{"id":6888,"date":"2025-05-16T14:25:10","date_gmt":"2025-05-16T14:25:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/05\/16\/review-wayne-thiebaud-art-comes-from-art-at-the-legion-of-honor\/"},"modified":"2025-05-16T14:25:11","modified_gmt":"2025-05-16T14:25:11","slug":"review-wayne-thiebaud-art-comes-from-art-at-the-legion-of-honor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/05\/16\/review-wayne-thiebaud-art-comes-from-art-at-the-legion-of-honor\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: \u201cWayne Thiebaud, Art Comes from Art\u201d at the Legion of Honor"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Wayne Thiebaud, Five Seated Figures<\/em>, 1965; oil on canvas, 60 x 72 in. (152.4 x 182.88 cm). Wayne Thiebaud Foundation \u00a9 Wayne Thiebaud Foundation \/ Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Welcome to <\/i>One Fine Show<\/i><\/a>, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.<\/i><\/p>\n

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Last year, an artificial intelligence program posted an image to Facebook with the sympathetic caption \u201cThis is my first cake! I will be glad for your marks,\u201d under eighteen images featuring eighteen different fake humans and their nonexistent baked goods. The results, according to a study by Ren\u00e9e DiResta and Josh Goldstein<\/a>, were legions of likes and interactions from real humans. Further data offered by shows like Is It Cake?<\/em> would seem to suggest that humans cannot resist representations of cake, the stranger the better.<\/p>\n

Wayne Thiebaud<\/a> (1920-2021) was the master of such deceptions. His cakes are sliced, complete or lined up in rows of miniatures, but they always seem to pulse off the canvas with bombastic sensuality. The New Yorker once took him to Lady M on East 78th Street, where the cakes are intricate, but delicate, and he decried the \u201cconfectionery delights\u201d as \u201cun-American<\/a>.\u201d But let\u2019s be clear: the man was not that interested in cake itself. As suggested by the title of his new retrospective at the Legion of Honor, \u201cArt Comes from Art,\u201d the show probes the extent to which his art was an exercise in self-described thievery, borrowing traditions from across the centuries as he worked up new experiments in pigment-based visual trickery.<\/p>\n

The exhibition tracks his six-decade career across some sixty-five works, most of which fit into the category of still lifes, frequently featuring icing, cityscapes and other vistas that work a strange m\u00e9lange of Pop and abstraction and intense portraiture. Thiebaud\u2019s sitters are incapable of relaxation. The first painting that greets you in this exhibition, Betty Jean Thiebaud<\/a> and Book<\/i> (1965-1969), shows the artist\u2019s wife holding her head in her hand like, \u201cWhat is it now, Wayne?\u201d As with so many of his figures, the lines that compose her are actually miniature rainbows if you look close enough, a confounding hint of the psychedelic within this otherwise glum and buxom matriarch.<\/p>\n

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SEE ALSO: <\/i><\/b>U-Haul Gallery\u2019s Mobile Model Takes Art to the Streets<\/i><\/b><\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But his lines are always like that, as if to suggest that we haven\u2019t even scraped the surface of his sitters\u2019 depths. Five Seated Figures<\/i> (1965) is a group of three men and two women in full Mad Men<\/i> regalia. They might be waiting for a sermon or for the beginning of a key party. Need I even mention that none of them are looking in the same direction?<\/p>\n

I had been on the hunt for cake as I wandered this show, but it was the figures that kept bringing me back to them. It goes back to his proud stealing from the greats of art history. Girl with Pink Hat<\/i> (1973) isn\u2019t just topless and distant; she\u2019s tapping into the same melancholy expressed by \u00c9douard Manet\u2019s Blonde with Bare Breasts<\/i> (1878), as the catalogue points out. These emotions are profound because they\u2019re eternal. Then you begin to notice the curious upturn of her nipples and recognize the angle from some of his landscapes. Thiebaud painted everything as a monolith, which means even the monoliths appear mundane. Laguna Rise<\/i> (2003\/2010\/2012\/2018) features a city on top of a hill that is definitely made of frosting. \u201cIs it cake?\u201d To Thiebaud, everything was.<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/b>Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art<\/b><\/a>\u201d is on view at the Legion of Honor through August 17, 2025.<\/b><\/p>\n

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