For many years now the Galway Arts Festival has enjoyed a fruitful alliance with the Los Angeles-based art dealer Jack Rutberg. Year after year he's come up with shows by illustrious names. In particular, he is familiar with West Coast personalities less well known here than their New York counterparts. This year he is bringing over the work of the renowned West Coast realist painter Wayne Thiebaud.
Thiebaud has the unusual distinction of becoming famous for his paintings of confectionery - of garish, mass-produced, iced and glazed cakes, or slices of pie laid out in rows in display cabinets. He was 41 when, in 1961, he held an exhibition in New York devoted to such cakes, pies and pinball machines. This show coincided with the advent of Pop Art, and Thiebaud is often described as one of the pioneers of Pop Art, but he never thought of himself in those terms. In fact, as he put it, "I see myself as a traditional painter. . . interested in the concept of realism and the notion of inquiring into what the tradition of realism is all about."
He is indeed a realist painter, one who painted not Cezannesque arrangements of fruit and vessels, but the actual still lifes that he saw around him every day, like food arranged in delicatessens and cafeterias. And this food isn't bathed in soft natural light, it positively vibrates in the harsh white glare of fluorescent tubes. Even in the 1950s it's evident from his work that he was interested in the relationship between food and paint, in much the same way that Lucien Freud sees a direct equivalence between flesh and pigment. Oil paint is thick and meaty, and Thiebaud piles it on with evident sensual relish, in almost sculptural depth, so that his cakes look literally good enough to eat. "The relationship between paint and subject matter comes as close as I can get it," he said, "white, gooey, shiny, sticky oil paint spread out on top of a painted cake to `become' frosting."
He was born in 1920, in Mesa, Arizona. When he was 16 he broke his back in an athletics accident and, while he was recuperating, began to draw in earnest. His first job, with Walt Disney, came to an abrupt end when he was fired for joining a union and going on strike in protest at the appallingly low rates of pay. But he went on to work in design and illustration, becoming an advertising art director before serving with the USAAF during the war, after which he went through art school and taught part-time in Sacramento while he painted.
The influences on his own style are relatively recondite. He admired straightforward realist painters, including Velasquez, Vermeer, Chardin, Eakins and Hopper. But the nuts and bolts of his technique derive from the mid-19th century Italian Macchiaioli movement, formed by a group of painters related to the French Impressionists but distinguished by their broad brushwork, bold lighting effects and, in particular, thick impasto. Thiebaud noticed that the technique was adopted by the Spanish painter Joaquim Sorolla y Bastida, another influence on his own working methods.
AT the height of Abstract Expressionism he tried to move towards abstraction but soon realised that he was a representational painter first and last: "I felt sort of embarrassed by the fact that I had subject matter in there so I tried to cover it up with arty strokes and expressive lines and so forth." His own mature work depended on a brave leap of faith when, around 1961, he abandoned a conventional approach to subject matter and launched into his confectionery paintings. He recalls trying out a painting, rather liking the result, laughing and thinking to himself that he'd just thrown away his career. In the short term, he was right. When he showed the new work in Sacramento, his buyers simply abandoned him. New York, though, was a different story.
He isn't only a painter of cakes. His other two main areas of interest are those you would expect of a realist painter: the human figure and landscape. His figurative work is interesting, though uneasy. It runs from straight life studies to more complex painted figure compositions. In two of his substantial figure paintings, of a woman wearing a bikini and a man in a business suit, the figures, each viewed head-on, share a curious, un-pictorial awkwardness. Each is depicted in Thiebaud's trademark hard white light, which emphasises the pull of gravity on their bodies to the extent that they seem almost weary. The paintings may be simple, objective acts of observation, but they impart a surprisingly strong sense of life as a struggle on many levels.
In landscape he found a subject as rich in possibility as food, and with a comparable contemporary twist. Initially he applied himself to rural themes, around the Sacramento valley, in a distinctly quirky vein, with uneven results. But it was when, partly inspired by the example of another fine West Coast painter, Richard Diebenkorn, he turned to an urban setting that he began to produce something exceptional.
In 1973 he bought a house in San Francisco and began to spend a lot of time there, and it was the distinctive verticality of the city's topography, with its roads seeming to cling to vertiginous hillsides, that inspired him. "You look at a hill and, visually, it doesn't look as if the cars would be able to stay on it and grip. It's a very precarious state of tension, like a tightrope walk." His city drawings and paintings brilliantly capture the visual excitement of this environment, with complex angular and curvilinear patterns formed by roads, buildings, cars and other urban paraphernalia, all articulated by strong, direct light. A work like Urban Freeway departs from strict observation in its memorable evocation of the labyrinthine layering of flyovers and intersections in the California road system. Such subjects may transcend the conventions of 19th century salon painting, but they are altogether in keeping with realist aspirations. Since he made the leap in 1961, he has truly been a painter of the modern world.
Works on paper from Wayne Thiebaud's personal collection will be on show in the UCG Gallery during the festival
