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Lot Essay
Wayne Thiebaud’s grand, life-size Children of the Sixties is a rare early portrait from the great artist of the American vernacular capturing an evocative glimpse of the era’s legendary counterculture. Commissioned by his friend Muriel Kaplan to paint her children Amy and Jerrold, Thiebaud employs his distinctive technique to realistically render the children circumscribed in a nimbus of colors against an unadorned white backdrop, their figures illuminated with intense floodlights to establish an almost clinical austerity and nonnarrative context where all attention is concentrated on the figures and their vestments. While few in number, Thiebaud considered painting figures to be the ultimate artistic statement, noting that “I think it’s the most important study there is and the most challenging and the most difficult” (emphasis original; W. Thiebaud, quoted in K. Tsujimoto, Wayne Thiebaud, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1985, p. 100).
Children of the Sixties brilliantly encapsulates Thiebaud’s idiosyncratic artistic approach developed throughout his career, imbued with internal juxtapositions and a deep concern for translating traditional painting techniques into his contemporary milieu. An impartial chronicler of his times, Thiebaud here poignantly captures the essence of the human figure while crystallizing the fleeting, iconic style of the 1960s, capturing the cultural phenomena of Beatlemania and the counterculture as America experienced rapid societal change. The double portrait has remained with the Kaplan family since its execution almost sixty years ago and is now being offered by the subjects whom Thiebaud so grippingly captured in their youths.
Thiebaud turned to figure painting in 1963 after his first highly acclaimed still life paintings resulted in critics identifying him as a Pop artist, an association he never accepted. In these important works, Thiebaud employed a revitalized realism where the primary concern was to paint figures without affectation, sentimentality, or evasiveness, permeating the canvas with enough observed detail to personify the image while ensuring the work did not transcend into mere illustration. While his culinary still lifes were always painted from memory, for portraiture Thiebaud painted directly from his models, working perceptually to paint only what met his eye, scrutinizing his subjects with an intense stare which heightened his perception of visual data and intertwined subject and moment into one precise image. The artist explained that “close staring has a tendency to expand what you are looking at… staring fixedly at an object does something to expand time” W. Thiebaud, quoted in J. Coplans, Wayne Thiebaud, exh. cat., Pasadena Art Museum,1968, p. 35-36). Thiebaud mostly painted his close friends and family, and his interest was in freezing the figure at the precipice of action, in the moments just before or right after; Thiebaud described that “what I am interested in, really, is the figure that is about to do something, or has done something, or is doing nothing, and with that sort of centering device try to figure out what can be revealed” (W. Thiebaud, quoted in J. Friedman, “Anyone Can Be My Protagonist: Wayne Thiebaud’s Unrepresented Spectator,” in People: Figure Paintings 1936-2021, Wayne Thiebaud, New York, Wayne Thiebaud Foundation, 2021, p. 10).
Extant studio photographs evince the careful posing which Thiebaud orchestrated for Amy and Jerrold, placing them against a blank white backdrop evacuated of spatial illusion, floors and walls undifferentiated. The siblings’ alluringly liminal stances in blank space infuse the composition with temporal ambiguity, with Thiebaud explaining that “I like to put my figures in a pose that is not explanatory. It’s a way of getting rid of narrative. It gives a sense of timelessness” (W. Thiebaud, quoted in K. Wilken, “Wayne Thiebaud: Figures,” in op. cit., 16). The timelessness of the work is made all the more palpable by the visual contradiction of their inherent timelessness with their contemporary clothing. Jerrold sports a Beatles-style moptop hairstyle popularized just a few years previously by the band’s appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show—his Anglo-mania accentuated by his regal cape, an example of a London police uniform from the Edwardian era reinterpreted as a Carnaby Street vintage item. Amy’s long hair worn straight down in a fringe similarly bears witness to the massive societal shifts occurring in the 1960s, and along with the minidress presciently articulates the new American woman emerging at the time. The artist was intentional in his role as a chronicler of his times in both his portraits and his still lifes, rejecting grandiose subjects in favor of paying close attention to the living vernacular of American life. Thiebaud articulates his aim, writing, “I try to find things to paint which I feel have been overlooked… but some years from now our foodstuffs, our pots, our dress, our ideas will be quite different. So, if we sentimentalize or adopt a posture more polite than our own we are not having a real look at ourselves for what we are” (W. Thiebaud, “Is a Lollipop Tree Worth Painting,” San Francisco Sunday Chronicle, 15 July 1962, p. 28).
Children of the Sixties brilliantly encapsulates Thiebaud’s idiosyncratic artistic approach developed throughout his career, imbued with internal juxtapositions and a deep concern for translating traditional painting techniques into his contemporary milieu. An impartial chronicler of his times, Thiebaud here poignantly captures the essence of the human figure while crystallizing the fleeting, iconic style of the 1960s, capturing the cultural phenomena of Beatlemania and the counterculture as America experienced rapid societal change. The double portrait has remained with the Kaplan family since its execution almost sixty years ago and is now being offered by the subjects whom Thiebaud so grippingly captured in their youths.
Thiebaud turned to figure painting in 1963 after his first highly acclaimed still life paintings resulted in critics identifying him as a Pop artist, an association he never accepted. In these important works, Thiebaud employed a revitalized realism where the primary concern was to paint figures without affectation, sentimentality, or evasiveness, permeating the canvas with enough observed detail to personify the image while ensuring the work did not transcend into mere illustration. While his culinary still lifes were always painted from memory, for portraiture Thiebaud painted directly from his models, working perceptually to paint only what met his eye, scrutinizing his subjects with an intense stare which heightened his perception of visual data and intertwined subject and moment into one precise image. The artist explained that “close staring has a tendency to expand what you are looking at… staring fixedly at an object does something to expand time” W. Thiebaud, quoted in J. Coplans, Wayne Thiebaud, exh. cat., Pasadena Art Museum,1968, p. 35-36). Thiebaud mostly painted his close friends and family, and his interest was in freezing the figure at the precipice of action, in the moments just before or right after; Thiebaud described that “what I am interested in, really, is the figure that is about to do something, or has done something, or is doing nothing, and with that sort of centering device try to figure out what can be revealed” (W. Thiebaud, quoted in J. Friedman, “Anyone Can Be My Protagonist: Wayne Thiebaud’s Unrepresented Spectator,” in People: Figure Paintings 1936-2021, Wayne Thiebaud, New York, Wayne Thiebaud Foundation, 2021, p. 10).
Extant studio photographs evince the careful posing which Thiebaud orchestrated for Amy and Jerrold, placing them against a blank white backdrop evacuated of spatial illusion, floors and walls undifferentiated. The siblings’ alluringly liminal stances in blank space infuse the composition with temporal ambiguity, with Thiebaud explaining that “I like to put my figures in a pose that is not explanatory. It’s a way of getting rid of narrative. It gives a sense of timelessness” (W. Thiebaud, quoted in K. Wilken, “Wayne Thiebaud: Figures,” in op. cit., 16). The timelessness of the work is made all the more palpable by the visual contradiction of their inherent timelessness with their contemporary clothing. Jerrold sports a Beatles-style moptop hairstyle popularized just a few years previously by the band’s appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show—his Anglo-mania accentuated by his regal cape, an example of a London police uniform from the Edwardian era reinterpreted as a Carnaby Street vintage item. Amy’s long hair worn straight down in a fringe similarly bears witness to the massive societal shifts occurring in the 1960s, and along with the minidress presciently articulates the new American woman emerging at the time. The artist was intentional in his role as a chronicler of his times in both his portraits and his still lifes, rejecting grandiose subjects in favor of paying close attention to the living vernacular of American life. Thiebaud articulates his aim, writing, “I try to find things to paint which I feel have been overlooked… but some years from now our foodstuffs, our pots, our dress, our ideas will be quite different. So, if we sentimentalize or adopt a posture more polite than our own we are not having a real look at ourselves for what we are” (W. Thiebaud, “Is a Lollipop Tree Worth Painting,” San Francisco Sunday Chronicle, 15 July 1962, p. 28).