Ordinariness coexists easily with extravagance in the accomplished, ever-engaging paintings of Wayne Thiebaud — a true American old master.
The 88-year-old California artist is just as happy to paint a humble gumball machine as he is to construct elaborate caricatures of the up-and-down San Francisco cityscape.
He might render one part of a canvas with a distilled, almost disengaged, simplicity while slathering on paint elsewhere with the luxuriant texture of frosting on a cake.
These contradictory impulses merge comfortably in Thiebaud’s well-honed aesthetic, resulting in works that are deceptively sophisticated and broadly appealing.
More than 100 paintings and drawings by this distinguished artist are included in “Wayne Thiebaud: 70 Years of Painting,” a career survey on view at the Loveland Museum/Gallery though Aug. 16.
It is the easternmost and by far the smallest stop for this traveling exhibition, which was originally organized by Laguna (Calif.) Art Museum in 2007 and later enlarged by the Palm Springs (Calif.) Art Museum.
The show ranks among the largest and highest-profile offerings ever at the city-run space in Loveland, and, like the Fernando Botero retrospective that opened simultaneously in Colorado Springs, it should draw visitors from across the region.
Although it contains no selections from the scores of art musuems where Thiebaud is represented, it is nonetheless highly comprehensive, drawing on the family’s abundant holdings as well as loans from private collectors across the country.
The Mesa, Ariz., native’s early career included a 1936 stint in the animation department of Walt Disney Studios and work from 1946-49 as a layout designer and cartoonist in the advertising department of the Rexall Drug Co. in Los Angeles.
But his focus evolved from cartoons and commercial art to fine art, and he earned his bachelor’s and master’s of art degrees in 1951 and ’53 from what was then California State College in Sacramento.
In 1951, Thiebaud also had his first solo exhibition at the E.B. Crocker Gallery in Sacramento and began an extensive teaching career, which culminated with his retirement from the University of California at Davis in 1990.
He took a leave of absence in 1956-57 to spend a year in New York, where he met many of that city’s top abstract-expressionists, including Willem de Kooning, whose work he especially admired.
As influential as this time was on him, Thiebaud, like Richard Dieben- korn and other artists of more or less the same generation, has always remained rooted in the California aesthetic. This can be seen in part in his ubiquitious use of soft, luminous colors.
A couple of paintings on view from the 1950s, such as “Beach Boys” (1959), with its agitated brushwork, show the effect of abstract-expressionism on his work, but it did not take long for Thiebaud to turn away from that style.
In 1960-61, he began an ongoing series of still lifes which established his artistic identity and remain his best-known works. He focused on everyday objects, putting particular emphasis on food, especially cakes, pies and other pastries.
This exhibition has some wonderful early examples, including “Watermelon Slices” (1961) and “Cheese Display” (1966), an iconic, decontextualized view of a store display of cheese, complete with signs announcing the prices.
To keep these images from becoming saccharine or cloying, Thiebaud took a kind of detached, unemotional view of his subjects, an approach that is especially evident in “Candy Counter” (1966), a quiet, subdued oil and charcoal on paper.
Because of his penchant for the everyday and commercial, Thiebaud is sometimes associated with the pop artists, who were emerging at the same time. But ascribing such ties can be misleading, because his artistic intentions diverged in other directions.
Rather than emulating the conceptual edginess of Andy Warhol or becoming consumed with mass media and merchandising, Thiebaud has simply been the ultimate artistic democrat, deeming virtually any subject, however modest, worthy of his attention.
At the same time, he has taken a serious, kind of old-world approach to painting that is more closely related to Edward Hopper than Roy Lichtenstein. He meticulously studied the old masters, as some of his exhibited studies from the 1950s make clear.
Nearly as famous as Thiebaud’s still lifes are his dizzying, exaggerated views of San Francisco, with effusively detailed views of streets as vertical as buildings and oversized, sweeping freeways. Examples include “Dark City” (1999) and the sun-drenched “Uphill Streets” (1992-1994). These, along with the portraits, beach scenes and landscapes, add up to what Palm Springs curator Steven Nash calls in an essay the artist’s “many realisms.”
But whatever the diversity in subject matter or variances in style, there is one, unmistakable Thiebaud look.
Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com
“WAYNE THIEBAUD”:
70 years of painting.” Art. Loveland Museum/Gallery, Fifth Street and Lincoln Avenue. More than 100 paintings and drawings by the nationally recognized California artist are on view in this touring career survey. Through Aug. 16. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturdays and noon to 4 p.m. Sundays. $5 suggested admission. 970- 962-2410 or .
