An Interview with Wayne Thiebaud

Leonardo

An Interview with Wayne ThiebaudAuthor(s): A. LeGrace G. Benson, David H. R. Shearer and Wayne ThiebaudSource: Leonardo, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Jan., 1969), pp. 65-72Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1571930 .

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Leonardo, Vol. 2, pp. 65-72. Pergamon Press 1969. Printed in Great Britain

DOCUM ENTS-DOCUMENTS AN INTERVIEW WITH WAYNE THIEBAUD

A. LeGrace G. Benson* with David H. R. Shearert Interviewers' note-Since about 1962, Wayne Thiebaud has often been identified with Pop art, a term that seems more a critic's category than an actual 'move- ment' or 'school'. An alternate appellation has been The New Realism, one that relates more appropriately to the work of this artist. After a long period of masking and deliquescence offorms, there were to be seen in his works recognisable objects in their familiar shapes, colors, and, sometimes, surroundings. Perhaps because the return to the readily recognisable was something of a shock, tending to suppress reactions to all other factors operative in the work, it was difficult at first to take note of the real differences among the works lumped together in these misleading but convenient categories. From thepresent vantage, distinctions are easier to make.

For some painters (e.g. Lichtenstein), the relationship of the artist to the external world, so far as the work itself was concerned, seemed to have nothing to do with the problems of replication or of making a visual equivalent of the perception of the visible world that had been the study of the Renaissance or the Impressionist artist. There was, rather, an involvement with the images of reality pre-existing in comic books, advertisements, billboards, etc., augmented and refined by the artist to reveal something about the responses of the mind. Lichten- stein, Rosenquist, Warhol and others seemed to have been dealing with the 'popular image' rather than with the 'popular reality'.

Others included among the Pop artists or New Realists (e.g. Jim Dine) were indeed concerned with external realities, the common objects that populate our daily environment. But here again, the concern was less with creating an illusion or of incorporating reality than with using those two possibilities to adumbrate the little understood connections between these tangibilities and the subconscious, subliminal mind.

In the interview below, Thiebaud's articulate responses to our various questions give full indication that while he shares both of these kinds of artistic and philo- sophical concerns, he is preoccupied as well with that most ancient and enduring of artistic feats, the convincing and vibrant replication of reality. While he mentionsfreely many artists who have influenced him, his work is so singularly his own that these 'influences' are to be seen more as parallel accomplishments rather than anything having a direct bearing on his work. He, like them, is concerned with something more than that chicanery that makes us see aface where there is onlypaint arranged upon a surface. He seems to wish to join on that surface both the things seen and the thing as seen by a responsive human being who invests all that he sees with something of himself.

Interviewer. It's interesting to me that a lot of people from the very beginning in articles about your work referred to its Chardinesque quality; and they were referring it seemed to me not only to the material but also to your choice of subject matter and, to a certain degree, to the way you presented it in a straightforward manner. Is there anything conscious in this that makes you akin to Chardin or is it just one of those things that jumps genera- tions and centuries ?

Thiebaud. I think I have such a proclivity towards art history and its uses. I believe very much in the

*Assistant Professor, History of Art Department, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., U.S.A.

tFine Arts Librarian, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., U.S.A. (Received 24 April 1968.)

notion that 'Art comes from Art'. Chardin has always been one of the people I've loved very much, been thrilled by his work, and I'm sure I've been influenced a great deal by him particularly in specific ways. Chardin was very interested in the idea of the propensity of materials, which fascinates me, how you can take oil paint and make it function for the replication of so many things, and such different things. Let's say the expression of the softness of rabbit hair as opposed to copper pots or the clay pipe or eggs, all the variety, like those pork chops of Chardin which are as though they are full of fat, all that richness. Chardin's subject matter is something that is interesting to me, that is his reclaiming of still life objects. His choice of objects to paint

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A. LeGrace G. Benson with David H. R. Shearer

was really a celebration of very ordinary commonplace things; copper pots and clay pipes, dead rabbits or hares hung in the kitchen. Now they seem very uncommon in the sense that antique stores are uncommon. We are interested because the things which happened over a hundred years ago are visually and materially attractive to us in terms of intrigue; how did they curl their hair, how did they cook their soup, how did they make their pies and so on. The remnants of that era are uncommon to us, they seem rather special. But for Chardin's time, one must contextually reassign the materials the artists painted to see how commonplace a lot of them were.

I. So you were interested, then, in the idea of the commonplace object, just as Chardin was ?

T. Yes, but in a kind of complex way. It is difficult when you begin to try to make an analysis of how these objects are chosen; for example, how much attention did one pay to the color of the object, the lighting of it, the isolation of it, the sort of vital issuance of its stimulating force and then its psychological implications. How does one ever figure out how one was responsible for choosing a gumball machine ? On the one hand, one can say it was a common object that has a parallel with those of Chardin and certainly it does in fact, but then again what about the psychological implications of a gumball machine? We have a tendency to overlook the gumball machine, perhaps because of its commonness. But there are also funny reasons-we turn away from such things in a way as if we were playing down our senses. We are trained not to look at gumball machines by telling our children, as they delight in seeing them and in wanting chewing gum out of them, "You can't have that, it's bad for your teeth. I don't want you to have that gum!" Barnett Newman pointed out to me how we suppress our senses when he came to my first show; he said to me, "You know the gumball machine is in a way the most surreal object in the world, it promises things inside, it's like gift- wrapped elegance. All it supplies is something to chew on, but look at it with its brightest kind of colors plus the fact you put in the dirtiest, grimiest kind of copper money and out comes a beautiful magenta or yellow ball full of sweet promise". In many gumball machines there are other things to note-one may have one's fortune told, one can comb one's hair in a mirror, there is no end to the ways one can get involved with a simple thing like a gumball machine; so calling it a commonplace object is really a bit simplistic, I think. We tend toward a sort of over-simplistic preoccupation, it is helpful, but when you think about a gumball machine, it is both a most ele- mentary mechanism and a gadget for stimulating the grandest sort of associations and references. Thus one can see how difficult it is to sift out the reasons why one gets interested in a particular object (cf. Fig. 1)-why one paints people-why one is interested in pies.

People always say the same thing about pies. "I would never pick pies to paint, why did he pick pies ?" It is a simple fact that I started painting. I was painting in a certain way at one point and I was getting tired of doing the same kind of subject matter, like for example, gumball machines that I painted in 1915 and 1953. But they were so highly abstracted and I was so interested in being an artist. Then, as I got more and more interested in an object, as such, I began to feel that I wanted to get rid of the expressionist brushstroke, which jazzes up the surface, making everything active and busy. I decided to go back to very basic, formalistic concerns.

I took three basic shapes to work with: a rectangle, an ellipse or a circle and a triangle. Well, that's a piece of pie. A piece of pie is a triangle on a saucer, which can take on various elliptical shapes on two rectangles the bottom plane and the top plane. I chose a pie for a couple of reasons; because of its basic shape and because I had never seen a pie painted. I thought it might be interesting to select something I had not seen painted before, something that did not consciously or unconsciously bring to mind what I may have seen someone else paint. I have seen a pie in some of Breugel's paintings, but never a piece of pie in a cafe. As I started painting these very simple triangles on platters, I got more and more intrigued with pies. A pie has all kinds of marvelous complex associations. The whiteness of meringue became for me of great poetic preoccupation; it's like snow, like frost, like the concept of purity and, from a painter's standpoint white both absorbs light and reflects light, it's composed of all colors, like Chardin's tablecloths.

But then, I know you wonder-why a pie instead of a snow bank. Well, pie has a long history and it has other implications: the idea of 'Pie in the Sky', the old American preoccupation with Mom and Apple Pie, pie throwing contests, pie eating contests, pie throwing in Chaplin films. One makes a pie out of ordinary stuff, like raisins, squash or apples and gift wraps it, in a sense, with a crust. It's very magical, very special.

I. Well, at about the same time you were painting some other still-life subjects, for example, mustard and ketchup bottles (cf. Fig. 2). I have heard people discuss at great length whether they were heraldic. I note the shapes of a piece of pie that you referred to: the circle, the triangle, the square-the play of shapes against each other. What about this painting: is it related to the same group of ideas also ?

T. It is related in some ways, I think it almost an obvious kind of homage to Morandi who, in one period of his work, grouped objects in, I think, a very unusual way. He felt that he had just taken some bottles and compressed them as tightly as he could. He was fascinated, it seems to me, with how much one can compress objects in painting illusionistically and still not disturb the viewer but have him feel that there is not enough

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Documents: An Interview with Wayne Thiebaud

Fig. 1. 'Pinball Machine', oil on canvas, 24 x 52 in., 1962. (Collection of Allan Stone Galleries.) (Photo: Allan Stone Galleries, New York.)

Fig. 2. 'Mustard and Catsup', oil on canvas, 1964. (Photo: Wayne Thiebaud.)

C,dim--- ....... _ '" . I Illr lll

.....

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room between the objects. They are so tightly compressed they are false. In this painting of mine, this is one of the things I was interested in- in the space between objects. The objects are for me like small landscapes, buildings or characters in a play with costumes; they have all of these images for me.

I can think of other painters who seem to me to be dealing with this type of concept. When the painter creates a microcosm, a little world that he is able to manipulate and to bring parts of it into existence, one gets much downright pleasure from the experience. As a painter, for a number of years I have had certain simple cyclic interests. They have basically been concerned with land- scape, the human figure, portraits and still life objects. When I painted food products it is perhaps interesting to note that they were painted from memory. I did not have the objects in front of me; I made it a point to paint the pies, the gumball machines, the cakes etc. as I remembered them. And this is perhaps what makes them seem like icons, in a sense; they're greatly convention- alized in many ways and yet they may allude to spatial and volumetric associations. When I started to paint the human figure, what I would have liked to do would have been to paint it from memory, but I am unable to do that. The artistic conventions I know of are not those which fascinate me in terms of figure painting. There- fore, I had models to pose for the figure paintings -poses that lasted for long periods of time. While there are many traditional aspects of frontality or the isolation and the quality of paint in the paintings, they differ in that I was much more preoccupied with volumetric projec- tions, foreshortening, etc., than I was in my earlier still lifes.

At one opening of my show in New York, Allan Stone, instead of serving champagne, served cakes, pies, candy suckers, etc. The baker, who came to decorate a real cake, made a great event of the occasion. In the show I had a big painting of a wedding cake, which he commented on in the jargon of his profession. The real cake was nothing like the cake in my painting. In still- life painting one can get away with much more than one can in a painting of the human figure, because we know the human body so intimately, in a way, too much so. For this reason, figure painting is, from my point of view, the most difficult of all for an artist. It is almost impossible; we are acquain- ted to such a high degree with what a figure looks like or with what we would like it to look like that one becomes artistically limited. This is not true of wedding cakes and pies; we look at them impressionistically compared to the way we look at figures. People said that my painting of a cake looked very realistic. However, when we posed a real cake near the painting, the real cake looked so different that we decided not to offer the comparison. Only then did I realize how little my painted object resembled a real object.

I. I am interested in the size of objects in your paintings. First of all, are they different from their real size ? Also, when you made figure paintings, did you do them full scale or of an imagined size ?

T. Yes, that's a good question, because it is very difficult to transfer a three-dimensional object to a two-dimensional surface. I remember, as a commercial artist in the Rexall Drug Co., wanting to produce a life-size color photograph of Jimmy Durante to place in a hall. In a meeting with our advertising director he said: "I want him to look like he's gonna reach his hand out and shake your hand! I want it realistic, and I want it to give people a double start when they walk in the door. 'Gee, I thought I saw Jimmy Durante'- Now, get the scales perfect for that life-size."

First we measured the height of Jimmy Durante. He is about 5 foot 7. We photographed him and enlarged the color photograph to full size; cut out the figure, put it on hardboard and stood it up. When we looked at the result, Jimmy Durante looked like a runt-he seemed to be 4 foot 2. We made something like seventeen or eighteen color blowups of Jimmy Durante of different sizes and we had them standing around, trying to choose the most realistic one. We even posed Durante next to the cut-outs to see which was the most like him. I learned that to produce an illusion of actual dimensions of real objects is extremely difficult.

If one goes to the Prado in Madrid and sees the Velasquez figures, life-size portraits, how big are they really ? One feels that they are life-size. One recognizes his ability to capture the weight and energy of 'reality', how to give an illusion of size and scale. One also recognizes this ability in Eakins. What makes Eakin's tiny scale seem so vitally alive and so right? One is not conscious of the edges of things; one does not notice that there is a frame or a format.

In my paintings of still-life, I was interested in the questions; how big is a piece of pie on a plate; what is the color of a pumpkin pie ? I used to have in my studio little patches of color-pumpkin colored, lemon meringue colored, chocolate pudding colored. Color basically is a problem similar to that of size. Well, pumpkin pie color is one color, damn it, and it is an ochre with some orange in it. One thinks of adding cinna- mon and eggs, but when one mixes them together and puts it on a white canvas the result looks like pudding not the color of a pumpkin pie. When you place the mixture next to a slab of pumpkin pie, it seems to match in color but on a canvas it definitely does not-why ? It lacks life, vitality- one must add patches of orange, of blue, of other colors, in fact, a mosaic of colors to give it some semblance of the pumpkin color one sees in reality.

I suppose that basically we are talking about the concept of reality. I feel the opposite of so many people who think that realistic painting is dead. I think it is just beginning. I really

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Fig. 3. 'Booth Girl', oil on canvas, 1964. (Collection of Allan Stone Galleries.) (Photo: Wayne Thiebaud.)

believe that the solution of the problems is realist painting have never been touched any- where. In addition to the concept of scale and spatial problems, there is the terribly difficult concept of'time' in a painting. What is the 'time' of Harnett as opposed to the 'time' of Vermeer? That's a question which fascinates me. I look at a Vermeer painting-how much 'time' has he compressed in those frozen clear edges? How does one figure this out?

I. How do you feel about the various interpretations that have been made of'Booth Girl', for instance ? (cf. Fig. 3) I have heard at least fifteen different interpretations. Do you find this desirable for your work-that it is open to so many interpretations, almost as many interpretations as there are people looking at it, it would seem?

T. First of all, I am grateful that people take the time to look at them at all, especially if they respond. If they are serious, any reaction they have gives me joy. It is never sad to read what people say about one's work. Whether you agree with them or not is another thing. I had a theory of the concept of so-called Pop art when art writers began to write about it. I think that writers who wrote largely about Pop art in the popular press were writers who, without realising it, were before restricted in what they could say. Pop

art became a stimulus for them to express what they felt about what was happening in the world. They wrote that the pop artist is concerned with social alienation, with a society amidst mass produced goods-cheap, ordinary and banal objects. They began to see that Pop art expressed what they feel. But if one considers the idea of Pop art, it is terribly complex, you know. There are artists who wish to celebrate Coca-Cola signs as beautiful objects-they love them to death. They love comic strips. I believe you would have to admit that the 'Seventy-Six Union Stations' symbol is really quite an elegant symbol. Artists trained in art schools have thought about a great number of objects and subjects to paint. I know this because I worked in an advertising agency where one worked for years on a logo (a consumer goods label). It was blown up to a huge size-it was reduced to a tiny size. I mentioned our work on the image of Jimmy Durante-the amount of time we spent on it does not compare with the time spent on a logo. The label on a can of soup has to stand out from all competing cans of soup. If you look at a can of Campbell's soup or at a cigarette package, you will find that they are very special.

Pop art made use of these commonplace objects-whether you like them or not, they are

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intrinsically elegant, beautiful-one can use the terms 'classical' or 'perfect'. They are icons. We have selected them from thousands of other objects. They are one element of Pop art. Another element is the hate of popular society- women with girdles, money, etc. The ideal of these artists is to have a lot of fun and joy out of 'Silly Americans'. But then, how would one describe Jasper John's painting, 'Flag'? What is it ? Is it a celebration of a flag ? Or is it a simple reaction to our preoccupation with nationalism ? Or is he caught up with traditional spatial preoccupations ? Is it possible to place his painting within a category ? I, personally, do not feel that we know enough about the world to be able to say with any finality what is happening in it.

I. What about 'Fruit Stand'? T. Well, I think this painting relates to something in

my work that I have not talked about as yet- the feeling of nostalgia in a person. One of the things that I have been accused of, and I think rightly, is that my paintings treat things which have had much use-old pinball machines, old salt and pepper shakers without stainless steel tops, etc. New shakers do not interest me, partly because I paint from memory-I remember as a boy, a big salt shaker, with a big top with big holes and the pretended cut-glass sides. Napkin dispensers where the napkins really hung out, rather than the new kind which spit out at you when a button is pushed. Commonplace objects are constantly changing and when I paint the ones I remember I am like Chardin tattling on what we were. The pies, for example, we now see are not going to be around forever. We are merely used to the idea that things do not change. The Breugel pies I mentioned earlier were vastly different from our pies, as will be pies in 1985. Already pies are being baked-Betty, my wife, and I saw them in Missouri-in the shape of hexagons with separations so one does not have to cut them.

I. Do you believe the wheeled fruit stand is disap- pearing from our cities ?

T. Yes, I do. They are now only a cultural remnant. They are not going to be around much longer. Especially with their hand-lettered signs.

I. Do you feel nostalgic about the hand lettering? T. Yes, very much. Imagine trying to get the word

'apples' to fit on a big sign! But now big felt pens and stencils are given to the fruit-stand operators, so that the lettering comes out neat. One sees very few fruit stands today as they used to be and these are the ones that have been abandoned along the road.

I. This brings to mind another experience. When one is driving along the highway one sees the sign ICE COLD with a red watermelon underneath it. There is a bright blue shadow inside the stand and one feels it is cool inside. But somehow the blue is a 'hot' blue, almost as hot as the red. Could you talk about this ? (cf. Fig. 4).

A little while ago you were saying that one of

the problems of realism is to recreate a real sense of reality. Jimmy Durante, in order to be given an impression of his real size, had to be replicated taller. Do you think that in your paintings you have succeeded in giving one who looks at them a feeling of reality ?

T. I think generally I do. I think most of my paintings use direct expression-they are exag- gerated. When you think of painting as a painting it is rather absurd. The real world is before us- glorious sunlight and activity and fresh air, and high speed motor cars and television, all the animation-a world apart from a little square of canvas that you smear paint on. Part of the problem of art is to compete, exactly and very specially, with the real world. One must look at it and not be bored, not be put off. I like to think that, in terms of alternating warm and cool, hot and cold colors and of other effects, my paintings, I hope this is not too pretentious, create their own light and their own energy. As one looks at them one can sense the vitality of their surfaces. The colors seem, as Matisse liked to say, to expand as one looks at it.

I. I would like to ask another question about light. You referred once, I believe, to going to Mexico and seeing small lights, then returning to the United States where shop windows and streets were brightly lit and that you were strongly affected by the contrast. Could you tell us about this experience and how it worked into your paintings ?

T. My experience in Mexico is similar to the one I had twenty years ago, as a small boy. Then an electric light bulb of 60 watts or even of 20 watts was usual. Now, one must have 75 or 150 or even 200 watt lights in the house. It was apparent to me when we came back from Mexico that not only had the lights at night changed but that there was a general glittering activity on all sides. There was more chrome, more reflected light, more flags waving-when one went into a place to eat, the speed and tempo were much greater, the light sources were much larger, the flamboyance, the energy was omnipresent. We only noticed this after we had gone to a slower-paced community.

But the problem of lights at night was one that had interested me for a long time. What happens to objects under lights, particularly where we live, where we have an atmosphere which is very clear and very dry. The effect of light on objects has fascinated me a great deal because it is related to the problems we have been talking about-in the sense of halation and of the strengthening of color. If one goes out into the sunlight and looks at a shadow, the longer one stares, the more differences one notices. One begins to see its color composition, that its edges have a different color than its inner part, that one can see the edges of the edges. I live in a part of the country [California] that is good for this kind of study. I decided to express myself in a way that was different from the period in which I painted pies

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Fig. 4. 'Roadside Stand', oil on canvas. (Photo: Wayne Thiebaud.)

Fig. 5. 'Girl in a Tub', oil on canvas. (Photo: Wayne Thiebaud.)

and cakes. I began to use very strong light bulbs in my studio, a daylight bulb, a 3200? Kelvin photoflood light, which illuminated a subject, in some ways, like the sun.

I. This painting, 'Girl in a Tub' (cf. Fig. 5) has been compared, rightly or wrongly, with David's 'Death of Marat'. Is this comparison valid ?

T. Very much. I was very conscious of the famous David painting which I have known for a long time. I made several thumbnail sketches and 'thought' notes on what I would do. One of the problems was to in some way devise a painting of a person in a bathtub that did not look too much like the David painting. I recall that at one point

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.. . ..

Fig. 6. 'Toy Counter', oil on canvas, 20 x 28 in., 1963. (Collection of Allan Stone Galleries.) (Photo: Wayne Thiebaud.)

I had an arm hanging out of the bathtub. Then I replaced the bathtub with a big tray. When I saw Betty Jean (my model for the painting) on the meat tray, the sight was so cruel, so brutal it made me want to cry. I first made a tiny painting; I sometimes make a small model painting to help me get away from too much realism.

I. Is this painting full scale ? (cf. Fig. 5) T. Yes, it is full scale-the head is about life size.

The scale of the painting frankly bothers me a bit. I cannot make up my mind about it; sometimes when it is shown it is the favored painting, perhaps because it is so melodramatic. I have a photograph of a good friend of ours looking at Betty Jean in the painting and it gives the impression that he is looking into a coffin.

I. Let us turn to the group of paintings that you did of toys. They are in quite a different spirit. What interested you about the toys at the time? Did they come before the figure paintings ? (cf. Fig. 6)

T. No, I made them in between the pies and cakes and the figures. Some of them were done at the same time as the figures, particularly the panda dolls and some silly dolls, something like

'Raggedy Ann' dolls. There were five identical dolls sitting on a ledge with their legs dangling. Toys are constantly changing. Those we choose reflect what we are. When we line our shelves with blocks and panda dolls or with trucks, guns, jeeps and 'GI Joe' monkey outfits, we are showing our preoccupations in life. A terrific thing about toys is their bright colors. For some reason, when we make toys we are not so self-conscious. We make concessions to toys that we would not make for other objects. We paint them brighter, make them gayer or even erotic. Dolls can be terribly erotic. We dress them in lace so they can be rather 'sweet' also. I guess dolls also show in some way what we are like.

I am somewhat annoyed with our preoccupation with art students. We give them a strange over-expectancy about what art is. Critics seem to go out of their minds with the most wild jargon about what art is. I agree with them that art is going to save the world. But it is not going to save it with heroic gestures but with nuances of fact which an artist can express in a very direct and real way.

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Fig. 7. 'Hors d'wuvre Plate', oil on canvas, 1964. (Photo: Wayne Thiebaud.)

[facing p. 72]

