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Lot Essay
With its vibrant, sun-drenched colours and gracefully simple, almost geometric figuration, Wayne Thiebaud’s Three Ties from 1967 exemplifies the artist’s quintessentially American artistic practice. Exquisitely drawn in radiant pastels, Thiebaud’s ties possess a soft, illuminated brightness that is built up in the artist’s rich treatment of light and shade; their shadows smoulder with the complex tones of blended pinks and deep blues, while golden light catches their outline, supplying their shape with a materiality that sets them out from the wall. The ties themselves glow against the tranquillity of the pale brown wall behind them; pale greens, reds and blues are given a vivid, punchy consistency that nonetheless contains subtle variations and combinations of tone. Rendered with such understated sensitivity, Thiebaud’s work with his pastels re-introduces us to the objective qualities of the ties, asking us to look again, and more closely, at the visual patterns and forms inherent to the everyday objects we are accustomed to treating as interchangeable. Here, patterns and motifs are generated throughout the work, not only in the symmetrical composition of the ties as they hang from their rack, but in the designs stitched into them, and in their material itself, realised by Thiebaud with varying styles of shading – while his green is marked by long, decisive, downward strokes, the blue is a teeming cross-hatch of diagonal lines.
Born in 1920, Thiebaud worked as a cartoonist and commercial artist for the first ten years of his career – he once spent a summer during high school apprenticing at the Walt Disney Studios – before gravitating towards the world of high art through the 1950s. However, despite befriending Willem and Elaine de Kooning around 1956 it was the explosion of the Pop Art moment of 1962 that afforded Thiebaud’s work broader public recognition, when his paintings of delicatessens and cake shop displays were shown in the seminal ‘New Paintings of Common Objects’ exhibition at Pasadena Art Museum alongside Lichtenstein, Warhol and Ruscha. However Thiebaud always resisted the categorisation of Pop, preferring to think of himself as a figurative painter interested, above all, in the tradition and technique of figurative painting. If other Pop artist of his generation were interested in analysing and satirising the mechanisms of consumerism, Thiebaud’s interest in gleaming, mass-produced objects came from a more straightforward desire to register the visual quality of everyday life in 1960s America: ‘[My subject matter] was a genuine sort of experience that came out of my life, particularly the American world in which I was privileged to be. It just seemed to be the most genuine thing which I had done’ (W. Thiebaud quoted in Wayne Thiebaud: Paintings, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2000, p. 18). Yet at the same time, Thiebaud’s cakes or ties are not symbols, but objects – less metaphors for a way of life or an economic system than they are precious scraps of evidence of a specific time and place. It is thanks to the subtlety and focus of Thiebaud’s draughtsmanship and the vivacity of his colouring that these forgotten commonplaces of daily life live on into today.
Born in 1920, Thiebaud worked as a cartoonist and commercial artist for the first ten years of his career – he once spent a summer during high school apprenticing at the Walt Disney Studios – before gravitating towards the world of high art through the 1950s. However, despite befriending Willem and Elaine de Kooning around 1956 it was the explosion of the Pop Art moment of 1962 that afforded Thiebaud’s work broader public recognition, when his paintings of delicatessens and cake shop displays were shown in the seminal ‘New Paintings of Common Objects’ exhibition at Pasadena Art Museum alongside Lichtenstein, Warhol and Ruscha. However Thiebaud always resisted the categorisation of Pop, preferring to think of himself as a figurative painter interested, above all, in the tradition and technique of figurative painting. If other Pop artist of his generation were interested in analysing and satirising the mechanisms of consumerism, Thiebaud’s interest in gleaming, mass-produced objects came from a more straightforward desire to register the visual quality of everyday life in 1960s America: ‘[My subject matter] was a genuine sort of experience that came out of my life, particularly the American world in which I was privileged to be. It just seemed to be the most genuine thing which I had done’ (W. Thiebaud quoted in Wayne Thiebaud: Paintings, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2000, p. 18). Yet at the same time, Thiebaud’s cakes or ties are not symbols, but objects – less metaphors for a way of life or an economic system than they are precious scraps of evidence of a specific time and place. It is thanks to the subtlety and focus of Thiebaud’s draughtsmanship and the vivacity of his colouring that these forgotten commonplaces of daily life live on into today.