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Lot Essay
The professional relationship and friendship between master painter Wayne Thiebaud and legendary gallerist Allan Stone began in 1961 when a weary Thiebaud wandered into Allan Stone’s gallery at 5 East 82nd Street in uptown Manhattan after a day of being turned away by other galleries. Stone recounted their first meeting in the 1994 catalogue Celebrating 33 Years Together: Wayne Thiebaud at Allan Stone Gallery, “Abstract Expressionism was still going strong and everyone was trying to identify the new stars, the next generation of important abstract painters” (Allan Stone, Celebrating 33 Years Together: Wayne Thiebaud at Allan Stone Gallery, New York, 1994, n.p.). The prescient Stone signed the representational Thiebaud well in advance of the rise of Pop art, when the artist’s paintings of cakes and pies painted in a manner as luscious as their subject matter began to “haunt” him. Stone continued, “I like the kind of surface and the lushness [of Thiebaud’s work]... You sense a love of paint and surface… there’s a real joy of painting, a joy of life in his work” (A. Stone quoted by K. Tsujimoto, Wayne Thiebaud, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1985, p 36-7).
The gallery offered Thiebaud a solo exhibition--the artist's first--in April of 1962. Andy Warhol, whose own first one-man show would follow a few months later in July of the same year at Los Angeles’s Ferus Gallery, was in attendance that night. As New Yorker art critic Adam Gopnik has written, “When [Wayne Thiebaud] exhibited his first cake pictures and pie pictures at the Allan Stone Gallery, in 1962, the result was almost like the Picasso circle’s discovery of Le Douanier Rousseau” (A. Gopnik, “Window Gazing,” New Yorker, April 29, 1991, p. 80). The Museum of Modern Art acquired works for their collection and Thiebaud received reviews from The New York Times, the New York Post, Time, Life, The Nation, Artnews and Art International for this exhibition. Stone gave Thiebaud quite the debut.
Allan Stone described Wayne Thiebaud as “a great painter whose magical touch is exceeded only by his genuine modesty and humility” (A. Stone, ibid.). The gallerist had an unfailing eye that focused on finding and showcasing the giants of contemporary twentieth-century art, including Abstract Expressionists Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky and Franz Kline. In the 1950s, Stone, then a lawyer on Wall Street, exchanged legal advice to artists for artworks. By 1960, Stone opened his own gallery on 86th Street, later moving to a carriage house on East 90th, which was celebrated for its imposing exhibitions and corresponding catalogues for artists such as Joseph Cornell, John Graham and Barnett Newman.
Though Thiebaud and Pop art share a common subject matter--the everyday products of American consumer culture--and arrived on the scene at the same time, Pop is too cool and detached or, perhaps Thiebaud is too earnest for the two to have been truly compatible partners. As New Yorker art critic Adam Gopnik describes, Thiebaud makes a “commitment to the American vernacular--to the cakes and gumball machines and soda fountains and coffee-shop pies that he takes as his subjects, and to the cake-counter and coffee-shop come-ons and displays that he uses as starting points for compositions (A. Gopnik, “Window Gazing,” The New Yorker, Apr. 29, 1991, p. 78). The stuff of Thiebaud’s paintings evoke the comfort of home, they are the things of holidays, and road trips, Sunday dinners and celebration, prompting the artist Allan Kaprow to describe his work as “italicized nostalgia.”
But to focus too closely on the content of the work would eclipse another equally important aspect. Like many before him including Cezanne and the Cubists, the still life provided readymade content for Thiebaud to work through issues of form and painting. The delight the artist takes in the colors and textures of these confections is equal to the delight one takes in a slice of pie. In fact, the artist often times tops off his painted cakes with swirls of paint that resemble frosting. As for color, Adam Gopnik describes Thiebaud’s signature halation best: “The cakes, which seem so honestly and forthrightly described, turn out, when they’re seen up close, to be outlined with rings and rainbows of pure color--bright blues and reds and purples, which register at a distance only as a just perceptible vibrator. These rings are Thiebaud’s own invention--there’s nothing quite like them in any other painting--and they give to his pictures not just a sense of the shiver of light in a particular place but also the sense that the scene has the interior life and unnatural emphases of something recalled from memory” (A. Gopnik, ibid., p. 80).
Collecting, not money, was the object of Allan Stone's career, and his collection continues to be his legacy. His business was “art dealing” but that term, too, doesn’t seem appropriate for someone whose buying outdistanced his selling. In addition to contemporary artists, he also amassed one of the largest collections of tribal art, American folk art, Gaudi furniture and Bugatti cars. His home in Westchester, New York, was a seemingly random and chaotic display of the fruits of his passions. However, upon closer inspection, an internal order became apparent, within which the objects were meant to converse with one another. In The Collector: Allan Stone’s Life in Art, a documentary film about the gallerist made by his daughter Olympia, ends with a particularly poignant scene: The celebrated gallerist debates between hanging works by Kline or Thiebaud on the wall--two artists with whom Stone played an integral part in introducing to the world. In the end, he chooses to hang the Kline, saying of the Thiebaud, “I’m going to put that in my tomb, in the pyramid... I’m going to take that with me, along with some special oils” (K. Shattuck, “In a Daughter’s Film Tribute, A Celebration of a Life Lived Through Art,” New York Times, February 10, 2007, n.p.), so important was the Wayne Thiebaud to Allan Stone.
In Sunglasses, a rare watercolor and pastel work, Wayne Thiebaud demonstrates the importance and function of repetition and seriality within his work. Since 1960, he has painted row upon row of cakes, shoes and ties (among other objects) in an endless variety of styles and colors to speak to the infinite availability of products. In this work, he lays out the seven pairs (one is partly obscured on the right of the frame) of sunglasses, which are then doubled-up by their reflections which fall upon the surface. A strong light source comes from the back casting these tinted shadows through the front of each pair of sunglasses. Each shadow perfectly matches its source, except notably the red-lensed pair on the lower right corner which casts a blue-hued shadow.
Poet and art critic John Yau writes about the importance of seriality in Thiebaud’s painting: “Thiebaud’s fascination with paint’s materiality and excess spans the gamut, from subject matter to composition, with a particular focus on our relationship to food and to usable land--forms of consumption. ...There is an irresolvable clash between image and materiality, repetition and surplus, surface and shadow...In counterpoint to the excess, Thiebaud’s use of the grid and repetition makes the surplus seem manageable, as well as enables the artist to explore color and color relationships” (J. Yau, “Wayne Thiebaud’s Incongruities,” Wayne Thiebaud, New York, 2014, p. 30).
In addition to repeating the same object in one painting, Thiebaud has also revisited recurring subjects over and over for nearly sixty years. In her article on the artist, “Food for Thought” for Art & Antique, art writer Mara Holt Skov notes, “Over the years, Thiebaud has kept his drawing skills honed and his muscle memory sharp by repeatedly sketching multiple views of his subjects as the first step in the creation of new work.” Skov reminds us, “This, of course, is the classical iterative method of art training, beginning with the humble tools of graphite, ink and paper. Even today it is the way that painting is taught--through sketching, repetition and refinement. Thiebaud approaches his own work as well as his teaching in this way; he continues to teach and model the creative process for developing artists, as he has done ever since he joined the faculty at the University of California at Davis in 1960” (M. Holt Skov, “Food for Thought,” Art & Antiques Vol 37 no. 2, 2014, 82-87).
The gallery offered Thiebaud a solo exhibition--the artist's first--in April of 1962. Andy Warhol, whose own first one-man show would follow a few months later in July of the same year at Los Angeles’s Ferus Gallery, was in attendance that night. As New Yorker art critic Adam Gopnik has written, “When [Wayne Thiebaud] exhibited his first cake pictures and pie pictures at the Allan Stone Gallery, in 1962, the result was almost like the Picasso circle’s discovery of Le Douanier Rousseau” (A. Gopnik, “Window Gazing,” New Yorker, April 29, 1991, p. 80). The Museum of Modern Art acquired works for their collection and Thiebaud received reviews from The New York Times, the New York Post, Time, Life, The Nation, Artnews and Art International for this exhibition. Stone gave Thiebaud quite the debut.
Allan Stone described Wayne Thiebaud as “a great painter whose magical touch is exceeded only by his genuine modesty and humility” (A. Stone, ibid.). The gallerist had an unfailing eye that focused on finding and showcasing the giants of contemporary twentieth-century art, including Abstract Expressionists Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky and Franz Kline. In the 1950s, Stone, then a lawyer on Wall Street, exchanged legal advice to artists for artworks. By 1960, Stone opened his own gallery on 86th Street, later moving to a carriage house on East 90th, which was celebrated for its imposing exhibitions and corresponding catalogues for artists such as Joseph Cornell, John Graham and Barnett Newman.
Though Thiebaud and Pop art share a common subject matter--the everyday products of American consumer culture--and arrived on the scene at the same time, Pop is too cool and detached or, perhaps Thiebaud is too earnest for the two to have been truly compatible partners. As New Yorker art critic Adam Gopnik describes, Thiebaud makes a “commitment to the American vernacular--to the cakes and gumball machines and soda fountains and coffee-shop pies that he takes as his subjects, and to the cake-counter and coffee-shop come-ons and displays that he uses as starting points for compositions (A. Gopnik, “Window Gazing,” The New Yorker, Apr. 29, 1991, p. 78). The stuff of Thiebaud’s paintings evoke the comfort of home, they are the things of holidays, and road trips, Sunday dinners and celebration, prompting the artist Allan Kaprow to describe his work as “italicized nostalgia.”
But to focus too closely on the content of the work would eclipse another equally important aspect. Like many before him including Cezanne and the Cubists, the still life provided readymade content for Thiebaud to work through issues of form and painting. The delight the artist takes in the colors and textures of these confections is equal to the delight one takes in a slice of pie. In fact, the artist often times tops off his painted cakes with swirls of paint that resemble frosting. As for color, Adam Gopnik describes Thiebaud’s signature halation best: “The cakes, which seem so honestly and forthrightly described, turn out, when they’re seen up close, to be outlined with rings and rainbows of pure color--bright blues and reds and purples, which register at a distance only as a just perceptible vibrator. These rings are Thiebaud’s own invention--there’s nothing quite like them in any other painting--and they give to his pictures not just a sense of the shiver of light in a particular place but also the sense that the scene has the interior life and unnatural emphases of something recalled from memory” (A. Gopnik, ibid., p. 80).
Collecting, not money, was the object of Allan Stone's career, and his collection continues to be his legacy. His business was “art dealing” but that term, too, doesn’t seem appropriate for someone whose buying outdistanced his selling. In addition to contemporary artists, he also amassed one of the largest collections of tribal art, American folk art, Gaudi furniture and Bugatti cars. His home in Westchester, New York, was a seemingly random and chaotic display of the fruits of his passions. However, upon closer inspection, an internal order became apparent, within which the objects were meant to converse with one another. In The Collector: Allan Stone’s Life in Art, a documentary film about the gallerist made by his daughter Olympia, ends with a particularly poignant scene: The celebrated gallerist debates between hanging works by Kline or Thiebaud on the wall--two artists with whom Stone played an integral part in introducing to the world. In the end, he chooses to hang the Kline, saying of the Thiebaud, “I’m going to put that in my tomb, in the pyramid... I’m going to take that with me, along with some special oils” (K. Shattuck, “In a Daughter’s Film Tribute, A Celebration of a Life Lived Through Art,” New York Times, February 10, 2007, n.p.), so important was the Wayne Thiebaud to Allan Stone.
In Sunglasses, a rare watercolor and pastel work, Wayne Thiebaud demonstrates the importance and function of repetition and seriality within his work. Since 1960, he has painted row upon row of cakes, shoes and ties (among other objects) in an endless variety of styles and colors to speak to the infinite availability of products. In this work, he lays out the seven pairs (one is partly obscured on the right of the frame) of sunglasses, which are then doubled-up by their reflections which fall upon the surface. A strong light source comes from the back casting these tinted shadows through the front of each pair of sunglasses. Each shadow perfectly matches its source, except notably the red-lensed pair on the lower right corner which casts a blue-hued shadow.
Poet and art critic John Yau writes about the importance of seriality in Thiebaud’s painting: “Thiebaud’s fascination with paint’s materiality and excess spans the gamut, from subject matter to composition, with a particular focus on our relationship to food and to usable land--forms of consumption. ...There is an irresolvable clash between image and materiality, repetition and surplus, surface and shadow...In counterpoint to the excess, Thiebaud’s use of the grid and repetition makes the surplus seem manageable, as well as enables the artist to explore color and color relationships” (J. Yau, “Wayne Thiebaud’s Incongruities,” Wayne Thiebaud, New York, 2014, p. 30).
In addition to repeating the same object in one painting, Thiebaud has also revisited recurring subjects over and over for nearly sixty years. In her article on the artist, “Food for Thought” for Art & Antique, art writer Mara Holt Skov notes, “Over the years, Thiebaud has kept his drawing skills honed and his muscle memory sharp by repeatedly sketching multiple views of his subjects as the first step in the creation of new work.” Skov reminds us, “This, of course, is the classical iterative method of art training, beginning with the humble tools of graphite, ink and paper. Even today it is the way that painting is taught--through sketching, repetition and refinement. Thiebaud approaches his own work as well as his teaching in this way; he continues to teach and model the creative process for developing artists, as he has done ever since he joined the faculty at the University of California at Davis in 1960” (M. Holt Skov, “Food for Thought,” Art & Antiques Vol 37 no. 2, 2014, 82-87).