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Lot Essay
For over half a century, Wayne Thiebaud has produced charismatic explorations of American life through its people, objects and landscapes, realized in his singular deliciously rendered but highly controlled technique. Inspired by both commercial Americana and the art historical canon, Thiebaud’s oeuvre pays homage to a diverse array of predecessors and contemporaries, from commercial illustrators—whom he respects deeply as technicians-- to giants of art history, from Mondrian, Chardin, and Sargent, to Hopper, Morandi and Diebenkorn. Thiebaud is easily distinguished from his Pop contemporaries by the singular richness of his surfaces. Unlike the silk-screens of Warhol, the Benday dots of Lichtenstein, and the slick surfaces of Rosenquist, his work is a result of his love for the skillful manipulation of material as well as the deft representation of everyday things. He marvels in color combinations that are so spirited that a certain reverie pervades the piece. His small-scale works are among his most alluring, with each stroke of color producing a dearth of exquisite detail. Executed in 1966, Haystacks is a delicate, jewel-like landscape in ethereal pastel, exemplifying Thiebaud’s remarkable ability to imbue everyday scenes with his distinct brand of gravitas.
In Haystacks, a spring-green, meticulously rendered picture plane—dotted with precisely placed blocks of sun-bathed, butter yellow hay—stretches and dissolves into a distant cornflower sky. Thiebaud’s impeccably blended pastels evince the flickering play of light, his country landscape radiating with texture and energy. Thiebaud’s haystacks are brought to life with perfectly delineated lines, their rich, cool shadows evincing the placement of a beating sun. The haystacks are aligned at precisely at equal distance from each other, allowing Thiebaud to isolate his subjects, and formalize their shapes and forms into both a pattern and a grouping. Haystacks exemplifies the artist’s movement away from the gestural, abstract expressionist influences of his 1940s-50s work towards a clarification of the picture frame and isolation of the object that would become the hallmark of his mature work. Says Thiebaud, “At the end of 1959 or so I began to be interested in a formal approach to composition…at that point [I] began to rework paintings into much more clearly defined objects. I tried to see if I could get an object to sit on a plane and really be very clear about it. I picked things…based upon simple shapes like triangles and circles- and tried to orchestrate them” (W. Thiebaud, quoted in S. Nash, Wayne Thiebaud: A Painting Retrospective, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2000, p. 15).
Within this rich and precisely executed scene, a prodigious range of aesthetic parallels can be explored- from Claude Monet’s iconic haystacks, which also joyfully explore the visual effects of light and shadow, to the geometric sculpture of American Minimalist Donald Judd, the luminous California light of Bay Area figurative painter David Park and the bright Fauve colors of Henri Matisse. The grid-like placement of the haystacks brings to mind Piet Mondrian, while the neat grouping of like objects on a neutral ground echoes the tranquility of a Giorgio Morandi still life. The distinctly figurative quality of each haystack, which occupies its own particular space, is evocative of the isolated diners in an Edward Hopper painting. As Thiebaud said himself, “I’m very interested in the tradition of painting and not at all self-conscious about identifying my sources…I actually just steal things from people that I can use.” (W. Thiebaud, quoted in S. Nash, Wayne Thiebaud: A Painting Retrospective, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2000, p. 11). Haystacks is a singular, beautiful melting of myriad inspirations, yet distinctly Thiebaud in its unmistakable exacting technique and lustrous soft-hued coloration.
In Haystacks, a spring-green, meticulously rendered picture plane—dotted with precisely placed blocks of sun-bathed, butter yellow hay—stretches and dissolves into a distant cornflower sky. Thiebaud’s impeccably blended pastels evince the flickering play of light, his country landscape radiating with texture and energy. Thiebaud’s haystacks are brought to life with perfectly delineated lines, their rich, cool shadows evincing the placement of a beating sun. The haystacks are aligned at precisely at equal distance from each other, allowing Thiebaud to isolate his subjects, and formalize their shapes and forms into both a pattern and a grouping. Haystacks exemplifies the artist’s movement away from the gestural, abstract expressionist influences of his 1940s-50s work towards a clarification of the picture frame and isolation of the object that would become the hallmark of his mature work. Says Thiebaud, “At the end of 1959 or so I began to be interested in a formal approach to composition…at that point [I] began to rework paintings into much more clearly defined objects. I tried to see if I could get an object to sit on a plane and really be very clear about it. I picked things…based upon simple shapes like triangles and circles- and tried to orchestrate them” (W. Thiebaud, quoted in S. Nash, Wayne Thiebaud: A Painting Retrospective, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2000, p. 15).
Within this rich and precisely executed scene, a prodigious range of aesthetic parallels can be explored- from Claude Monet’s iconic haystacks, which also joyfully explore the visual effects of light and shadow, to the geometric sculpture of American Minimalist Donald Judd, the luminous California light of Bay Area figurative painter David Park and the bright Fauve colors of Henri Matisse. The grid-like placement of the haystacks brings to mind Piet Mondrian, while the neat grouping of like objects on a neutral ground echoes the tranquility of a Giorgio Morandi still life. The distinctly figurative quality of each haystack, which occupies its own particular space, is evocative of the isolated diners in an Edward Hopper painting. As Thiebaud said himself, “I’m very interested in the tradition of painting and not at all self-conscious about identifying my sources…I actually just steal things from people that I can use.” (W. Thiebaud, quoted in S. Nash, Wayne Thiebaud: A Painting Retrospective, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2000, p. 11). Haystacks is a singular, beautiful melting of myriad inspirations, yet distinctly Thiebaud in its unmistakable exacting technique and lustrous soft-hued coloration.