Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art

In an interview with Apollo in 2017, four years before his death, the American artist Wayne Thiebaud claimed that ‘the art world is not much interested in humour […] to its disadvantage’. There is certainly humour in Thiebaud’s paintings – his many depictions of clowns, the perspectival games he liked to play in his portraits, the almost provocative matter-of-factness with which he painted everyday objects: boxes, cakes, a pair of shoes. There is something cheeky, too, in Thiebaud’s self-confessed identity as an ‘art thief’, a trait which the Legion of Honor is putting to the fore in this retrospective, which focuses on Thiebaud’s reinterpretations of the work of other artists (22 March–17 August). Some of these works incorporate subtle references to artists from Rousseau to De Kooning; others are more outright copies of paintings and drawings by Rembrandt, Hals, Morandi and others, many of which are on display alongside the Thiebaud pieces here. Visitors can also see, for the first time, two works from the artist’s personal collection: an Ingres drawing from 1817 and an abstract canvas by Joan Mitchell painted in the 1950s.

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Find out more from the Legion of Honor’s website

Five Seated Figures (1965), Wayne Thiebaud. © Wayne Thiebaud Foundation/licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Supper at Emmaus (after Rembrandt van Rijn) (n.d.), Wayne Thiebaud. © Wayne Thiebaud Foundation/licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Three Machines (1963), Wayne Thiebaud. Photo: Randy Dodson; courtesy Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; © Wayne Thiebaud Foundation/licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Harriet Frances Webster Pellew (1794-1849), Mrs. Fleetwood Broughton Reynolds (1817), Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Photo: Jorge Bachmann; courtesy Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco