LAGUNA BEACH
Wayne Thiebaud: “Seventy Years of Painting” at Laguna Beach Art Museum

Less than a decade after the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco organized a retrospective touting fifty years of Wayne Thiebaud’s paintings, the Laguna Art Museum introduced a second retrospective entitled, “Thiebaud: Seventy Years of Painting.” This was not the result of poor arithmetic. The Laguna exhibition did in fact greatly expand the chronology through the inclusion of recent paintings, as well as Thiebaud’s student work and juvenilia.

Of the 84 works on view in “Seventy Years of Painting,” more than a third were executed since the San Francisco retrospective. The emphasis of the Laguna show was not on what was once a productive career, but on how that career continued to evolve. The 87-year-old artist is still fluent in the language of his iconic Pop still-lifes as demonstrated by the confident application of rich, thick paint in Food Bowls (2006) or Bakery Case (1996). Another theme revealed itself over the past decade, which guest curator Gene Cooper referred to as the “beach paintings.” The new focus included several sub-genres within the larger category of the beach. Groups of people, often depicted from above, recall the young artist’s summer job as a lifeguard in Long Beach. In Beach Group II (2003), a crowd gathers at the center of the composition while the yellow sand of the beach seems to drain into the nexus of this knot of people. A second strand within this theme focused on groups of dogs at play, chasing Frisbees and digging holes, as in the light-hearted Beach Dogs (2004-2007) or Eight Beach Dogs (2006). A third aspect propelled the vantage point even higher in works like Dark Beach (2003) and Triangle Beach (2003-2005), which focus on the flattened-out geometries and bold colors of the coastal landscape as seen from the air.
What emerged from the exhibition of these disparate works is the unique manner in which Thiebaud’s paintings train their viewers. Based on the studied, strictly balanced compositions of the Pop still-lifes, one is compelled to recognize order even in those images that depict the chaos of life in the natural world.