Art and The City; Artist’s Depictions of San Francisco I: Wayne Thiebaud
Wayne Thiebaud, Street and Shadow, 1982-83, 1996 http://www.crockerartmuseum.org, Oil on linen
35 3/4 in. x 23 3/4 in. Crocker Art Museum, gift of the artist’s family
“Vertiginous.”
This is the way Wayne Thiebaud (the painter, not artist, he insists) describes the landscape of San Francisco. Various dictionaries define this word as having an aspect of great depth, drawing the eye to look downwards. A giddy precipice. Inducing a feeling of vertigo, dizziness or of whirling. Alfred Hitchcock must have had the same thought in mind when he set his 1958 psychological thriller, Vertigo, in San Francisco. Against the backdrop of a gleaming cityscape James Stewart and Kim Novak play cat and mouse as they plunge their cars over the city’s precipitous streets.
There are other cities with hills and expansive views such as Lisbon and Hong Kong, but it is the imposition of a relentless grid of streets with a willful disregard for the terrain that gives San Francisco its unique quality. No discussion of gardens in San Francisco is complete without considering the city’s topography and layout. Behind the many densely packed wood-framed structures lie hidden small “pocket” gardens. Some are placed well below the dwelling, while others perch precariously above, accessed by winding wooden stairs.
Wayne Thiebaud, 24th Street Intersection, 1977. Oil on canvas, 35 5/8 x 48 in, Private collection, copyright Wayne Thiebaud
Wayne Thiebaud once lived down the street from me in the Potrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco. I never did get up the nerve to borrow a cup of sugar (or a tube of Alarizon crimson) from him, but it was a source of neighborly pride that he was there, just the same. Thiebaud’s paintings of mass produced pies and cakes vaulted him into the “pop art” scene of the 1950’s. With paint as thickly applied as the fillings and frostings he depicted, Thiebaud’s work revealed an optimistic regard for his subjects, and did not share the deprecating satirization seen in later pop art. In 1973 Wayne Thiebaud moved to Potrero Hill, at the time a working class enclave of Russian and Eastern European immigrants. Located on the bay below downtown, this neighborhood of low rents, sunny fog-free weather and spectacular views from its grid of plunging streets attracted writers such as Alan Ginsberg (who wrote Howl here), Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and the artist Robert Bechtle.
Potrero Hill where Thiebaud Lived is placed directly below the cityscape of downtown.
Inspired by the setting, Thiebaud produced paintings of fantastic cityscapes, with cliffs for streets punctuated by improbable gardens. All were executed using strong, saturated pigments reflecting the brilliant technicolor light of the city.
Wayne Thiebaud, Down Eighteenth Street, 1980 Oil and charcoal on canvas http://hirshhorn.si.edu/
Thiebaud presents not a literal representation of San Francisco, but the idea of the city. Wayne Thiebaud describes the process of painting this series: I’ve always painted out of doors, with a french easel, some in the city, but not very much. So I started from the San Francisco intersection, and I remember one time painting on the street, and a nice man came along, an older fellow, and he stayed longer than most people would, and he watched, and finally he couldn’t resist, and he said, “I’ll be God-dammed. You are painting the intersection.” He couldn’t believe it. so I knew from the beginning I was in trouble.
After painting directly on the street, and making 20 or 30 pictures that way, I felt none of them were very successful. The reason for not feeling that they were delivering on what I had hoped for had to do with some sort of dramatic feeling in this particular San Francisco landscape, and the on-site works weren’t reflecting this. And during this time, I had a chance to talk to the critic Brian O’Doherty, and he was relating to me how Edward Hopper worked on his city pictures. He made lots of different sketches, watercolors, drawings, and then he put them together, like a stage set. So I thought I would try that and see if it might help. I went back to the studio, and began to make a lot of drawings with graphite or charcoal on paper, which I could move around a lot, kind of playing around with them. These drawings seemed to offer more of the visual feeling that was closer to the idea of San Francisco. So, when I returned to painting again, the city itself looked more like the composite drawings I had been making. An that dialogue between what was actually there and what was made up became the basis of the entire series
Wayne Thiebaud: Cityscapes
Exhibition catalog with an interview with the artist by Richard Wollheim. 52 pages with color reproductions. Published by Campbell-Thiebaud Gallery, San Francisco, 1993
http://crownpointpress.stores.yahoo.net/waythiebcit.html
Wayne Thiebaud Apartment Hill, 1980 http://www.nelson-atkins.org/
It is the San Francisco neighborhoods whose names end in “Hill” (Potrero Hill, Telegraph Hill, Russian Hill, and Nob Hill) where Thiebaud’s cityscape paintings come to life. In a walk I took recently up and down these hills, the glancing light of the late afternoon sun placed some streets in deep shadow, while the apartment towers on the summits were illuminated like signal beacons.
Tourists crowd six deep before the crooked Lombard street as they will do before the Mona Lisa. I want to ask “Haven’t you seen a winding street before?” Looking closer, however, at these families from India and France, those polite Dutch kids with their blond dreadlocks, I see that everyone is smiling, laughing and appear quite giddy. This is the city as amusement park. The camera in my hand is nothing unusual on these streets. Indeed, because of it, I fit into the scene.
As I continue my walk to Nob hill I come to suppose that in a Thiebaud cityscape we are all a brand of tourist, where what is real is so improbable that only the fantastic comes close to reality. San Francisco as depicted by Wayne Thiebaud blurs the concepts of truth and the idea, where the city itself becomes a kind of polychrome dreamscape.
