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拍品专文
“Painting is more important than art” - Wayne Thiebaud
In Boat Profile, the small vessel that chugs across the flat, open water joins Wayne Thiebaud’s pantheon of singular objects. Just like his paintings of individual cakes, ice creams, and gumball machines, the boat possesses an outsized presence that belies its isolated form. Boat Profile was painted at an important time in the artist’s career as he basked in critical acclaim for his painterly studies of memory, nostalgia and ultimately, the joy of painting itself. A sister painting to this work, Starboat (Tugboat and Riverboat) also from 1966, is in the permanent collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri.
Painted in 1966, Boat Profile is an essay in painterly composition by one of the most accomplished artists of his generation. Thiebaud's unrivalled skill results in crisp, precise lines, sumptuous fields of color and a handling of shadows and reflections that are almost fauve-like in their audacity. At first glance, the composition focuses on form, but closer inspection reveals a rainbow of colors that make up every edge, corner, and crevice. This kaleidoscopic effect is especially evident in the boat's reflection. The subtle, warm tones above the waterline are enhanced beneath the surface, the mirrored cabin and funnel awash in vibrant candy hues of hot pink, lime green, and regal purples.
“Painting is more important than art,” Wayne Thiebaud once said (W. Thiebaud, quoted by A. Gopnik, “An American Painter,” in S. Nash, Wayne Thiebaud: A Painting Retrospective, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2000, p. 39). Living and working in California, far from the abstraction that dominated the New York School of his youth, Thiebaud instead developed his own unique style. “I am very fascinated with the concept of the stare” he said. “Staring fixedly at an object does something to expand time. The more you look at it, the more the edges, the inside and the minute particles quiver. It is almost as if it is loaded and you recognize a kind of stillness which tends to vibrate. When I stroke around the object with a loaded paintbrush it is calculated to echo the presence of that object” (W. Thiebaud, quoted in J. Coplans, Wayne Thiebaud, exh. cat., Pasadena Art Museum, p. 35-36).
Wayne Thiebaud emerged onto the public consciousness in 1960 with his strikingly original and engaging paintings of American diners and food counters, and the cakes, confectionary, and candies that they served. With each of his subjects, he isolates them against a light background and allows the interplay of light, color, and shadow to push the image beyond the realm of realistic representation into one of aesthetic beauty. Thiebaud’s interdisciplinary work captures the emotional resonance of a bygone age, turning the ordinary into the extraordinary with a few strokes of his brush. His paintings are as emblematic of the feeling of postwar America as Andy Warhol’s Coca-Cola bottles and tins of Campbell’s Soup. Yet his meticulous style helped to revive what had previously been regarded as the staid genre of still life, before he took hold of it in the early 1960s.
Looking back, Thiebaud noted of the 1960s, “At the end of 1959 or so I began to be interested in a formal approach to composition. I’d been painting gumball machines, windows, counters, and at that point began to rework paintings into much more clearly identified objects. I tried to see if I could get an object to sit on a plane and really be very clear about it. I picked things like pies and cakes—things based upon simple shapes like triangles and circles—and tried to orchestrate them” (W. Thiebaud, quoted in S. A. Nash, Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 2000, p. 15). The present work perfectly illustrates this orchestration. Encapsulating Thiebaud's most iconic techniques and inventive use of color, Boat Profile is a celebration of the artist's pure joy in the act of painting itself.
In Boat Profile, the small vessel that chugs across the flat, open water joins Wayne Thiebaud’s pantheon of singular objects. Just like his paintings of individual cakes, ice creams, and gumball machines, the boat possesses an outsized presence that belies its isolated form. Boat Profile was painted at an important time in the artist’s career as he basked in critical acclaim for his painterly studies of memory, nostalgia and ultimately, the joy of painting itself. A sister painting to this work, Starboat (Tugboat and Riverboat) also from 1966, is in the permanent collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri.
Painted in 1966, Boat Profile is an essay in painterly composition by one of the most accomplished artists of his generation. Thiebaud's unrivalled skill results in crisp, precise lines, sumptuous fields of color and a handling of shadows and reflections that are almost fauve-like in their audacity. At first glance, the composition focuses on form, but closer inspection reveals a rainbow of colors that make up every edge, corner, and crevice. This kaleidoscopic effect is especially evident in the boat's reflection. The subtle, warm tones above the waterline are enhanced beneath the surface, the mirrored cabin and funnel awash in vibrant candy hues of hot pink, lime green, and regal purples.
“Painting is more important than art,” Wayne Thiebaud once said (W. Thiebaud, quoted by A. Gopnik, “An American Painter,” in S. Nash, Wayne Thiebaud: A Painting Retrospective, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2000, p. 39). Living and working in California, far from the abstraction that dominated the New York School of his youth, Thiebaud instead developed his own unique style. “I am very fascinated with the concept of the stare” he said. “Staring fixedly at an object does something to expand time. The more you look at it, the more the edges, the inside and the minute particles quiver. It is almost as if it is loaded and you recognize a kind of stillness which tends to vibrate. When I stroke around the object with a loaded paintbrush it is calculated to echo the presence of that object” (W. Thiebaud, quoted in J. Coplans, Wayne Thiebaud, exh. cat., Pasadena Art Museum, p. 35-36).
Wayne Thiebaud emerged onto the public consciousness in 1960 with his strikingly original and engaging paintings of American diners and food counters, and the cakes, confectionary, and candies that they served. With each of his subjects, he isolates them against a light background and allows the interplay of light, color, and shadow to push the image beyond the realm of realistic representation into one of aesthetic beauty. Thiebaud’s interdisciplinary work captures the emotional resonance of a bygone age, turning the ordinary into the extraordinary with a few strokes of his brush. His paintings are as emblematic of the feeling of postwar America as Andy Warhol’s Coca-Cola bottles and tins of Campbell’s Soup. Yet his meticulous style helped to revive what had previously been regarded as the staid genre of still life, before he took hold of it in the early 1960s.
Looking back, Thiebaud noted of the 1960s, “At the end of 1959 or so I began to be interested in a formal approach to composition. I’d been painting gumball machines, windows, counters, and at that point began to rework paintings into much more clearly identified objects. I tried to see if I could get an object to sit on a plane and really be very clear about it. I picked things like pies and cakes—things based upon simple shapes like triangles and circles—and tried to orchestrate them” (W. Thiebaud, quoted in S. A. Nash, Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 2000, p. 15). The present work perfectly illustrates this orchestration. Encapsulating Thiebaud's most iconic techniques and inventive use of color, Boat Profile is a celebration of the artist's pure joy in the act of painting itself.