Wayne Thiebaud Mountains: 1965–2019. Text by Margaretta M. Lovell and Michael M. Thomas

Abstract

Wayne Thiebaud Mountains: 1965–2019 catalogues a 2019 exhibition at Acquavella Galleries in New York City. It includes a biography of the artist; a foreword by Eleanor Acquavella, the owner of the galleries; and essays by Michael M. Thomas, a former curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Margaretta M. Lovell, a professor of American Art at the University of California, Berkeley. The 33 plates of the works exhibited boast vivid colors and high resolution, showing Thiebaud’s much-lauded brushwork to great advantage. While it can be difficult to gauge the relative sizes of the different paintings, Thomas and Lovell occasionally provide a helpful sense of scale by comparing them to each other. Wayne Thiebaud was born in Arizona and grew up in California. He started out in cartooning and commercial art, then gained recognition for his ‘‘cheerful, impossible to resist’’ paintings of ‘‘desserts, shoes, countertops, and other quotidian objects’’ (p 11; Figure 1). He began his series of mountain paintings ‘‘entirely from memory’’ (p 7) in the 1960s, intensifying his focus on mountain subjects in the 2000s. In ‘‘Wayne Thiebaud’s Mountains: An Appreciation,’’ Thomas takes a conversational tone, avoiding excessive jargon and employing broad strokes, for example, ‘‘America is about independence and so is Thiebaud’’ (p 24). He notes the paintings’ ‘‘monumentality’’ (p 13), ‘‘precipitous verticality’’ (p 14), and ‘‘general lack of human presence’’ (p 18), in contrast to works of other mountain painters. Through such comparisons, Thomas portrays Thiebaud as an unconventional landscape painter and primes readers for the works to come. Thomas’s judicious use of quotes also conveys Thiebaud’s personal charm: ‘‘‘I’m obviously a very influenced painter and I delight in being so’’’ (p 18). As a geologist, I read Thomas’s discussion of Big Rock Mountain (Figure 2) with interest. In my view, it illustrates vertical exaggeration, cross section, and layer-cake geology effectively. The fact that Thiebaud ‘‘painted and repainted [it] over the past 15 years’’ (p 19) lends the work an appropriate sense of change over time, albeit on a human, rather than geologic, scale. Though Thomas’s essay helped me appreciate Thiebaud’s enigmatic mountains in a more nuanced way, I did not feel the ‘‘special joy in verticality’’ (p 19) he describes. While the series may reflect the artist’s joy and virtuosity, many of the works inspire disorientation and dread in this viewer. FIGURE 1 Wayne Thiebaud, Around the Cake, 1962. Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, gift of Ralph T. Coe in memory of Helen F. Spencer, 1982.0144. ( 2021 Wayne Thiebaud / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society [ARS], NY) FIGURE 2 Wayne Thiebaud, Big Rock Mountain, 2004–2021/2019. ( 2021 Wayne Thiebaud / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society [ARS], NY) Mountain Research and Development (MRD) An international, peer-reviewed open access journal published by the International Mountain Society (IMS) www.mrd-journal.org MountainMedia