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Lot Essay
Delicately rendered with decadent shades of oil paint, Wayne Thiebaud’s French Fish from 1974 is a visual and sensual delight. Suspended in space and pictured on a luminous and creamy background, Thiebaud allows the striking beauty of this shimmering, freshly caught fish to bask in the full attention of its viewers. Rich jade greens bleed into deep royal blues and crimson, leading into Thiebaud’s signature colorful shadows, while the sleek, upwardly diagonal composition of the painting brings a contemporary flair and a joyful energy.
Thiebaud had a unique ability for developing the potential, hidden meaning of everyday objects, and proved that no object is unworthy of a prolonged gaze. Treating all of his subjects with equal admiration and attention - from lipsticks to lollipops and, indeed, to fish - his paintings inspire quiet meditations on the very items that we encounter time and time again but never actually register. In essence, Thiebaud’s paintings are most concerned with a sentimental yet honest realism. “His work is about celebrating the joy of living,” the artist’s friend and dealer Allan Stone once explained (A. Stone, as interviewed on CBS Sunday Morning, May 10, 2008; accessible via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI_QJ5D9Qm8).
Beginning his career as a commercial artist with a short apprenticeship at Walt Disney Company, Thiebaud recognized the visual impact of commercial visual strategy, the use of blank backgrounds to isolate the product and quick, decisive lines to delineate them. This paved the way for the development of the artist’s now quintessential style of objects and figures with colorful silhouettes and shadows. Despite it being so recognizable today, Thiebaud actually discovered this technique quite by accident. As he spent hours in his studio closely observing the appearance of things, the artist observed a new visual phenomenon: that an object was not actually delineated by a single black line but rather surrounded with a “halo” effect composed of several colors. This “halo” is beautifully apparent in the present lot, both in its cobalt shadow and in the striation of rainbow hued scales. As Thiebaud’s trademark motif, it imbues his paintings with a kind of flickering, hyper-real quality that makes his objects come alive whilst also being simply a joy to visually consume.
Thiebaud had a unique ability for developing the potential, hidden meaning of everyday objects, and proved that no object is unworthy of a prolonged gaze. Treating all of his subjects with equal admiration and attention - from lipsticks to lollipops and, indeed, to fish - his paintings inspire quiet meditations on the very items that we encounter time and time again but never actually register. In essence, Thiebaud’s paintings are most concerned with a sentimental yet honest realism. “His work is about celebrating the joy of living,” the artist’s friend and dealer Allan Stone once explained (A. Stone, as interviewed on CBS Sunday Morning, May 10, 2008; accessible via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI_QJ5D9Qm8).
Beginning his career as a commercial artist with a short apprenticeship at Walt Disney Company, Thiebaud recognized the visual impact of commercial visual strategy, the use of blank backgrounds to isolate the product and quick, decisive lines to delineate them. This paved the way for the development of the artist’s now quintessential style of objects and figures with colorful silhouettes and shadows. Despite it being so recognizable today, Thiebaud actually discovered this technique quite by accident. As he spent hours in his studio closely observing the appearance of things, the artist observed a new visual phenomenon: that an object was not actually delineated by a single black line but rather surrounded with a “halo” effect composed of several colors. This “halo” is beautifully apparent in the present lot, both in its cobalt shadow and in the striation of rainbow hued scales. As Thiebaud’s trademark motif, it imbues his paintings with a kind of flickering, hyper-real quality that makes his objects come alive whilst also being simply a joy to visually consume.