Wayne Thiebaud: an epicurian artist who saw painting as «a living body»

Wayne Thiebaud, who died at 101 last December, was one of the great painters in the United States. His work is notably included in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. A retrospective of Wayne Thiebaud's work is on view through August 7 at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, the capital of California, which the artist had called home since the 1950s. An heir to Hopper and a friend to de Kooning and Diebenkorn, Thiebaud left us a demanding and pleasurable body of work that, most often with humor, sometimes with gravity, questions consumer society and traces the impact of man's hand on his environment. In the process, Thiebaud contributed much to forging a truly American art that speaks to people inside as well as beyond the borders of his country.

In 2008, when he was only 88 and still painting almost every day, I had the pleasure to meet Wayne Thiebaud at his studio in Sacramento. Relaxed, almost curled up in a leather butterfly chair during our in-depth interview, the great American artist, ever so modest, talked about his admiration for Matisse and Vermeer and his passion for teaching the art of painting. This grandson of a Swiss emigrant also opened up about his family roots, his Mormon upbringing, his love of food and tennis, his journey from working on a farm and at the Disney studios to dedicating his life to painting. Throughout our conversation, he underlined the importance of a little sense of humor, especially in the often dreary world of contemporary art.

Many thanks to editor Catherine Stearns and artist Isabelle Bonzom who contributed to this project. Thanks and tribute to Paul Thiebaud, the artist’s son and collaborator who helped arrange this interview and who sadly passed away at age 49 in 2010.

Marie-Christine Bonzom: Wayne Thiebaud, I would like for you to talk about Rudolph, your paternal grandfather who came from Switzerland. Was his name Rudolph Thiebaud ?

Wayne Thiebaud: Rudolph Louis Thiebaud, pronounced originally Québaud for some reason, like K-a-b-o. I don’t know, they told that in that part of Switzerland, with that kind of configuration, it’s pronounced almost like K, K-a-b-o. But we said Tee-bo. After my grandfather passed away, we pronounced Tee-bo for simple reasons because we were always trying to explain to people about Kay-bo, and all the French teachers we had were saying: no! no! not Kay-bo, but Tee-bo!

Bonzom: When did your grandfather come to America ?

Thiebaud: I don’t know exactly the date but he came and settled in Indiana and because he had some training, became a teacher. He had a certificate from Switzerland, then he transferred so that he could teach here in the United States. He taught high school in a little town called Rising Sun, Indiana. Then, he slowly became, eventually, superintendent of schools before he retired. Then, he moved, to Arizona first, homesteaded, and then finally near Huntington Beach in California. There, he became a kind of gentleman experimental farmer, had a little two or three acres. That was the time of people like Luther Burbank [1], an experimental biologist, and my grandfather liked to do that kind of thing, in addition to his reading and participating in public affairs and so on.

Bonzom: Was your grandfather’s family involved in farming in Switzerland?

Thiebaud: That, I don’t know. I didn’t hear any recollections of that. Unfortunately, I don’t know what his background was. He was always interested in ideas. He would always drill me about my schooling. Well, I was not a good student. I was bored and unpleasant. He would say: “How are you doing? “ And I would say: “I’m doing well”. And then, he would say: “What are you doing?” I’d say: “Mathematics”. And he would begin: “What is the theorem? “ And he would begin to teach. So, before I went out to see him, I’d try to bone up a little bit. He was a very nice gentle man, along with my grandmother. Both very sweet people.

Bonzom: Was your grandmother from Switzerland, too?

Thiebaud: No, I don’t know very much about her, unfortunately. They were both married before and the one son they had between them was my father. My grandmother was quiet and very nourishing, a very sweet lady, and a good cook. We’d go Sunday dinners. My grandfather also introduced me to gardening. He sold Mr. Knott, of Knott’s Berry Farm [2], some of his first berry plants.

Bonzom: What was for Sunday dinner at your grandparents’?

Thiebaud: Fried chicken out of their yard. Fresh corn, vegetables, mashed potatoes. Very good.

Bonzom: Any cakes?

Thiebaud: Pies, she cooked pies (smiles).

Bonzom: Were you close to your paternal grandfather as you were growing up?

Thiebaud: Yes, in the sense that he was always very kindly, but I didn’t see a great deal of him. Sometimes, I would go for a week and stay with them during the summer. I would go out with him to farm. It was very black earth there.

Bonzom: Near Huntington Beach?

Thiebaud: Yes, and they eventually discovered a lot of oil there, obviously. But I remember following him in his big boots and I couldn’t think of steps as big as he did. I must have been 8 years old maybe, quite small.

Bonzom: When did he pass away?

Thiebaud: I wish I knew that. It was when I was in high school so that would have been probably, I would guess, in 1936 or 1937.

Bonzom: So you got to know him pretty well.

Thiebaud: Yes, I’d also go to meetings with him. He held town meetings, he was a kind of unofficial mayor of that little town of Wintersburg. It was not much of a town. Gas station, Baptist church and so on. And he held meetings, I remember. One time, he invited me to come. At that point, I was playing the guitar and trying to sing. So he asked me to sing a song for the entertainment of the place. 

Bonzom: Did he teach you to yodel? I’ve heard that you yodel.

Thiebaud: No, I learned yodeling from cowboy singers. There was a cowboy singer by the name of George Strange, The Yodeling Cowboy, in Long Beach [3].

Bonzom: What was your grandfather’s influence on you, the main thing you retain from him?

Thiebaud: He made me feel that I should be interested in ideas. I think that, for me, was a world I couldn’t be less interested in at the time. But slowly, it came to me because there were always magazines and journals and books around at his house. I think he was a kind of model of gentle inquiry. That, I remembered when I finally got interested and went back to school, I could feel his influence pretty strongly.

Bonzom: Did your father get a little bit of an inquisitive mind from his father, too? I understand that your father was interested in how things work and invented an electric truck for the dairy company he was working for.

Thiebaud: My father started as a mechanic in Arizona and when he came here in California, he worked in the shops. In one instance as he worked more, he had the job of putting together automobiles. They would ship out Model-Ts from the east and he could put one and a half cars together in one day. The fastest one in the shop. Then, he became a kind of overseer in shops. He was also interested in invention. He invented a patent of six-wheel brakes very early on. He designed milk trucks. One, the one you mentioned, was an electric truck that ran between San Francisco and Los Angeles, transporting milk.

Bonzom: He was green before it was fashionable.

Thiebaud: That’s right. There were a few electric cars around, then, but the gasoline world took over pretty surely.

Bonzom: What about the other side of your family? Your maternal grandmother lived in Utah, I believe.

Thiebaud: Yes. She was English but she had walked across the plains with Brigham Young and the Mormon tradition. She had eleven children, lived to be 99. She would not let my mother marry my father until he converted from being a Baptist to a Mormon. When he became a Mormon, my father became very enthusiastic about it and became finally a bishop in the Mormon Church. And that gave my father a chance to do a lot of things, like developing sermons and things that he would be interested in, like visiting people in hospitals but he also continued to be very interested in invention. He was always taking me for rides, telling me things that he would try and invent and so on. 

Bonzom: You were quite involved in the Mormon Church when a youngster. Did you move away from the Church later?

Thiebaud: We had a huge family, both sides of the family, lots of cousins and aunts and uncles. It was a very nurturing family. The Mormons are, like the Jewish tradition maybe, very clannish. It was a little stultifying but it was a wonderful place to grow up psychologically because they took such good care of you and celebrated you, spoiled you, really (smiles)! But in my opinion, the Mormon tradition has very little intellectual tradition. It’s a kind of leap-to-faith idea where the question is not so much that it interests them…and I’m essentially a kind of schematic skeptic and I think that’s part of the world of ideas when you always need openness and skepticism. And I must say that my father was very understanding. As I got to be 15 or 16, I just told him I no longer had any interest in that kind of thing although I admired many of the things that the Mormon tradition did. 

Bonzom: Was it a complete departure from religion or did religion keep a role in your life?

Thiebaud: Philosophy did, more. The Jesuit tradition or the study of religions still interested me and still interests me but I have no affiliation with religion.

Bonzom: You moved a lot when you were a child. You were born in Mesa, Arizona. Then, when you were one or two years old, your family moved to Long Beach, California.

Thiebaud: I think I was even just six months, maybe.

Bonzom: Your father then moved the family to Los Angeles because of his work. Then, it was back to Long Beach. Then to Utah during the Great Depression.

Thiebaud: Yes, during the Depression, my father lost his job that was no longer heavens and he took what money he had and went in for other family members in Utah and bought a ranch between Saint George and Cedar City, in Southern Utah.

Bonzom: A cattle ranch?

Thiebaud: Sheep, mostly, and farming, agriculture. The fellow who had the ranch was a sheep raiser. We just raised crops, not animals.

Bonzom: Did you participate in the farm work ?

Thiebaud: Very much. It was a wonderful life, actually. Me and my cousins, we all worked in the fields. I had a horse and we all plowed and did what we were supposed to do.

Bonzom: And then, you all went back to Los Angeles.

Thiebaud: To Long Beach. Actually, we lost the ranch during the Depression. So, my father, absolutely, started over again. He went to Long Beach to get work. And there was an earthquake there, the famous 1933 earthquake [4], a very serious one. We were very worried. We were living in Saint George, Utah, going to school. But he called and said that everybody in the family was OK. So, then, he found work cleaning up right after the earthquake, just labor, and then he went back, ironically, to work in the same creamery in which he had been a boss to be a milk deliverer, which I helped him with in Long Beach.

Bonzom: Did you enjoy moving a lot from one place to another? Or was there in you, as you were growing up, some discomfort with that kind of life ?

Thiebaud: It seemed not to bother me. Seemed that we did go to quite a lot of different grammar schools. Finally, I was able to go to junior high and high school without interruption. Even though we moved, we moved in pretty closely proximate areas. I can’t remember having any difficulty.

Right: Entrance to the fort built by John Sutter, the Swiss-born founder of the city of Sacramento.

Bonzom: Now it seems to me that you really have a sense of place, in your life as well in your paintings. I’m struck by the fact that you have painted landscapes available around you. The Sacramento River landscape, the San Francisco cityscapes, and I understand that, here in Sacramento, you have basically all your family around you.

Thiebaud: Yes.

Bonzom: Is being anchored in a place, both as a human being and a painter, important to you?

Thiebaud: I think so. I think it allows for a kind of constancy and dealing serially with themes and ideas. Everybody asks: “Why are you in Sacramento?” (laughter)  [5]. I think, mostly, because I came back to school late and got my degrees here. People were very helpful and very encouraging. Also, it was a place where there was not much going on in terms of an art scene. There were some serious people and some serious university and college departments. I was lucky to get a job right away teaching in a junior college. It was a pleasant place to go to school and again, people were very helpful in getting me reoriented toward some sort of education. The idea of painting in relationship to place, I think, certainly is influential. But also, in my own sense of things, I’m fascinated by and taken with the whole tradition of painting and I use it without any guilt of stealing everything I can from it. So, my works, while they may reflect this area and influences, are based on a series of problems of which the traditional formalist enterprises are primary.

Bonzom: What is your first memory of drawing or painting?

Thiebaud: My mother, in rainy days, would encourage my sister and me both to draw. I became very much interested in comics, wanted to be a cartoonist. A lot of critics say that’s where I am still. They don’t realize that’s a compliment to me, as far as I’m concerned, because I love cartoons, particularly American cartoonists who, I think, are under celebrated, yet very powerful graphic artists. So, that was what I wanted to be until I got very interested, more and more, in drawing and reading art history. But I still mostly wanted to be a red-hot advertising art director and make a lot of money. I didn’t go to art school so I had a lot of wonderful kind people who showed me how to do things, wonderful women fashion illustrators and great old lettering men, all who were very wonderfully trained and very demanding on you to do it correctly, over and over again until you get it right. I think that was almost better than an art school because it left out the, I think, dangerous idea that you might make art, I think that’s a serious interference into doing work.

Bonzom: You started out with a summer job at Disney.

Thiebaud: Yes.

Bonzom: Did you learn something working at Disney?

Thiebaud: Oh yes, those old guys were great! I was only there for a short time in the summer and got fired for trying to get a union started. We were turned out pretty quickly. Took them years to get a decent union, the animators and so on. But a lot of wonderful old cartoonists and illustrators were models for excellence in so many ways. 

Bonzom: Was the moving picture of interest to you, I mean the fact of seeing a picture moving and being followed by others?

Thiebaud: Oh yes, I became quite interested in filmmaking and made some experimental films myself. I even developed a course teaching filmmaking history and studio at the city college just before I left there. So, I went to lots of experimental film festivals and I’m still fascinated a lot with it. I guess the sense of movement, your question directs itself towards, yes, that is something about painting which does interest me. What and how and in so many ways how movement, perhaps metaphorically, is used in painting.

Bonzom: The dynamic in the painting.

Thiebaud: Yes. Since there’s nothing more than a still flat object, how in hell do you get it to move? Well, you look at de Kooning or you look at futurism or cubism or even Vermeer because his movement is quivering movement.

Bonzom: Are you still drawing cartoons?

Thiebaud: All the time, yes.

Bonzom: I understand that you don’t want to show them. I also understand that you do abstract paintings and don’t show them.

Thiebaud: That’s’ right.

Bonzom: Why do you keep them for yourself? Is it something you do just for pleasure or is it something that is part of your thinking about painting ?

Thiebaud: Well, I find abstract painting, really, the sort of bone structure of painting, mostly, dealing with primary research problems in space, color, all of those things. But, in my own case, I think if you’re going to be a non- objective painter, that’s probably a lifetime. And while I might encourage and even demand students exercise themselves in that way and use it and try it out, for me, it’s still a somewhat limited domain. The painting tradition which I admire is one in which attempts are made to integrate abstract and representational painting in one. That, for me, is the ultimate, whether it’s Degas or Velasquez or de Kooning or Picasso, Matisse or, for that matter, the whole history of painting, medieval. Almost all of the conventions based themselves, essentially, on a kind of abstract premise but with realistic or representational elements that qualify them, I think, as a multi-dimensional art form.

Bonzom: In the medieval paintings, are you interested mainly in those odd perspectives?

Thiebaud: Yes, that’s it, but also in Chinese and Japanese paintings, the use of the various kinds of conventions of space use. The whole thing about painting is those worlds that make little worlds which we wouldn’t have without those terrific painters. I’m not talking about myself, I’m talking about good painters, great painters who give us a whole new visual species, the Van Gogh visual species, you know right away that’s a unique and added world that we wouldn’t have had without him. That’s fascinating to me.

Bonzom: Is painting, then, a way to understand the world?

Thiebaud: It’s a way to see the world in its potential, since we’re still in a sense in a, --it’s hard for us to maybe think of that, but the world is still evolving, changing. That’s why we have earthquakes and storms and so on. So, it’s fascinating…There’s a great poem by W.B. Yeats called “The face I had before the world was made” [6], which is a sort of inference of how much more we need to know, can know, might know. And painting’s responsibility, it seems to me, is to develop those alternative ways of knowing, not only about ourselves but about how the world might be, in addition to what it is.

Bonzom: Do you want the viewers of your paintings to see things better or see things in another world, so to speak, or is it about seeing things, reality better or closer?

Thiebaud: First, I want them to learn how to take great pleasure in just looking at works, just like you listen to music, when you stand before a work for half an hour and get to really know what it is to see painting, what a miracle it is to change a two-dimensional surface into a three-dimensional world. That’s one of the great inventions of the human spirit. It’s not nearly talked about enough, I think. That’s one of the reasons I enjoy teaching so much, it’s to see students change their whole sense of what looking is and seeing, so that yes, all of those things you mentioned, you come to view alternate sensibilities, you engage in a kind of, one of the most important things is your sense of being able to transfer yourself physically into things. Empathy. With that empathy, it teaches us to really care about other worlds and other people. Without it, we’re a sad group. So, that painting, --- according to Richard Wollheim [7], a very wonderful philosopher ---, painting is a kind of metaphor of the physical body. It includes gestures, skin, musculature, reflections, and that sort of duality of self and extension of the self is a wonderful orchestration in terms of the experience which painting gives us.

Bonzom: When you are about to paint a painting, do you have to love or like your subject, whether it’s a crooked street in San Francisco, a woman in front of you, a cake or a rural landscape? Do you have to have some kind of, as you say, empathy, or even liking or loving for your subject?

Thiebaud: Empathy, certainly, because one of the reasons you have, still in art schools, life drawing is not that you may never want to paint the figure but to understand what something like grace is, what is tension, how you create the idea of tension, a sense of disequilibrium or equilibrium, balance, tension. Those kinds of things are the real joy in painting, to feel a kind of aliveness of the paint as it indicates to you that that space is at certain position and it’s either receding or coming towards you or in some sort of ambiguous relationship. This sense of immediacy, in terms of contact with painting, is for me, probably, the most joyous aspect. It doesn’t happen all the time, unfortunately, and most of the time, the most difficult thing is to get the damn thing to come together. You get good little things happening and so on. Also, that sense of orchestration, with you supposedly as the conductor, is the kind of juggling aspect of both intellectual and perceptual information simultaneously, and that’s what makes it also so difficult.

Bonzom: I love this expression in English when you talk about “painting from life.” In French, we say “d’après nature”, but “from life” is so right and I’m curious to know what you respond to people who think that “painting is dead”.

Thiebaud: They’re right. I mean, painting is dead, that’s what it is. It’s just a flat, non-moving, still object. So the people who say “painting is dead”, they don’t understand Lazarus. They don’t know that, if they want the painting to live, it has to live through them as well as itself. We’re the ones that give life to painting, our eyes, our physical involvement with it. So, it’s a kind of phenomenon that cannot die, even if we would like to, because they’re those who, by looking, by painting, make it live. And there’s always someone coming around who, in spite of all the so-called dead ends and everything, there’s a funny little woman painting flowers and they say: “my god, where did it come from, those flowers, you’re not supposed to paint flowers, look at that”, you know. “Why did that guy Morandi get away with that? Little smearing some old grey: slabs of color, mostly greys, on the surface ? Is he serious? ” Only if you’re serious! And look at it! I’m absolutely thrilled by what he does. It’s a miracle, just to see those old clay pots, light which is just barely there, highlights which are like floating chips of almost nothing on a surface. “My god, how did he get away with that?” Because he’s a painter, he’s a nut.

Left: Wayne Thiebaud's studio in Sacramento.

Bonzom: There’s being a nut and there’s being working. How do you work?  Do you have a strict discipline, in terms of how much you work? Do you keep regular hours, do you maintain some kind of a schedule that allows you to make painting part of your life?

Thiebaud: I’m so spoiled, in a way, because I have a family that allows me to do this. This is a privilege. So, I work all the time. I work every day, almost, holidays included, Sundays. I still have family and so on, so I have a regular schedule where I come early in the morning, and I go play tennis, about midday, fix lunch for my wife and come back here to the studio, talk to people like you sometimes, and get back to work. So I’m lucky to have a schedule, and maybe, paint somewhere between 40 and 50 hours a week.

Bonzom: How many studios do you have in addition to this one in Sacramento?

Thiebaud: Well, wherever I go, I usually have a place to work but I have a studio right on top of the house where I live. I have a studio in San Francisco, a little kind of a basement. In Laguna Beach where we have a condo we share with my son [8] and he’s given me an additional bedroom to work in. I don’t need very much space. I also go outside and paint a lot, draw. I go to classes, still, in life drawing and draw. I take them, I also give them. I’m still doing emeritus volunteer teaching at the university (University of California at Davis [9]) so I have a studio there as well.

Bonzom: How do you organize your time between studios? Is there work that you do at one studio in particular, other works that you do at another studio?

Thiebaud: All the places are set up pretty much the same. A certain kind of palette, certain kind of light so that I can go from one to another. Sometimes, I would even take a painting I’m doing here with me to Davis and vice-versa. Sometimes, on the other hand, in San Francisco I used to leave all of those there for a long time, went out in the streets and drew and painted and came back in the studio and reconstructed them. So, the studio is kind of ambulatory, I guess, overall.

Bonzom: Do you use any assistants, maybe to prepare grand formats?

Thiebaud: No.

Bonzom: You work alone from A to Z?

Thiebaud: Yes.

Bonzom: As a painter, have craft, the notion and reality of craft, and technical knowledge been important to you? Did you dedicate a lot of attention to acquiring and inquiring about this technical knowledge?

Thiebaud: Yes, not as much as I should. But being a teacher, you are obligated to be sure the students understand poisons and be sure not to use brushes in their mouths and so on, but also to show them how to prepare a canvas. I’m not as good as I should be. Restorers, sometimes, are giving me the eye and say “you should do so and so and you shouldn’t do such and such”. It’s true you have to be more and more careful but it’s something which…well, there’s a great story. When I was in New York in 1956, I got to know some of those people like de Kooning, I heard a discussion of how painters were using mayonnaise and god-knows-what in their work, so they had a restorer come and tell them how they should paint. He said: “Be sure, now, to stretch carefully with nice linen and good gesso, be sure to isolate the canvas, sand it three ways, gesso over and then you can paint on it”. They said: “Yes, we should be more careful” and they turned to Bill de Kooning and said: “Bill, what do you think?”. He said: “True! But the thing is we’re going have a lot of goddamned ugly paintings that are going to last too long!” (laughter).

Bonzom: It was quite true! (laughter) I’m reminded of Matisse who said that “work heals everything.” Do you agree with that statement or do you find in work any other strong virtue?

Thiebaud: Oh, I think yes, and Matisse said something even more poetic when he said that “work is a paradise”. If you love work, and along the lines we’ve been talking, then, I think it’s true, it’s fundamental, a joy, an agony, too (laughter).

Bonzom: Do you sometimes agonize over a painting?

Thiebaud: Yeah, you just work all day and throw it away, but it’s so much better if you go home and cook a good meal and you say: “now, I’ve done something worthwhile”.

Bonzom: Is there a sort of parenthood between cooking a meal and putting together the pigments on a canvas?

Thiebaud: Yes! A lot of painters I know are quite good cooks, are interested at least very much in cooking, somehow I think it’s an interesting relationship.

Bonzom: Is it about putting things together?

Thiebaud: Well, I gave a student, recently, a criticism. He said: “Basically, what’s wrong with my work?” And I said: “It’s what you would call undercooked”. He said: “Undercooked! What do you mean? Not done?” I said “Raw, undigested, it’s tasteless, it has no structure, no complexities, you know, dull”. I had a dealer who used that term, “undercooked”. He’d tell me sometime when looking at one of my paintings: “It’s undercooked, take it back and put it in the oven for a while!”

Bonzom: As a matter of fact, food has played a big role in your life. Not only are you a cook but you have illustrated books related to food. I’m thinking in particular about a cookbook with Alice Waters [10].

Thiebaud: Oh yes!

Bonzom: There's also that translation into English of Brillat-Savarin’s “The Physiology of Taste” by M.F.K. Fisher [11].

Thiebaud: Did you see that book?

Bonzom: I didn’t but I love M.F.K. Fisher’s writing and I’d like to see that book. Is it still available?

Thiebaud: It was one of those fancy art books that cost lots of money but they sold it out, and then, they did make a trade edition but it’s out of print so I don’t know where you would find it. But that was a lot of joy. And Alice Waters is a friend and I got to eat the desserts of Lindsey Shere (smiles). Cooking is one of the great arts of our civilization. I’m not really a cook, I’m a second-string cook to my wife who’s quite a good cook. I try to do it so she doesn’t need to do it all. And I like cooking. My mother was quite a good basic cook, wholesome. I was lucky to have a good upbringing.

Bonzom: You’re also a great lover of tennis. Is it a love of geometry that draws you to tennis, those lines on the court?

Thiebaud: Well, yeah, you’re playing, after all, on a kind of Mondrian, you know (laughter). It’s a great game. It’s one of those games that has a slow learning curve. And I started too late to be much of anything. I play tournaments, I play senior tennis, and it’s a great joy and a great sense of exercise, so yes, I do love tennis very much. My wife is a more serious player… she’s part Indian, you know, the old tomahawk…

Bonzom: Your wife is part Indian?

Thiebaud: We call her the Old Tomahawk. She’s part Cherokee.

Bonzom: From Oklahoma?

Thiebaud: From Missouri.

Bonzom: There’s a notion that has come back quite a lot so far during this interview, and that notion is joy.

Thiebaud: Yes.

Bonzom: What role do you assign to pleasure, both when you work and when you exhibit a painting? Are you aiming to provide pleasure to the viewer? We talked earlier about helping the viewer see things in a different way. Do you try to convey pleasure of the painting itself?

Thiebaud: Yes. Pleasure is very much a part of it. My own life has been pleasurable and I’ve been very lucky. So, it would be disingenuous of me to pretend to be overly serious, and that’s a dead giveaway to say you’re not an artist in the art world. The art world, in my estimation, has lacked a sense of humor for too long. Humor, for me, is very important and I’m serious when I say I think that without a sense of humor, there is a loss of a sense of perspective. If, for instance, I’ll give a little story here, suppose a fellow goes to a museum director and says: “Mr. Museum Director, I want to have an exhibition.” The director says: “Yes, I’d love to have it because you’re a very good painter.” “Yes, I am”, says the painter, but he says “I’m going to hang them all upside down.” Now, shouldn’t the museum director laugh first and say: “Why upside down?” and have a jolly old time, and ask this fellow: “what is it that you mean?”, and something would come out of that. Or a sculptor comes: “Yes, I’ll have an exhibit since you’ve asked me but I need about thirty thousand dollars’ worth of refrigeration equipment”. The director says: “Well, what for?” The painter says: “well, I saved my own blood and I made myself a self-portrait and I want it fresh all during the exhibition time”. Why wouldn’t you laugh? No, we don’t laugh, we get four philosophers and one aesthetician to talk about the importance of that, I mean, well, that’s good, too, but somehow, lurking in every painting is a sense of humor. There’s a funny little rabbit poking out of a hole at the Frick Gallery in the Bellini painting [12] which is a marvel and you can’t help but smile at that. And all around painting, I mean, if you can’t find a little bit of humor in the painting, you’re missing something.

Bonzom: Do you appreciate Dubuffet?

Thiebaud: Dubuffet is, for me, a fascinating thinker. He has saved things like institutional artists, eccentric artists and celebrated them. I think when he got into his later work, those things, for me, also are funny things, funny in the sense of “why bother?” Is he Swiss?

Bonzom: No, he’s French, but we, French, do have a sense of humor, too! (laughter). Now, for many critics in the art world, you are the Pie Man, the guy who painted cakes in the 1960s. People and critics were surprised, even here in your region of Sacramento and San Francisco, when you painted cityscapes, when you made the rural landscapes of the Sacramento River. How do you feel about that strong tendency in the art world to classify people, put them in a little box, you know, “You’re the Pie Man”, “He’s doing the Mondrian networks” and all of that ?

Thiebaud: Well, I think it’s a useful kind of thing that helps us file things. It’s a convention that means a convenience so it helps us to classify and organize our thinking. I think every painter probably feels he doesn’t want to be classified. It’s very hard to find a card-carrying Pop artist. They all say: “No, no, I’m not a Pop artist, I’m a formalist, I’m so and so”. Maybe Warhol might say “Yes, I am”, if he says anything.

Bonzom: Is it even possible, in your view, for an artist, for a painter, let’s say, to be part of a group, any group?

Thiebaud: Yes, well, groups are very important, I think, because that’s where the interaction solidifies and organizes and develops a critical sense in a kind of group interchange. The bare figure painting, Braque and Picasso, the German Expressionists, on and on. That kind of interchange is of tremendous value when it helps shy away from superficialities, obviousness, eccentricities which are maybe not interesting, solipsism, and all those things. I think, however, there is only one kind of painting and that’s simply the way in which a two-dimensional surface is made into a three-dimensional world.

Bonzom: When you look back at what you did in the ‘60s, the famous cakes and pies, did you consider yourself, at that very moment, part of the Pop movement?

Thiebaud: No, because I knew nothing about it, and I also, because I came more from commercial art, that was already a popular art, and that’s something, oddly enough, that has not been written about very much. Where Warhol came from, in terms of his images, and in what way the Pop artists cannibalized commercial art, so that this kidnapping of processes and conventions is something which will finally be considered in terms of a quality of ideas. There are two kinds of painting, maybe, which, for me, help students when they get into questions of this kind, and it helps me at least to make a point which I’m very interested in, about which is where art is. That is, there is in science two kinds of science, applied science and research science, and parallel to that, I think, is the same in the painting tradition. There are research painters, as I see them, who want to clarify something which has no application. It’s just for what it is. Ad Reinhardt’s fascination with black. Barnett Newman’s interest in sublime limitations, and on and on. But each of those serious research types of paintings, I find mostly terminal, where they find themselves, end themselves and do what they do well so there’s not much more to go on from. So, research painting can be of that kind. It can also be of the kind of Cézanne who’s trying to find what form is, how you orchestrate planometric shapes and develop a classical rhythm or whatever, where people think “we can never apply that to anything, that’s just painting for painting sake”. And modernism, to a great extent, had a lot of that art-for-art sake. The trouble with it is that we don’t yet know what art is, even though we’d like to think we do. Art may come from the damnest places, it may come from George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, on and on. So, that’s an argument I’d like to keep alive in terms of saying “This distinction between fine art and commercial art, I find somewhat spurious and there’s too much self-congratulation on this idea of the fine art…better be a little more careful about it”. Now my students, they’re on to me, but if they make a mistake and say “now, I have to go and do my art”, I say, “wait a minute, not so fast, what are you going to do?” “Well, I’m going to do my art”, I say “No, you’re going to try to do some painting”. Someone else has to decide whether it’s going be art or not. And probably, it’s not.

Bonzom: You’ve talked about the importance of commercial artists and commercial art. I believe that you feel a good kinship with Edward Hopper who, like you, was also a commercial artist. Is the kinship with Hopper based on your shared experience of commercial art, of working under constraint, or based on the importance of lines and of relationships between the elements of the picture?

Thiebaud: It’s a very subtle thing with Hopper. Clement Greenberg [13], the old pronouncer, said this about Hopper. This is fascinating to me. Greenberg said: “If Hopper were a better painter, he wouldn’t be a very good artist but because he’s a bad painter, he’s a good artist”. And that sort of circumlocution and philosophical fun doesn’t help to really understand what Hopper does. Hopper is arid, he’s minimal, he’s the essentializer. Those things are admirable because it’s so easy to show off. Art directors always tell you: “this work needs to be slicked up, blah, blah, blah”. Hopper could keep that from happening. That’s not easy to do. So, I like that about him. I also think he’s a marvelous composer. At his best, he’s very, very fine, indeed. Like all of us, at his worst, he’s ham-handed and strange and dry and so on.

Bonzom: Do you see a thread going from Hopper to Vermeer?

Thiebaud: Yes! There’s a thread between those two in terms of their planometric interest. There’s that funny story about Degas. Someone rushes up to Degas and tells him: “Oh, look at that space and that landscape! You should paint that!” Degas says: “Yeah! That’d make a hell of a nice flat picture!” (laughter) Well, you know right away what he’s talking about, that plane. And Vermeer does it with those maps on the wall and frontal organize. And Franz Kline said that was he’s favorite painter, because of the reductive sense of planometric power of his compositions and that’s what’s good about Hopper as well, his forests which look more like stage-set drops, but right next to it is this little store with a clock and a beautiful little flat picture in the middle of a doorway and a whole series of Mondrianesque pictures. Marvel!

Bonzom: How about Velasquez?

Thiebaud: Velasquez! (laughter) The damned guy! Makes us all ashamed, you know, he’s so…he shouldn’t be able to do what he does at all, and he becomes the leader of that bravura school of direct handling of paint. Astounding! Just makes you weak in the knees to see what he does, to stand in front of the Las Meninas.

Bonzom: The lusciousness, the body of it.

Thiebaud: Yeah! And you could not do that on purpose, so many people try to emulate it. And so you had to come away with a kind of, some, well, Frans Hals makes it a kind of time thing. Well, he says I know I can’t spend too much time (laughter) because it’s going to be a fake, so I got to make it as if it’s on the edge of split second time. And Manet, I’ll just have to quit … and do some flowers.

Bonzom: And Matisse?

Thiebaud: Matisse is a…huh, I hated Matisse. I thought he was the clumsiest painter in the world. I liked fashion illustrators much better! (laughter) But I love Matisse. Matisse is a wonder, obviously. The amazing thing he was able to do with the planometric and volumetric and getting those things to go together is a lesson in fancy juggling, how he could keep those two different kinds of space always at some dialogue but also never resolved in a way, it’s what enlivens his paintings and I think that’s why he liked to talk about tensions so much. I think he’s truly a wonder. Both Matisse and Picasso kept doing this but I feel more and more, it’s an awful thing to say or a fun thing to say, that somehow it seems like Matisse may be gaining on Picasso over the years. The interesting difference, for me, ---that may be awful boring, I don’t know but I think in a way Picasso never was a painter, he was a strong graphic artist, and Matisse stayed a painter. I don’t know maybe that’s not true, I’ll have to think more about that.

Bonzom: Do you mean that Picasso is more interested in shapes and design?

Thiebaud: Yes, he was a very great designer. He was a terrific craftsman also.

Bonzom: When you were in the south of France working in Vallauris, did you go and see the mural work by Matisse, the chapel in Vence?

Thiebaud: No, I only saw Picasso’s mural in Vallauris, “La Guerre et la Paix”.

Bonzom: You’ve done some mural work yourself. That mosaic mural commission here in Sacramento?

Thiebaud: Yes.

Bonzom: Did you ever do other murals?

Thiebaud: At the California State Fair, I did murals but they were only temporary. We worked on putting together the art show and as a part of that, we did murals, rather large murals.

Bonzom: Did you bring back something from mural art to the painting on canvas or wood?

Thiebaud: Well, I had done a series of paintings in the early fifties and mid- fifties, sort of, almost pointillist paintings, so that the tiles were a nice way of implementing that particular fixation of the moment. I didn’t do a lot of them but they were several and the mural in Sacramento sort of terminated that.

Bonzom: What is the process of your work? You know, starting from life, going back to the studio, many times going back to painting from life, is that correct?

Thiebaud: Yes, back and forth. Particularly with the figures. I tried to do them from memory. You know, most of the paintings are done largely from memory, and that’s another thing that interests me, the difference between observation and memory, but the figure paintings, I tried to do from memory and ran smack up against my limitations, so! (laughter)

Bonzom: When you’re talking about the difference between observation and memory, are you talking about the way something we have seen from reality is transformed by memory, distorted or embellished or undergoing any other kind of transformation by the memory process?

Thiebaud: A project I give my students is to do that. They first must paint something they think they know well, you know, a hammer, a shoe, a tennis ball, and they have to know that they have it someplace at home. But today, we paint it absolutely from memory. So they take a small canvas and they paint. Then, they bring in the piece and paint another whole different painting, observing it, which gives us an opportunity to talk about how those perceptual, conceptual memory experiences are somehow put together, so that you see what you could remember, what it lacks, or if it was more interesting than the one … back and forth. Then, we look at paintings to see what we think. When did Matisse use his memory as opposed to observation? Did Cézanne ever use his memory, except maybe thinking about Poussin? And if so, how did that help him orchestrate those relationships? I think it is one of those very important learning aspects of learning to paint.

Bonzom: The memory can also be memories, memories that the painter has from way back. So for example, when you paint a rural landscape, is there a piece of your memories of you actually farming with your grand-father or your father? Is that something that comes up?

Thiebaud: I’m sure it does. Classic story of Corot when a person observed him painting and said: “I don’t see that tree in your landscape”. He said: “Look behind you”. The person turns around and he says: “No, I mean, look behind you in my mind, it came from another place”. That’s very much a part of it. And that’s another reason for drawing a great deal because, as you’re drawing, you’re building a kind of vocabulary of forms by memory. You are, in a way, learning to see like a dictionary of forms. So, I find memory very, very interesting.

Bonzom: Is painting a language, to you?

Thiebaud: Yes but not of the tongue. I’m curious about Duchamp who said that “the eye is a dumb organ”. And you could see what he means, but if a student is drawing a still life or a figure, the mind will always be preeminent, it’ll always tell you “well, this is what you’re seeing, this is what you’re seeing”, well in fact, the eye has to correct that and that’s why you hold up your thumb to make a measurement because the mind has told you that position from here to there is a foot and a half long, so you got to make that that way, oh no, the eye says “I can’t see that,” the eye has gotten something in front of it, so the eye has to correct the brain in addition to the brain telling the eye what to do. Duchamp felt he had the answer to that but I think he’s wrong.

Bonzom: I also think painting as language because of Hopper. When he was asked about his work, --- and although he was more talkative than people think, he was not that talkative ---, but he used to say: “If I could say it with words, I would not have painted it.”

Thiebaud: Yes, in that sense, it’s a different language. You can miss that easily, by our educational system eliminating any kind of access to really looking at painting and art, generally. We don’t have art history, we don’t have really any kind of fundamental training in the arts in school or educating half a person, you know. So it’s not surprising the state we’re in, where people really have no opportunity to witness those things which are so wonderfully missing from their lives.   

Above: Candy and gum ball machines at a shopping mall in Virginia.

Bonzom: We are surrounded by objects, usually badly made objects, and an abundance of them, and in your paintings in the sixties, you have played a lot on this idea of repetition, of having several cakes in a row, the pin balls and all that. Do you think this abundance of stuff that has increased exponentially since the sixties in this society is a sort of screen that prevents people from going closer to reality and apprehending the world with more understanding?

Thiebaud: The most vitiating series of images, in my opinion, is the abundance of photography. We have accepted the fact that the reality that can be documented is photographic. This is not the way we see. We’ve gotten used to the idea that’s the way we see but in fact, we see two visions which we merge together but one never quite merges perfectly. We see variously. When you think of all the different ways in which the eye sees, you see out of focus, in focus, peripherally, inward, by memory, so that paintings give you that dimension of what real seeing is. Photography can’t do that. It’s a blessed technological form and tremendously effective but it ain’t all there is. And the trouble with art schools having integrated photography into painting and drawing studios is that it shows the poor students how agonizing and frustrating it is to try to learn to draw, so they pick up the camera and they’re off and running, but they’re running off in a direction-less world of limitation, and that’s a tragedy.

Bonzom: How important do you think drawing is to the painter?

Thiebaud: Drawing is fundamental. Absolutely. You can’t really paint unless you can draw. Even if you’re Horace Pippin or Rousseau. Rousseau is a terrific draftsman. Every leaf, every nuance, every depth that he could create. That’s why he went to the Louvre and copied that snake charmer and all that crazy stuff he did. Rousseau is a marvelous draftsman, so is Cézanne, so is Van Gogh. Van Gogh even taught drawing. Oh, Jesus!

Bonzom: Chardin.

Thiebaud: Absolutely! Yes! Well, I guess we’re foaming at the mouth about drawing! (laughter). But it is of prime importance.

Bonzom: One thing I have noticed about the subjects you choose is that they are all what we could call man-made, transformed by man, including the landscapes, the rural landscapes with those fields and rivers. Are you preoccupied with showing us, the viewers, or inquiring about how humanity transforms its environment?

Thiebaud: I think a little of that in terms of our ritualistic preoccupation, how we need to do something to things to feel ourselves present, whether it’s a cut cantaloupe or we lay out a fish on a platter and it’s a kind of murder we need to justify with some parsley and lemons, and even the idea of how we glamorize and ritualize things, I mean, you look at a very inexpensive jewelry shop at that little chip of a diamond because it has ninety lights lighting it up until you take it out in the sunlight and all the magic is gone. So, this whole idea of display fascinates me, the careful arrangement and repetition and design of windows, something about that is saying something about our selves and our need to organize, and that’s quite a tender human attitude and preoccupation.

Bonzom: What would be the main advice you would give to a young painter starting today?

Thiebaud: To get under a good instructor as quickly as possible and do lots of drawing, get your drawings corrected. Don’t be afraid of the term “academic”. Realize, even with that, that you’re at risk because you can fall in love with academic and formalist means. You have to both embrace it and learn how to escape from it. It’s not an easy task but that’s an important one in order to really be a serious contender in the tradition of painting, if that’s your desire, that’s the road, I think, you have to take.

Bonzom: How would you like people to remember you as an artist, as a painter?

Thiebaud: I think, hopefully, with pleasure and a sense of humor. I love it when they laugh at the work. And I think also I would like to be remembered as a teacher, as a responsible teacher. I’m not like Gore Vidal when they ask him “How would you like to be remembered? “, “I didn’t give a god damn!” he said (laughter).

Bonzom: You do care?

Thiebaud: Yeah.

Bonzom: Finally, I have this very wide open question. I would like you to tell me if there is anything about painting or your work that you’re never asked about and that is very dear to you, something that you think hard about, that is really part of your internal discussion?

Thiebaud: I have been fortunate to have so many people write about the work from so many directions which astounded me, but I’m always curious about that world of intellectual rarity where we get entranced by whatever the philosophical latest mode of interest is, whether it’s Lacan and Baudrillard at the moment or whether it was Merleau-Ponty earlier, you know. That’s a world in which I would like to know how they feel about humor and I cannot find out.

Bonzom: Is there philosophy in humor?

Thiebaud: That’s what I want to know. I’d like for those authorities to tell me. I’d like to hear’em. They never write about my work! (laughter) I think they intelligently shy away from it like crazy (laughter). What is that silly series of paintings and things like that? And I can see that they would lose their respectability if they decided to do that. But some of them have written about my work, wonderful people like Richard Wollheim and Donald Kuspit and Adam Gopnik, Robert Hughes, Michael Kimmelman, I mean I’ve had wonderful people write about it, so I’m very fortunate.

Bonzom: Were you amused, was there some kind of a sense of humor when you painted, I believe that’s your wife, Betty Jean, eating an ice cream with her legs wide open facing the viewer ?

Thiebaud: (laughter) I thought that was quite funny but some of the philosophers who got erotic preoccupations came about with a 360-degree spin that I was not thinking about (laughter). It’s wonderful how you are informed by your critics as well. I actually teach a class, once in a while, --- because the damned department chairman made me do it ---, I teach that class called art theory and criticism where we actually introduce the students to critical literature and the tradition of criticism. But I like to read criticism.

Bonzom: What is it about teaching that is so important in your life?

Thiebaud: Well, because the students reorient you back to very basic questions. Their sense of irony releases them from the belief that all things have been settled, when they know it hasn’t been and they’ll pose questions to you that keep you honest. That and just the joy of seeing them change and learn finally the way we’re all finally taught, I think, by ourselves, learning to teach themselves. That’s heartening to me. But they will really provoke you. You give them all the information about cubism, for instance, then, a nice young lady comes up and says: “That’s a terrible name, cubism, I see no cubes at all, where are those cubes?” I said “Well, maybe that’s not a good name, what would you call it?” and she comes up with a perfect name for cubism, “the crystal period”. I learned what cubism was from her.

Bonzom: Thank you so much, Wayne Thiebaud. It’s been a real pleasure, thank you.

Thiebaud: It’s been wonderful to talk to you and I’m sorry I went on so long and on, but it was fun.

Notes and Links for further reading:

[1] Luther Burbank (1849-1926) was an influential American botanist and horticulturist who introduced more than 800 new varieties of plants. His home and gardens in Santa Rosa, California, are a Registered National, State and City Historic Landmark. http://www.lutherburbank.org/

[2] Knott’s Berry Farm was founded by Walter and Cordelia Knott in 1940 and is the oldest theme amusement park in the United States, drawing 3.7 million visitors a year to its location in Buena Park, CA: https://www.knotts.com/blog/2020/april/the-history-of-knotts-berry-farm

[3]  This article provides some history on the origins of American yodel cowboy music: https://web.archive.org/web/20120317144925/http://www.19thcenturyguitar.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=54&Itemid=74

[4] The magnitude 6.4 earthquake that hit Long Beach in 1933 is documented in these photographs from the archives of The Los Angeles Times: https://www.latimes.com/visuals/photography/la-me-fw-archives-the-1933-long-beach-earthquake-20190205-htmlstory.html

[5]  For a history of Sacramento through the extraordinary life journey of founder John Sutter, read my article published by Swissinfo in 2008: https://www.swissinfo.ch/fre/le-suisse-qui-a-fond%C3%A9-la-capitale-de-la-californie/206760?utm_campaign=teaser-in-channel&utm_medium=display&utm_source=swissinfoch&utm_content=o

[6] Yeats’ “Before the world was made” can be read here: https://www.poetryverse.com/william-butler-yeats-poems/before-the-world-was-made

[7]  Richard Wollheim (1923-2003) was a British philosopher who wrote a lot about painting and art in general: https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/richard-wollheim-on-the-art-of-painting-art-as-representation-and-expression-2/

[8] Wayne Thiebaud’s son, Paul Thiebaud, was an art dealer who owned galleries in San Francisco and New York. He died in 2010 at age 49. http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/obituaries/articles/2010/07/02/paul_thiebaud_art_dealer_worked_to_educate_public/

[9] The University of California at Davis released this statement on the death of Wayne Thiebaud and other information about Thiebaud’s relationship and activities with UC Davis: https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/wayne-thiebaud

[10] Alice Waters, owner of the Chez Panisse restaurant she opened in Berkeley in 1971, has been instrumental in the movement toward local, organic and sustainable agriculture and food in the United States. “Chez Panisse Desserts”, a book written by Lindsey Remolif Shere with a preface by Alice Waters and illustrations by Wayne Thiebaud, was published by Random House in 1985. Read an interview of Alice Waters in the Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2017/05/alice-waters

[11] M.F.K. Fisher (1908-1992) was a major American writer whose work is a witty meditation on gastronomy and pleasure. Read her obituary in The New York Times here: https://mfkfisher.com/

[12] Bellini’s “Saint Francis in the Desert” at the Frick Collection in New York City: https://collections.frick.org/objects/39/st-francis-in-the-desert;jsessionid=E9CF24F8BA9694CAFC4C4ED35991A72D?ctx=610e2d27-28ae-4e9d-818f-ce678f019531&idx=0

[13] Clement Greenberg (1909-1994) was an American art critic whose writings, especially his book “Art and Culture”, were very influential in the 1960s and 1970s.

Wayne Thiebaud's works illustrating this interview, in order of appearance: "Cakes",1963; "Apartment Hill", 1980; "Pounds and Streams", 2001; "Watermelon and Knife", 1989; "Apartment View", 1993; "Suckers and Sweets", 2000; "Candy Apples", 1987; "Confections", 1962; "San Francisco West Side Ridge", 2001; "Renwick Gallery Tenth Birthday", 1982; "Two paint cans", 1987; "Candy Ball Machine", 1977; "Lipsticks", 1988; "Girl with Ice Cream Cone", 1963.

Photo credits for Thiebaud's works: National Gallery of Art, Nelson Atkins Museum, de Young Museum, Crocker Art Museum, Paul Thiebaud Gallery, San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art, American Art Museum, Hirshhorn Museum.

All other photo credits: Marie-Christine Bonzom.

Isabelle Bonzom #americanart #americanartist #americana #americanpainting #americanhistory #ushistory #usa #usnews #painting #art #cityscapes #countryscapes #contemporaryart #modernart