, of priceless works by Cézanne, Picasso, Monet, Velázquez, Mondrian and others. Above the rack, which resembles a display of comic books, a sign reads “Masterworks 35¢.” The evocation of comic books is no accident, as that is another category of art that Thiebaud, a great egalitarian, also revered. His painting is an homage to a pantheon of his influences, and an impressive and painterly masterpiece in its own right, but it’s also a slyly subversive act of radical humility. It’s as if Thiebaud, himself a consummate everyman, is saying, yes, all of us artists have our 35 cents’ worth to contribute, and after your pilgrimage to the museum, you’re free to take a print home and stick it on the door of your refrigerator.”
Fittingly, this painting serves as the cover image for the catalog of the Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art exhibit, which opens at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco on March 22 and runs through Aug. 17 as part of the museum’s 100th anniversary lineup. Perhaps no other contemporary artist was as openly—some might say brazenly—engaged with art history as Thiebaud, making him the perfect voice to showcase amid the centennial celebration. The Legion of Honor, and its sister museum, the de Young, have been showcasing Thiebaud—who lived almost his entire adult life in Sacramento, until his death in 2021, and is, by any measure, one of the most successful artists to ever come out of Northern California, with his 1962 painting Four Pinball Machines selling at auction in 2020 for $19 million—since the de Young mounted a show of his now-iconic paintings of cakes, pies, gumballs and other wholesome Americana in 1962.
READ MORE: The Sweet Life – Wayne Thiebaud on the eve of his 100th birthday
Contemporary art history has a tendency to celebrate individual artists’ genius as if inspiration sprang solely from within. This annoyed Thiebaud, who saw all art as a continuum of influences, and liked to rattle other artists’ cages by declaring himself an outright “thief.” He viewed the entirety of art history as a smorgasbord of ideas ripe for the picking, and he would set up a photographic reproduction of a masterpiece like Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte or Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat, and copy them, in charcoal or paint, using imitation to deconstruct the original artist’s process.
Wayne Thiebaud’s 2000 reinterpretation of Georges Seurat’s famed pointillist painting A Sunday on La Grande Jatte will be among the 28 “copies” by the Sacramento artist featured at the Legion of Honor’s new Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes From Art exhibit. (© Wayne Thiebaud Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY)
“I think underlying that is the idea that, in addition to honing your skill, you can commune with these great artists from the past, but ultimately learn enough to create your own masterworks,” says the exhibit’s curator Timothy Anglin Burgard, distinguished senior curator at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which operates both the de Young and the Legion of Honor. “By appropriating, reinterpreting works in the past, you have communion with those artists. You can not only study their methods, but try to understand their motivations, psyches, creative force and creative energy.”
Gathered in a salon gallery, 28 of Thiebaud’s “copies” will be displayed alongside their source material. Since most of those originals reside permanently in institutions around the world, like the Seurat and David (which are at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, respectively), they will appear as photographic reproductions much like those Thiebaud would have copied from. The exhibit will also feature 65 of Thiebaud’s original works—including his signature dessert paintings like Display Cakes and Confections—each accompanied by reproductions of inspiration pieces, as well as 37 original works by other artists from Thiebaud’s own collection.
Display Cakes (© Wayne Thiebaud Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photograph by Don Ross, Katherine Du Tiel.)
Thiebaud considered all artists, living or dead, to be colleagues. He copied Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and Honoré Daumier. He shared this practice with another modern master, copying Pablo Picasso, who had extensively copied fellow Spanish painter Diego Velázquez, creating nested generations of appropriation and gleaning. Artists throughout history have made “studies” of their predecessors works as a tool for learning. “The artist ought first to exercise his hand by copying drawings from the hand of a good master,” Leonardo da Vinci once said.
On display alongside the museum’s permanent collection of masterpieces, Art Comes from Art serves as a fantastic journey into the living soul of art history, illuminating how it informs future generations, with Thiebaud as our puckish muse and guide. “I think that’s one of the great accomplishments of his art of appropriation,” Burgard says, “to render this treasure trove accessible and available for everybody.”
Confections (© Wayne Thiebaud Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photograph by Katherine Du Tiel)
Thiebaud, who died on Christmas Day 2021 at the age of 101, served in the Army during World War II, hence the Greatest Generation work ethic that served him throughout a long life of painting and teaching (he viewed his time in the classroom as tilling the idea farm). He worked as a cartoonist and illustrator, first for Disney and later in the Army Air Force (he was stationed at Mather), which taught him draughtsmanship and discipline. The opportunity to attend Sacramento State brought him to the River City, where he lived for the rest of his life, teaching at Sacramento City College from 1951 until 1960, and UC Davis from 1960 to 2002 while raising a blended family with his second wife and muse, Betty Jean, who died in 2015 and whose portrait Betty Jean Thiebaud and Book will be on view at the Legion of Honor show.
Original works by Thiebaud—including Betty Jean Thiebaud and Book, which portrays his wife and muse—will be displayed at the Legion exhibit alongside reproductions of pieces that influenced those paintings. (© Wayne Thiebaud Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY)
Thiebaud’s influences were eclectic and extended far beyond the realm of fine art. He once called comics and cartooning “one of the highest forms of art in circulation,” and he would discuss George Herriman’s Krazy Kat in the same breath as ancient Egyptian art and the Greek philosopher Plato. He acquired multiple pen-and-ink original drawings depicting the eponymous feline hero, like a 10-panel 1938 cartoon that will appear as part of the Legion exhibit. Looking at its linear desert setting with distinctive mesas in the background, it’s evident Thiebaud both soaked up Herriman’s expressive energy and translated it into a totally different kind of art for his own surreal planes and flat landscapes.
“He admired forgers—those skills if not necessarily what those people did with it,” says Thiebaud’s stepson Matt Bult, an artist himself who chairs the Wayne Thiebaud Foundation. “A Daumier drawing is very gestural and shows a lot of character,” Bult adds by way of example. “Like copying handwriting, you have to do it enough times to be fluid. Wayne learned a lot from that. He could have been a forger, and this show will show that.”
“Art is not delivered like the morning paper; it has to be stolen from Mount Olympus,” Thiebaud once said. This museum show is like a map of the route to that mythical summit, as drawn by one of its humblest—and craftiest—denizens.
