Três Cones (Three Cones) - Wayne Thiebaud

Três Cones (Three Cones) - Wayne Thiebaud
Coleção privada
OST - 33x37 - 1964

Painted in the winter of 1964, Wayne Thiebaud’s Three Cones is an exemplary example of the artist’s work. His ability to contemplate—then replicate—light, color, space and form is unmatched in late twentieth century painting, and his rows of painted cakes, confectionary, pinball machines and ice cream cones have become an important part of the postwar American artistic canon. Living and working in California, Thiebaud eschewed the dramatic gestural abstractions of the New York School, instead developing his own unique style. “I am very fascinated with the concept of the stare” he says. “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). Three Cones occupies a distinguished place in Thiebaud’s personal story as it has been in the collection of Maggy Cullman (the first wife of Thiebaud’s dealer Allan Stone) since 1965, and has remained there for more than 50 years.
In this archetypal painting, a trio of delicious ice cream cones sit in a row, waiting to be consumed. The three cones are piled high with scoops of thick, slightly melting ice cream; their flavors—strawberry, chocolate and vanilla—representing the classic Neopolitan trifecta. Thiebaud’s generous application of paint perfectly mimics the surface of the ice creams, inviting the viewer—almost salivating with anticipation—to enjoy their rich, creamy goodness. The repetition of the ice creams is a motif that is central to Thiebaud’s work. He uses it in many of the best examples of his paintings; from the products lining his delicatessen counters to his rows of cakes and pastries, reiteration lies at the heart of the artist’s work. As central as the actual ice creams are to the composition, Thiebaud contrasts the richness and roundness of the scoops with the sparse geometry of the setting. The strict lines of the shelf upon which the ice creams sit are in stark contrast to the amorphous shadows that the cones cast. It is in these areas that Thiebaud’s exemplary use of color is also on display; from the soft pastel tones of the ice creams themselves, to the prismatic kaleidoscope that he uses to render the shadows and recesses of the composition, his handling of color to depict light and space is unmatched among his generation of artists. Adam Gopnik describes Thiebaud’s signature halation of his foodstuffs best, “The cakes, which seem so honestly and forthrightly described, turn out, when they’re seen up close, to be outlined with rings and rainbows of pure color; bright blues and reds and purples, which register at a distance only as a just perceptible vibrator. These rings are Thiebaud’s own invention; there’s nothing quite like them in any other painting, and they give to his pictures not just a sense of the shiver of light in a particular place but also the sense that the scene has the interior life and unnatural emphases of something recalled from memory” (A. Gopnik, “Window Gazing,” The New Yorker, Apr. 29, 1991, p. 80).
The origins of this unique style can be traced back to the late 1950s. Looking back, Thiebaud said: "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).
In addition to its quintessential subject matter, Three Cones comes with the distinguished provenance of having been in the personal collection of Maggy Cullman, who acquired it from her husband, Thiebaud’s dealer, Allan Stone. Cullman says she has always admired the artist’s paintings for the way they are able to tap into our emotional resonances, “… particularly the ice cream cones and the pinball machines, it elicits the senses; it brings back the sounds and smells and things like that, which I find remarkable” she says. “When he paints something, it becomes more real than the thing itself. His ice cream cones for example. I've never seen an ice cream cone that looked that much like an ice cream. When he paints something, it becomes more real than it ever was just by itself, which is quite remarkable.”
Jeremy Stone, Allan Stone’s daughter, continues “My father wasn't seeing that much representational work and he wasn't seeing such structured, organized thoughtful work that was such a contradiction to it. [In Wayne’s work] there was a thick painterly impasto and this impossibly seductive, cheerful color in a very formal construct. And, you know, seductive subject matter—pies and ice cream and cakes. And it was refreshing I think. And shocking… To me, the three kinds of ice cream—vanilla, chocolate and strawberry—were really such a classic example of the way Wayne approaches formal composition, using really temporal subject matter—ice creams. When you look at it, all you can think about is you've got to eat it before it melts. The other great thing about Wayne's paintings is that the ice cream never melts. They are so captured in time that the moment of infatuation, the moment of first seeing them, is what you keep with you always” (M. Cullman & J. Stone in conversation with Christie’s, March 2020).
Thiebaud’s unique skill transforms an object such as a humble ice cream cone into a work of painterly exuberance. Through the advances of mass production, commerce, international travel, and even technology, the simple strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla ice cream cone has almost become a nostalgic relic of the past. It references a slower, simpler time, in which a trip to the beach or the park meant listening out for the melodic chimes of the ice cream truck. Thiebaud’s Three Cones evokes all of these things and more, making it the symbol of American childhood. As Steven A. Nash described in Thiebaud’s retrospective catalogue: "His objects are nuggets of nostalgia, encoding fond memories from his youth but also aspects of American life meaningful to a great many of us." (S. A. Nash, "Unbalancing Acts: Wayne Thiebaud Reconsidered,” Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2000, p. 35).

Estudo Para Vitrine de Delicatessen (Study for Delicatessen Counter) - Wayne Thiebaud

Estudo Para Vitrine de Delicatessen (Study for Delicatessen Counter) - Wayne Thiebaud
Coleção privada
Grafite e pastel sobre cartão - 26x29 - 1964

Demonstrating Thiebaud’s distinguished, early style, Study for Delicatessen Counter is an exquisite celebration of American food, one of the artist's signature motifs. Best known for his luscious paintings of ice-cream cones and pies, Thiebaud has been a prolific draftsman since the early days of his career as an illustrator. With its rich colors, sly geometry, shallow depth of field, wry humor, and common everyday subject matter, Study for Delicatessen Counter is a remarkable example of the artist’s mastery of his iconic visual vernacular.
Study for Delicatessen Counter is an upbeat, mouth-watering view of a deli counter, with tight groupings of blocks, wheels and wedges of meats and cheeses progressing sideways out of the picture plane. Fusing the still life and landscape traditions, the canvas is split horizontally in two by a white counter which acts as a horizon line and balances the composition. Above, a wheel of cheese sits in its glass casing while a grouping of brightly-colored sausages dangles in the distance giving the work perceivable depth. Drawing attention to the immediacy of frontal planes, the numbered enamel platters and stacks of rectangular cheeses inside the case seem to be at the forefront of the picture plane, and visually mimic the rows of houses lining the streets in Thiebaud’s famous landscape paintings.
Thiebaud defines mass, volume and space through his deft manipulation of color and tone, and adds texture and dimensionality through skilled layering of paint. His use of chiaroscuro is reminiscent of Dutch old master still life paintings. The stark contrast between light and dark yields dramatic effect; the bundles of rich red, burgundy and brown meats loom in darkness against the muted beige background, and the warm orange wheel of cheese, displayed like an encased relic, casts a cobalt shadow along the pale, icy blue counter. Both a lover of realism and a commercially trained artist, Thiebaud embraces the pureness and directness of geometric shapes, which he drew naturally out of the aesthetic delights of the common place.

Abaixando a Cidade (City Downgrade) - Wayne Thiebaud

Abaixando a Cidade (City Downgrade) - Wayne Thiebaud
Coleção privada
OST - 101x74 - 2001

Wayne Thiebaud's striking re-interpretations of the traditional genre of landscape painting takes its inspiration from the unique topography of San Francisco-its lurching and plunging hills, the rigidity of the urban streetscape, the strict formality of the buildings, sidewalks, and even the road markings-which the artist uses to upend conventional perspective, creating swells and inclines on the cusp between abstraction and representation. In addition, his resourceful use of light and shadow on the vertically thrusting street, rendered with a painterly realism and gravity-defying manipulation of space, demonstrates Thiebaud's determination to complicate perspective as he creates a viewing experience that plays with both the audience's sense of position and frame of reference.
City Downgrade is defined by Thiebaud's rendering of ambiguous, even precarious states of vertical tension. The main highway vanishes into the hillside, only to burst upward towards the pale, crisp Northern California sky. Strong light casts extravagantly angled shadows onto the vertical black pavement. Thiebaud seems to hang cars onto the curb to keep them in place like ornaments, and one cannot help but feel the tug of gravity that the scene defies. These elements further confuse the reading of space: the street lamp in the lower left corner accentuates the vertical thrust of the street, while the downward arrow on the highway sign opposite plays on the confusion of directional perspective that Thiebaud has created.
Thiebaud works within the traditional confines of the landscape genre and draws upon historical antecedents like the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, placing emphasis on the physical qualities topography and light, whether artificially created or natural. People are rarely included and when they do appear, they are minor punctuations in the overall roiling energy of the work. Instead, as seen in City Downgrade, Thiebaud includes details of the urban landscape in a composite rendering from memory of the collision of street lamps, parked cars, and highway signs. The landscapes and cityscapes further serve as a forum for Thiebaud's formal investigations. "I'm not just interested in the pictorial aspects of the landscape-see a pretty place and try to paint it-but in some way to manage it, manipulate it, or see what I can turn it into" (W. Thiebaud, quoted by G. Gordon, in "Thiebaud Puts a Visual Fest on Canvas," California Aggie, University of California, Davis, 1983, p. 2).
Thiebaud was specifically interested in confusing the reading of space by eliminating the horizon line or any fixed vantage point normally associated with landscape paintings. "Landscape for me took on the problem of composition," Thiebaud explains. "I wanted to eliminate the horizon line, to see if I could get a landscape image that didn't use a horizontal fixation. Instead, I try to establish a positional direction for the viewer-whether it's up, down, helicopter view, world view, valley view-to try and get some sense of the loss of the convenience or comfort of standing and looking at things, to throw people off a bit" (W. Thiebaud, ibid., p. 2). This manipulation of the horizon is clearly visible in City Downgrade, where Thiebaud has combined multiple vantage points in an effort to both unsettle the viewer's position while in the swirl of perspective move away from mere mimesis to a merry-go-round of spatial relationships.
Potrero Hill is cut by the angular patterns of poured cement and blacktop roads. When San Francisco was rebuilt in 1906 after the Great Fire, many of its streets were carved straight up the hillsides. Some streets rise so abruptly that they appear to shoot vertically into the air. In 1973 Thiebaud moved to a second home in San Francisco located on Potrero Hill, one of the many elevations that define the city's unique terrain. Over forty of these summits can be counted, rising just south of San Francisco's busy downtown center. Two major freeways, railroads, and bridges punctuate the landscape, along with towering office buildings that serve as urban motifs for the artist. The unique layout of the city sparked Thiebaud's fascination with capturing the topographical extremes of the city on his canvas. "Going to San Francisco, I was...fascinated by those plunging streets, where you get down to an intersection and all four streets take off in different directions and positions. There was a sense of displacement, or indeterminate fixed positional stability. That led me to this sense of 'verticality' that you get in San Francisco. You look at a hill, and, visually, it doesn't look as if the cars would be able to stay on it and grip. It's a very precarious state of tension, like a tightrope walk" (W. Thiebaud, quoted in S. Stowens "Wayne Thiebaud: Beyond Pop Art," American Artist, September 1980, p. 102).
The visual ambiguities of Thiebaud's cityscape recall the work of Richard Diebenkorn, another notable painter of San Francisco's unique topography. Diebenkorn and Thiebaud share compositional handling, organizing their surfaces into colorful geometric planes and emphasizing bold vertical climbs, the aerial perspectives combining elevated vantage points and lifting or obscuring horizon lines to create a visual vertigo. In contrast, though, to Diebenkorn's open and softer sensuality, Thiebaud is interested in the fierce spatial compression of the street that is read flat against the picture plane, flush with the similarly collapsed facades of the two high rises framing it. Yet the shadows that these buildings throw upon the street create a simultaneous reading of depth and flatness, a tension between three-dimensional space and the two-dimensional surface that the artist emphasizes. These simultaneous tensions between depth and surface and abstraction and representation create a work of compelling dynamism in the train of modernist masters, for example Cézanne and Braque, with whom Thiebaud shares shifting perspectives and geometric patterning. Referring to Thiebaud's landscapes, the philosopher and critic Richard Wollheim, wrote, "These paintings exhibit a complexity and, above all, an old-masterish cultivation of detail, completely without ironical intent, that has not been observed in art since the drip paintings of Pollock or the glorious late Ateliers of Braque" (R. Wollheim, Artforum, Vol. 38, no. 2, 1999).
City Downgrade synthesizes Thiebaud's formal and aesthetic concerns into a single mature canvas. His signature palette and brushwork create an urban rollercoaster that dangles at the limits of the real and impossible. Revealed in the unique San Franciscan topography is Thiebaud's interest in the complex tensions of depth, flatness, and ambiguous perspective. In City Downgrade Thiebaud has captured the urban landscape in a way that not only intensifies and condenses perspective, powerfully manipulating the geometries of angles and planes of topography, but also presents a highly individual take on the lush chromatic painterly surface and the rigors of compositional placement of Western art traditions while delivering to the viewer an enhanced sense of the immediacy and fullness of lived experience.

Nota do blog: Vendida em leilão da Christie’s por USD 4,002,500.

Três Maças Cristalizadas (Three Candied Apples) - Wayne Thiebaud

Três Maças Cristalizadas (Three Candied Apples) - Wayne Thiebaud
Coleção privada
OST - 30x40 - 1999

"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"—Wayne Thiebaud
(W. Thiebaud quoted in S. A. Nash, Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective, San Francisco, 2000, p. 15).
"Thiebaud's still-life paintings, and particularly those of food, were his first mature works and they rapidly built his reputation after his landmark exhibition at Allan Stone Gallery in New York in 1962" (S. McGough, Thiebaud Selects Thiebaud, Sacramento, 1996, p. 4).
Widely known for his earnest renderings of sweet treats and softly-lit dessert cases, Wayne Thiebaud’s career has spanned several decades and serves as a telling illustration of commonplace objects and their place in a wider American consumer culture. A particularly vibrant example, Three Candied Apples continues the artist’s inquiry into the sugary surfaces of everyday life started in the early 1960s. His consistent exploration of apparently innocuous subjects leaves room for a deeper conversation about the place of representative painting in the latter half of the 20th century and how the most traditional art medium has been continuously reinvented to stay relevant. Not merely illustrative still lifes, Thiebaud’s tableaux exhibit an eloquent merging of Pop sensibilities with Realist subjects and painterly finesse.
Glistening in their confectionary purity, the three titular apples gleam with a dark red sheen. Placed starkly against a two-tone blue ground, their cerulean and navy backdrop divides the canvas neatly in half while casting contrasting reflections in the glossy exterior of the candy treats. Each apple is enticingly rendered in varying shades of competing orange, yellow, blue, green, and a healthy dose of crimson. Their sticks stand at attention, but are portrayed in a decidedly less terrestrial manner than the desserts. Existing as diffused strokes of glowing color against the dark blue of their environment and the lacquer sheen of the fruit, they pull at the anchored apples and coax them from reality. Learned by observing modernist masters like Henri Matisse and Vincent van Gogh, Thiebaud’s mastery of color is especially prevalent in the signature halation of his subjects. He noted: "I began to heighten the 'edge effect' and also to re-echo the shape around the edges to give more energy to the image. The longer you stare at an object the more pulsation it emits and the color has to have what Matisse referred to as 'expanding propensities'" (W. Thiebaud quoted in "Wayne Thiebaud: An Interview," J. Coplans, (ed.), Wayne Thiebaud, exh. cat., Pasadena Art Museum, 1968, p. 32). Using contrasting colors at the edges of his objects, he was able to create both an illusionistic sense of depth as well as a ghostly glow like a restaurant’s neon sign through the San Francisco fog.
Breaking onto the scene in 1962 with an exhibition at Allan Stone Gallery in New York, Thiebaud anticipated Pop Art’s infatuation with the everyday objects and images of American life. New Yorker art critic Adam Gropnik noted: “His method…has the effect not of eliminating the Pop resonance of his subjects but of slowing down and chastening the associations they evoke, so that a host of ambivalent feelings—nostalgic and satiric and elegiac—can come back later, calmed down and contemplative: enlightened” (A. Gopnik, “The Art World: Window Gazing,” in New Yorker, April 29, 1991, p. 80). Andy Warhol was an early admirer, and the de facto leader of Pop Art’s penchant for repetition can be seen mirrored in Thiebaud’s own use of multiple subjects and consistent questioning of easily relatable objects. However, where Warhol’s works commented directly on the consumerist tendencies of the American people by repurposing commercial silkscreen techniques and appropriating graphic designs and imagery, works like Three Candied Apples show Thiebaud’s insistence on exploring the physicality of paint along with recognizable tropes.
Starting his career as a commercial artist, Thiebaud’s early artistic vocabulary was decidedly object-based. His years creating cartoons, first for Disney and then as an illustrator in Long Beach, California, afforded him a grab bag of imagery based in American consumer society. Having spent nearly a decade practicing this trade between California and New York, Thiebaud eventually found himself teaching at an art school on the West Coast while simultaneously befriending some of the leaders of the avant garde like Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, and Franz Kline. Although he never submerged himself fully into Abstract Expressionism, these experiences pulled him from the stylized depiction of objects and introduced a more painterly, forthright approach to his work. The artist noted: "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, San Francisco, 2000, p. 15). Three Candied Apples is a telling result of this inquiry as the objects exhibit a weight and presence that belies their flat rendering. By approaching representational still life with the eye of a formalist, Thiebaud breathed new life into diner counters lined with pastel pie slices and lustrous candied apples.
Working for much of his life in California, the thick, gestural impasto Thiebaud employs is akin to that of his colleagues, the Bay Area Figurative painters like Elmer Bischoff and David Park. Like them, his approach to coarsely rendered subjects that eschew pure color in favor of richly variegated strokes gives his seemingly simple subjects a richness and complexity that hints at something beyond the visible. Often considered a Pop artist for his affinity for depicting iconic Americana in the form of lunch counters, diner displays, and other bits of sentimentality, Thiebaud also inhabits a more conservative realist realm like the work of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin and Andrew Wyeth. It is this interstitial space where canvases like Three Candied Apples exist that make them such a poignant illustration of America’s self-aware nostalgia.

Nota do blog: Vendido em leilão da Christie’s por USD 3,852,500.

Bolos Cake Rows (Cake Rows) - Wayne Thiebaud

Bolos Cake Rows (Cake Rows) - Wayne Thiebaud
Coleção privada
OST - 41x55 - 1962

Painted in 1962, the same year as the artist’s first solo show in New York, Wayne Thiebaud’s Cake Rows exemplifies the sense of American prosperity and nostalgia that defines the artist’s practice. Beloved for decades for his depictions of delicious cakes and confectionary, alongside other uniquely American objects such as pinball machines and the streets of sunny California, Thiebaud has captivated audiences for over fifty years with his unique ability to capture the true essence of what he paints. Indeed, like the artists whose careers burgeoned on the other side of the country simultaneously, such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Thiebaud is instrumental to art history by elevating the objects of his viewers’ everyday lives into something far grander. Yet while his New York counterparts serve us these items with a sardonic twist, Thiebaud offers the ability to revel in childhood reminiscence and to luxuriate in life’s more simple pleasures.
In Cake Rows, with its luscious paint application and rich use of color, three varieties of cakes are laid out in strict rows against a minimal background. Receding into the distance, they hint at the endless supply that seemed to exist in diners and kitchens across the country. This particular painting is an exemplary example of the artist’s skillful paint handling, which allows his subjects to be condensed to their essential elements while preventing them from becoming merely flat depictions of real-world objects. Instead, these cakes appear before the viewer, tantalizing and ready to be picked up and bitten into. Indeed, one of Thiebaud’s strongest abilities as a painter is his capability to manipulate paint and transform it into whatever material he is trying to depict, ranging from frosting to shiny metal. This is most readily apparent in the chocolate cake in the lower right of the composition, with its luxuriously thick impasto resultant from the buildup of orange, blue, and brown hues. This subtle accumulation of color does not immediately register with the eye, but on close inspection it becomes evident that it is instrumental to Thiebaud’s practice, extending outwards as far as the edges of the canvas.
At the same time, Cake Rows is grounded in its subject’s most basic compositional elements. While paint coalesces to create frosting, it does so in distinctly rectangular forms. What’s more, these richly applied, colorful cakes, are set against a background that is empty to the point of quasi-abstraction. Solid bands of cream and sky blue denote the background, dividing up the composition between the table and background. Yet the picture plane is flattened to such a degree that this distinction could be easily overlooked, marked only by the subtle buildup of color in the band of orange and green that cuts across the center of the canvas, leaving a sense of quiet contemplation and a palpable sense of looking in place of illusionistic realism.
This tendency towards a reduced, essential depiction of form stems primarily from the artist’s early career as an illustrator. Thiebaud worked in the realm of commercial art, even briefly apprenticing at the Walt Disney Studios, before gravitating to a full-time career as an artist in the 1950s. Then, as he says, “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 place and really be very clear about it. I picked things like pies and cake—things based upon simple shapes like triangles and circles—and tried to orchestrate them” (W. Thiebaud, quoted in S. Nash, “Unbalancing Acts: Wayne Thiebaud Reconsidered,” in Wayne Thiebaud: A Painting’s Retrospective, exh. cat., Acquavella Galleries, New York, 2000, p. 15).
It wasn’t until the early 1960s that Thiebaud’s paintings of foodstuffs reached their mature form. These were then exhibited in his first solo show in New York at the Allan Stone Gallery, and Thiebaud was quickly propelled to critical acclaim with a highly successful show and an acquisition by the Museum of Modern Art. Stone would be Thiebaud’s dealer for over forty years, skillfully placing works like Cake Rows into notable collections, such as that of Leon Kraushar. During his lifetime, Kraushar had amassed one of the greatest collections of Pop Art ever assembled. Along with Cake Rows, Kraushar and his wife acquired a number of early and important works from the likes of Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, Roy Lichtenstein, and other artists of their generation. In fact, Roy Lichtenstein’s iconic Nurse (1964) was another highlight of Kraushar’s collection. It was this keen eye for the very best of the cutting edge that led Kraushar, along with his contemporaries Robert and Ethel Scull, to help define and nurture the art of their time.
What this present work makes clear is that Thiebaud’s art is about more than mere depictions of consumer goods. It is about a celebration and contemplation of life, of color, of painting in its many forms. This is an exemplary early work by the artist, a snapshot of a moment in time when the work that would sustain him for the rest of his career finally came to fruition in its mature form. Thiebaud and his work tie us together by the simple treats that we can all enjoy, creating a unique blend of realism and abstraction, in which personal remembrance and latent symbolism intertwine. In many ways, he is the archetypal American artist, and it is thanks to the subtlety and focus of Thiebaud’s draughtsmanship and the vivacity of his coloring that these overlooked commonplaces of daily
life live on in elevated form today.

Nota do blog: Vendido em leilão da Christie’s por USD 4,812,500.

Estudo Para Autoestrada (Study for Freeway) - Wayne Thiebaud

Estudo Para Autoestrada (Study for Freeway) - Wayne Thiebaud
Coleção privada
OST - 30x30 - 1979

Wayne Thiebaud's landscapes and cityscapes, particularly his views of roads and freeways, are as vital to a complete understanding of his oeuvre as his paintings of cakes, pies, and other examples of consumer ephemera, and in choosing the freeway as the subject of this work, Thiebaud continues this lifelong fascination with the images and objects that evoke modern America. The elegant curves of the rolling California hills and the majestic arcs of the freeway as it meanders through landscape recall the arcs and ellipses that can be seen in some of the artist's most iconic work such as Cakes, 1963, Pies, Pies, Pies, 1961, and Lipsticks,1964. Thiebaud's combination of foreshortened perspective and dramatic shadows cast by the thunderous expressway as it snakes its way through the countryside, effects a compositional labyrinth that reverberates with strong visual, nearly abstract, forms. The result is a work that causes us to reconsider the familiar, to open our eyes to the visual possibilities contained within even the most mundane observable landscape.
In 1972, while living in Sacramento, Thiebaud bought a second home and studio in San Francisco's Potrero Hill district and based several significant works on this cityscape. The giddy sensation of unending rolling hills is compressed into a dizzying vertigo by telescoping the sensation of scaling and then plunging down the escarpments. The spatial ambivalence that upends Study for Freeway, reinforces the artist's visual pleasures: "I was fascinated...by the way that different streets came in and out and then just vanished. So I sat out on a street corner and began to paint them" (W. Thiebaud, quoted in A. Gopnik, "An American Painter," in Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective, exh. cat., San Francisco, 2000, p. 58). Just as in San Francisco, the roads of Study for Freeway disappear at times, vanishing as their steep vertical ascent meets the horizon of the hilltops.
The visual tensions of Cézanne, the space between the reading of flat surface and pictorial depth, was referred to at one point by Thiebaud: "In Cézanne there is always this swelling, like the volume trying to get away from the plane, even though there is also a linear matrix. It's like trying to have both worlds simultaneously. If this kind of anthologizing of procedure and inference of spatial concerns can be evident in [my] painting, I think it's much more interesting" (W. Thiebaud, quoted in T. Albright, "Wayne Thiebaud: Scrambling Around with Ordinary Problems," Art News, February 1978, p. 86). In Study for Freeway, the "swelling" of volume can be seen in the rolling curves of the natural landscape that oppose the linear matrix of black roads and outlined rooftops.
Like Cézanne, Thiebaud's close and careful examination of the individual elements that make up the landscape has resulted in a painting that challenges the traditional conventions of the genre. There appears to be no contrast between the natural and man-made, but rather a fusion of elements into one unified scene. His use of perspective draws the viewer into the scene, asking us to consider the nature of our surroundings while encouraging us to recognize the haunting sense of beauty in even the most ubiquitous of objects.

Lata de Sopa Campbell's Pequena, Chilli Beef (Small Campbell's Soup Can, Chili Beef) - Andy Warhol

Lata de Sopa Campbell's Pequena, Chilli Beef (Small Campbell's Soup Can, Chili Beef) - Andy Warhol
Coleção privada
Caseína, tinta metálica e grafite sobre tela - 50x40 - 1962

Andy Warhol's Small Campbell's Soup Can (Chilli Beef) was painted early in 1962 at the dawn of the Pop age. Soon after the work was completed, Warhol was given his first one-man exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, where he showed a series of pictures of soup cans which are now among the best-known works in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In part because of that exhibition, Warhol's soup cans would alter the course of history, sending shock waves through the art world in the manner of Duchamp in 1912. As the legendary curator Henry Geldzahler would recall: "The Campbell's Soup Can was the Nude Descending a Staircase of pop art. Here was an image that became an overnight rallying point for the sympathetic and the bane of the hostile. Warhol captured the imagination of the media and the public as had no other artist of his generation. Andy was pop and pop was Andy" (H. Geldzahler, quoted in V. Bockris, The Life and Death of Andy Warhol, London, 1998, pp. 159-60).
One of only three soup cans of this size that Warhol produced in 1962, this particular example is distinguished by the artist's use of silver metallic paint. In Small Campbell's Soup Can (Chilli Beef) Warhol uses an additional embellishment of silver to the bottom rim, thus completing the metallic illusion. In addition to offering a more realistic rendition of the object itself, Warhol's use of silver in this work is one of the earliest examples of what would become one of his favorite colors. He would begin using it to even greater effect the following year with his series of Silver Liz paintings of the Hollywood icon, Elizabeth Taylor. In addition to its glamorous associations, for Warhol, silver was also the color that defined the age of high consumerism and in the form of aluminum foil and cans at least-all that was modern, clean, malleable and ultimately disposable.
By 1962 Campbell's Soup cans were standard features in the lives of all Americans, piled in pyramids and lining walls in shops and supermarkets throughout the United States. They were not merely icons, but were in fact the building blocks and backdrops of every American's life and had been for decades. When Warhol chose to add the Campbell's soup can to his rapidly expanding pantheon of cultural icons, he managed to tap into a vein of sentiment and nostalgia amongst viewers in a way that his previous works had not. Yet the Campbell's Soup pictures have the appearance of extreme indifference: the image, isolated in the center of its canvas, betrays nothing of the artist's life or thoughts. Warhol left no hint of painterliness or of emotion. This apparent indifference was reinforced by the display of 32 Campbell's Soup Cans at the Ferus Gallery in 1962: the assembled pictures were displayed in regular rows, mimicking shop shelves the same can echoed again and again, the only variation being in the names of the various soups.
Warhol linked Campbell's soup explicitly to his, and by extension to every American's, life and childhood: "I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day for twenty years. I guess, the same thing over and over again. Someone said my life has dominated me; I like that idea" (A. Warhol quoted in G. Swenson, Art News, November 1963, p. 26). Although the Ferus Gallery display perfectly embodied Warhol's idea of having 'the same thing over and over again', each soup can was intended as an individual work of art. The display of the works together on shelves, engineered with Warhol's enthusiastic approval by Irving Blum, conspired to present them in a way that emphasized their relationship to each other, and yet also discreetly mocked the art market itself, with the paintings appearing as a commodity, the gallery openly displaying its commercial nature. Another dealer further down the street from the Ferus Gallery famously bought some actual soup cans and displayed them in his gallery window with a sign proclaiming 'Do Not Be Misled. Get the Original. Our Low Price - Two for 33 Cents' (G. Frei & N. Printz, eds., The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Paintings and Sculpture 1961-1963, New York, 2002, p. 70).
Warhol's use of such a ubiquitous object also divided the critics; some dismissing his work outright while others were enthralled. It is interesting that Donald Judd, then a reviewer, showed such an interest in Warhol's works, as his rows of Campbell's Soup Cans in the Ferus Gallery exhibition could be seen to preempt Minimalism, a movement which claimed Warhol's later Brillo Boxes as an important influence. By appropriating an everyday image and reproducing it in a self-consciously mechanical way with little sign of artistic intervention, Warhol has undermined the process of artistic creation. The controlled appearance of Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans can be seen as a direct insult to the celebrated Abstract Expressionists. However, by selecting something as recognizable and universal as Campbell's Soup, Warhol managed to create an instantly understandable artwork.
In an interview in 1962, the year that Small Campbell's Soup Can (Chilli Beef) was painted, Warhol said, "I just paint things I always thought were beautiful, things you use every day and never think about. I'm working on soups, and I've been doing some paintings of money. I just do it because I like it" (A. Warhol, quoted in "The Slice-of-Cake School," Time, May 11, 1962, p. 52). For in whatever guise the explanation is packaged, in selecting this motif, Warhol elevated the backdrop of everyday consumer life through his paintings, placing those products on a new artistic pedestal.

Nota do blog: Foi vendida em leilão da Christie’s por USD 7,362,500. Não tenho palavras para comentar...

Fonte Luminosa, Ribeirão Preto, São Paulo, Brasil

Fonte Luminosa, Ribeirão Preto, São Paulo, Brasil
Ribeirão Preto - SP
Foto Postal Colombo N. 14
Fotografia - Cartão Postal

Pavilhão Mourisco, Botafogo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil

Pavilhão Mourisco, Botafogo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
Rio de Janeiro - RJ
Fotografia 

O Rio de Janeiro de 1906 era um canteiro de obras, tomado pelas reformas urbanas do prefeito Pereira Passos (1902-1906). A cidade se expandia no sentido zona sul e as ruas, antes estreitas, passaram a ser largas, para que comportassem o trânsito de carros. A Avenida Beira Mar, trecho que liga o centro da cidade ao bairro de Botafogo pela orla, foi uma das últimas obras inauguradas pelo prefeito. Para coroar este grande empreendimento, no fim da Avenida, em Botafogo, teve início a construção de uma das edificações mais bonitas da capital no início do século XX: o pavilhão mourisco.

Aberto em 1907, o pavilhão foi concebido pelo arquiteto Alfredo Burnier, chefe da Seção de Arquitetura da Diretoria Geral de Obras e Viação, para servir como café e restaurante, um pouso depois de longas caminhadas pela Avenida Beira Mar e suas cercanias. Contava com três grandes terraços, onde ficava o café, uma grande área interna destinada ao restaurante e uma pequena construção à parte, onde ficava um teatro de marionetes, para as crianças.

A construção possuía quatro torres e cinco cúpulas douradas, de inspiração árabe; seu exterior era revestido por cerâmicas e azulejos importados da Espanha. O estilo arquitetônico ao qual pertencia, o neomourisco ou neoislâmico, típico da época, também havia influenciado uma famosa edificação de 1905: o Castelo Mourisco, obra do arquiteto Luis Moraes Junior, que abriga a Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, em Manguinhos.

Considerado por muitos anos como um lugar da moda, o pavilhão mourisco começou a entrar em decadência na década de 1920. Já com o café e o restaurante fechados, a construção abrigaria entre 1934 e 1937 uma biblioteca infantil pública gerida por Cecília Meireles, sendo depois cedida ao clube Botafogo de Futebol e Regatas, que teve ali uma de suas sedes desportivas.

Em 1952, o pavilhão foi, enfim, demolido, para dar passagem ao túnel do Pasmado. Após anos de terreno vazio, um acordo com o clube, nos anos 1990, permitiria a construção do Centro Empresarial Mourisco, edifício comercial de grandes proporções e estética polêmica, cujas obras terminaram em 1998.
Ainda que o centro empresarial erguido em seu lugar não lembre em nada a glória do pavilhão e da Avenida Beira Mar no início do século passado, a memória do esplendor dessa região permanece. O pavilhão Mourisco foi retratado por fotógrafos como Augusto Malta e figurou no imperdível filme de 1936 ‘Rio de Janeiro: City of Splendour’, de autoria de James Fitzpatrick. Texto de Manuela Bezamat.

Pavilhão Mourisco, Circa 1910, Botafogo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil

Pavilhão Mourisco, Circa 1910, Botafogo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
Rio de Janeiro - RJ
Fotografia - Cartão Postal