Porsche 911 Turbo 1987, Alemanha
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Boulevard Santa Monica, Califórnia, Estados Unidos (Santa Monica Boulevard) - David Hockney
Boulevard Santa Monica, Estados Unidos (Santa Monica Boulevard) - David Hockney
Califórnia - Estados Unidos
Coleção privada
Acrílica sobre tela - 61x91 - 1979
Painted during what has been called ‘a watershed period’ for
David Hockney’s work, Santa Monica Boulevard is a vibrant painting
which reflects the love the artist had for his new adoptive home of Los
Angeles. Painted in 1979, immediately after the completion of his critically
acclaimed Paper Pools series, this colorful painting captures the
vitality of the West Coast during its heyday in the age of disco. Having moved
into a new studio on Santa Monica Blvd itself, Hockney decided to capture the
hustle and bustle of what was happening right outside his door. “I love it all,
and feel at home here,” Hockney said, “and what’s more important to me I feel
my activity painting in the studio has a lot to do with what’s going on right
outside the door” (D. Hockney, quoted by C. S. Sykes, David Hockney The
Biography, 1975-2012, New York, 2014, p. 81).
Hockney’s immortalization of Santa Monica Boulevard depicts that most indicative of L.A. of scenes—a car dealership. Flanked by red, white and blue streamers, in front of ‘Mr Compact’s’ low-slung whitewashed Spanish Revival saleroom, a row of technicolor cars await buyers, their bright paintwork gleaming in the Californian sunshine. On the sidewalk are two figures, one dressed in jeans and a white t-shirt walking towards another, propped up by a palm tree, who is sporting a tight t-shirt, short shorts and what appears to be construction boots. In a city where commerce is king, everything—it appears—is for sale.
Having spent time working on his Paper Pools in upstate New York, Hockney was keen to return to California. While he had been away, a friend had worked to secure a new apartment and studio for the artist in anticipation of his return to L.A., eventually selecting a space in the former home of the Versailles Furniture Company on Santa Monica Blvd. Hockney had picked the perfect time to return to the city, which was undergoing something of a renaissance; the nightclub scene was buzzing, the famous Hollywood Sign had been newly restored, Saturday Night Fever had come out the year before, and disco was at its height. Roller skating was all the rage, with Flipper’s Roller Boogie Palace at the corner of La Cienega and Santa Monica Blvd, being one of the hottest party spots in town. Hockney was loving every minute of it and writing to his friend R. B. Kitaj back in England, he said “Hollywood Blvd is better than ever. Roller-skaters everywhere gliding silently along the pavements…they have wonderful sexy outfits, pretty boys and girls…I stood outside Musso and Franks the other day Friday watching all, and suddenly thought—if Breughel came to L.A.—this is what he would paint” (Ibid.).
His move to Santa Monica Boulevard prompted Hockney to embark on one of his most ambitious series of paintings. “I’m starting some big paintings of L.A. streets,” he stated, “Santa Monica Blvd is full of fresh-faced hustlers from Iowa and slightly tired Hollywood types driving round in circles—that’s subject No. 1” (Ibid.). His plan was to produce a large-scale portrait of the streetscape measuring over 20-feet in length depicting the excitement of the busy L.A. thoroughfare. In addition to the car dealership, it was also going to include a shop with bright green shutters, a section of an apartment building, a woman pushing a shopping trolley, and two hustlers—one hitching a lift, the other standing in a doorway. “Santa Monica Boulevard is all facades, painted bricks, painted crazy paving. Nothing is what it seems to be. But what I love are the hustlers, they look like ordinary hitchhikers, but they are hustlers. And then there are these wonderful old ladies with their shopping bags, not noticing anything, smiling at the boys like their sons” (Ibid., p. 85).
Using a series of his own photographs as his guide, Hockney began to lay out the elements of this gigantic canvas. However, the project soon ran into problems, both artistic and personal. He had to interrupt his painting to schedule for his annual trip back to the U.K. for the Christmas holiday, and then another subsequent trip back home due the death of his father. He also found that working on such a grand scale was not producing the sense of movement and flow that he was hoping to achieve, and that the painting was too static. Eventually, he abandoned the large-scale project in favor of smaller, more intimate canvases, of which Santa Monica Boulevard is a pre-eminent example.
The artist made his first trip to California as early as 1964, a journey that was the culmination of a long-held dream. Growing up in northern England he had been captivated by what had seemed like the exotic world of sun, sea and sand of the West Coast. Living in the damp, cold and gray environs of Bradford, the attractions of the America were obvious. Apart from the vastly different climate, childhood memories of war and the austerity that many Britons faced during the long economic recovery afterwards, would have seemed at odds with his teenage counterparts in the U.S.A. Along with many others of his generation, one of the only means of escaping the drudgery of everyday life was going to the movies, and Hockney was an avid moviegoer, attending the movie theater regularly. So, the allure of the Hollywood and America he read about in books and magazines, and saw portrayed by the silver screen, was undoubtedly strong.
Thus, Santa Monica Boulevard becomes a celebration of Hockney’s love for the energy and vitality of his newly-adopted home in California. Its vibrant palette also marks the beginning of a new period of painting in which rich, high-keyed color began to play a much more important role in his work. Throughout his peripatetic career, David Hockney has never shied away from exploring the full gamut of the artistic process, constantly inspired by his surroundings to produce a rich array of works. But it is with the vibrant landscape of Southern California that he is most closely associated, a subject matter that has provided him with a rich stream of inspiration, making him one of the most enduring painters of his generation.
Nota do blog: Vendida em leilão da Christie’s por USD 2,415,000.Hockney’s immortalization of Santa Monica Boulevard depicts that most indicative of L.A. of scenes—a car dealership. Flanked by red, white and blue streamers, in front of ‘Mr Compact’s’ low-slung whitewashed Spanish Revival saleroom, a row of technicolor cars await buyers, their bright paintwork gleaming in the Californian sunshine. On the sidewalk are two figures, one dressed in jeans and a white t-shirt walking towards another, propped up by a palm tree, who is sporting a tight t-shirt, short shorts and what appears to be construction boots. In a city where commerce is king, everything—it appears—is for sale.
Having spent time working on his Paper Pools in upstate New York, Hockney was keen to return to California. While he had been away, a friend had worked to secure a new apartment and studio for the artist in anticipation of his return to L.A., eventually selecting a space in the former home of the Versailles Furniture Company on Santa Monica Blvd. Hockney had picked the perfect time to return to the city, which was undergoing something of a renaissance; the nightclub scene was buzzing, the famous Hollywood Sign had been newly restored, Saturday Night Fever had come out the year before, and disco was at its height. Roller skating was all the rage, with Flipper’s Roller Boogie Palace at the corner of La Cienega and Santa Monica Blvd, being one of the hottest party spots in town. Hockney was loving every minute of it and writing to his friend R. B. Kitaj back in England, he said “Hollywood Blvd is better than ever. Roller-skaters everywhere gliding silently along the pavements…they have wonderful sexy outfits, pretty boys and girls…I stood outside Musso and Franks the other day Friday watching all, and suddenly thought—if Breughel came to L.A.—this is what he would paint” (Ibid.).
His move to Santa Monica Boulevard prompted Hockney to embark on one of his most ambitious series of paintings. “I’m starting some big paintings of L.A. streets,” he stated, “Santa Monica Blvd is full of fresh-faced hustlers from Iowa and slightly tired Hollywood types driving round in circles—that’s subject No. 1” (Ibid.). His plan was to produce a large-scale portrait of the streetscape measuring over 20-feet in length depicting the excitement of the busy L.A. thoroughfare. In addition to the car dealership, it was also going to include a shop with bright green shutters, a section of an apartment building, a woman pushing a shopping trolley, and two hustlers—one hitching a lift, the other standing in a doorway. “Santa Monica Boulevard is all facades, painted bricks, painted crazy paving. Nothing is what it seems to be. But what I love are the hustlers, they look like ordinary hitchhikers, but they are hustlers. And then there are these wonderful old ladies with their shopping bags, not noticing anything, smiling at the boys like their sons” (Ibid., p. 85).
Using a series of his own photographs as his guide, Hockney began to lay out the elements of this gigantic canvas. However, the project soon ran into problems, both artistic and personal. He had to interrupt his painting to schedule for his annual trip back to the U.K. for the Christmas holiday, and then another subsequent trip back home due the death of his father. He also found that working on such a grand scale was not producing the sense of movement and flow that he was hoping to achieve, and that the painting was too static. Eventually, he abandoned the large-scale project in favor of smaller, more intimate canvases, of which Santa Monica Boulevard is a pre-eminent example.
The artist made his first trip to California as early as 1964, a journey that was the culmination of a long-held dream. Growing up in northern England he had been captivated by what had seemed like the exotic world of sun, sea and sand of the West Coast. Living in the damp, cold and gray environs of Bradford, the attractions of the America were obvious. Apart from the vastly different climate, childhood memories of war and the austerity that many Britons faced during the long economic recovery afterwards, would have seemed at odds with his teenage counterparts in the U.S.A. Along with many others of his generation, one of the only means of escaping the drudgery of everyday life was going to the movies, and Hockney was an avid moviegoer, attending the movie theater regularly. So, the allure of the Hollywood and America he read about in books and magazines, and saw portrayed by the silver screen, was undoubtedly strong.
Thus, Santa Monica Boulevard becomes a celebration of Hockney’s love for the energy and vitality of his newly-adopted home in California. Its vibrant palette also marks the beginning of a new period of painting in which rich, high-keyed color began to play a much more important role in his work. Throughout his peripatetic career, David Hockney has never shied away from exploring the full gamut of the artistic process, constantly inspired by his surroundings to produce a rich array of works. But it is with the vibrant landscape of Southern California that he is most closely associated, a subject matter that has provided him with a rich stream of inspiration, making him one of the most enduring painters of his generation.
Elvis Duplo, Tipo Selvagem (Double Elvis, Ferus Type) - Andy Warhol
Elvis Duplo, Tipo Selvagem (Double Elvis, Ferus Type) - Andy Warhol
Coleção privada
Serigrafia e tinta prateada sobre linho - 208x134 - 1963
A gleaming masterpiece that stands among the most iconic images
of 20th century art, Andy Warhol’s Double Elvis [Ferus Type] faces us
with visionary force. Elvis Presley, dressed as a gunslinger in a publicity
shot for the 1960 Western movie Flaming Star, is doubled in black
silkscreen upon a shimmering silver ground. He looms almost life-size, as if
caught in a full-length mirror. The painting is at once striking, its six-foot
star recognisable in a flash, and loaded with ambiguity. Warhol distills his
famed serial production method into a succinct twinned image that reflects the
overlapping nuances of celebrity, filmmaking, desire and performance in sixties
America. Cropped slightly at the head, the two Elvises intersect at the knees,
aligned in such a way that the left-hand figure appears to be holding both
pistols. With our attention drawn to his pose and finely-tuned outfit, Presley as
cowboy is the image of idealized American manhood wryly exposed as a costumed
interloper. United with the silver canvas, he takes his place in a flat, empty
surface that, for Warhol, functions as a looking glass. With subtle mastery,
Warhol mirrors the cultural world of his time, both glorifying and
destabilizing its glamorous, seductive fictions.
By 1962, having stunned the art world with his early paintings of Coke bottles, soup cans and Marilyn Monroe, Warhol had cemented his position as the king of Pop in New York. Created in the summer of 1963, the “Ferus Type” Elvises were conceived to conquer the West Coast. Warhol had already completed a group of initial “Studio Type” Elvises, whose half-tone backgrounds lent them a painterly sense of illusionistic space; for his upcoming show at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, the home of Hollywood and the birthplace of the Western, he had something more dramatic in mind. With the help of his new assistant, the poet Gerard Malanga, he completed a new series whose composition would vividly embody the “silver screen” of cinema. Displaced from any sense of narrative or locale onto pure, shining surface, they became celluloid ciphers, highlighting the multiple artifice of Elvis’s performance.
The very method by which Warhol delivered them was playfully theatrical, and is almost as famous as the works themselves. Gallery director Irving Blum received not individual canvases but a single, enormous roll of canvas with a box of differently sized stretcher bars. “I called him and said, ‘Will you come?’ [to Los Angeles],” Blum recalls, “And he said, ‘I can’t. I’m very busy. Will you do it?’ I said, ‘You mean, you want me to cut them? Virtually as I think they should be cut and placed around the wall?’ And he said, ‘Yes, cut them any way that you think should ... they should be cut. I leave it to you. The only thing I really want is that they should be hung edge to edge, densely – around the gallery. So long as you can manage that, do the best you can.’ … And that’s exactly what I did” (I. Blum, interview by P. S. Smith, October 20, 1978, in Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, Ann Arbor, 1986, pp. 221-22). Today, eleven of the twenty-two extant “Ferus Type” works are in museum collections, including another Double Elvis from this series at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Warhol’s apparent relinquishing of control was in fact anything but: he had predetermined the size of each canvas with the stretcher bars he sent to Blum, which he knew would have to be matched to the groups of single, double and multi-figure Elvises. Shown in concert with a series of silkscreens depicting Liz Taylor, they made for a mesmerizing, iterated display of cinematic archetype. Importantly, 1963 saw the beginning of the artist’s own movie-making career. Warhol’s films display a decidedly anti-Hollywood sensibility, disregarding norms of length, subject matter, plot and even sound quality: his debut release, Sleep, shows us a hazy five hours and twenty minutes of the poet John Giorno sleeping, while his controversial Lonesome Cowboys (1968) subjects the Western to pornographic parody. In a similarly provocative vein, the Ferus installation can be read as a barbed comment on the repetitive nature of the Western genre. As a commercial form instantiating predictable rules and roles, the Western in fact constitutes a mass-produced product not unlike the Campbell’s Soup cans Warhol showed at the Ferus Gallery the previous year. The Elvises, themselves a packaged commodity, echoed the soup cans’ supermarket-style rows. David McCarthy writes that in its “combination of reverence and ridicule, of homage and parody, of veneration and dismissal … the Ferus exhibition was something of a put-on, a sham, a provocation by an Eastern hipster who was already making his own films and who had previously dismissed Hollywood stars as pure product … [The paintings’] camp humor mirrored back to Hollywood its essential vacuousness in churning out formulaic narratives in the pursuit of profit, at least when it came to Elvis Presley and Flaming Star” (D. McCarthy, “Andy Warhol’s Silver Elvises: Meaning through Context at the Ferus Gallery in 1963,” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 88, No. 2, June 2006, p. 365).
The place of Presley himself in Warhol’s world was central to the subversion. Famous without precedent, he allowed Warhol to get to the heart of the 1960s. “Elvis Presley is the greatest cultural force in the twentieth century,” said composer Leonard Bernstein. “He introduced the beat to everything and he changed everything—music, language, clothes. It’s a whole new social revolution—the sixties came from it” (L. Bernstein, quoted in P. Clarke Keogh, Elvis Presley: The Man, The Life, The Legend, New York, 2004, p. 2). Born in a two-room house in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1935, Presley began singing as a small child. At the age of ten he made his first public appearance in a local talent contest singing a well-known folk song—he was placed 5th. In 1948, his family moved to Memphis, Tennessee and at the age of 18, he paid for a couple of hours of studio time at Sun Records, and made a demo, in order—as he later claimed—to see what his voice sounded like. After taking a job as a truck driver, Presley continued to sing at a number of local venues and on the evening of July 5th, 1954, he was invited back into the studio to sing a number of songs for Sun Records owner Sam Philips. Philips was looking for someone who could popularize the traditionally ‘Black’ ballads that the studio specialized in, and bring them to a wider audience. At the end of the evening, after signing a wide range of different songs, Elvis launched into a rendition of Arthur Crudup’s That’s All Right. After the record received some airtime on a local radio station, the DJ was inundated with calls and messages keen to find out more about this new talent, and so began a music career that would result in Presley become the most successful musical act of all time.
According to Rolling Stone magazine it was Elvis who made rock ‘n’ roll the international language of Pop, making him an ideal subject for Warhol’s unique brand of art. In his role as the American music giant of the twentieth century, Presley single-handedly changed the course of music and culture from the mid-1950s onwards. Elvis’s first record was of rockabilly music—an up-tempo, beat driven offshoot of country music. But it was in 1956, when he released his first single under the guidance of his new manager Colonel Tom Parker, that his career really took off when Heartbreak Hotel went to number one in the U.S. Billboard charts; Presley would ultimately sell over 600 million records during his lifetime. In the mid-1950s he expanded his repertoire and embarked on a film career and over the next two decades he appeared in at least thirty-two movies, including Jailhouse Rock, Blue Hawaii and Flaming Star (from where the source material for the current painting was taken). Presley’s emergence as a cultural phenomenon coincided with the birth of the American teenager—a new consumer market that, thanks to the popularity of people like Elvis, would come to be worth billions of dollars. As early as 1956 the Wall Street Journal identified the potential of this new sector of buying power and identified the singer as a major contributor. Elvis’s popularity spawned demand for everything from new lines of clothing based on his black slacks and loose, open-necked shirts to pink portable record players for teenagers’ bedrooms. It was also responsible for a phenomenal growth in the sales of transistor radios which rocketed from sales of an estimated 100,000 in 1955 to 5,000,000 in just three years later.
In addition to the music, one reason for Elvis’s popularity amongst young people was his sense of rebellion. Compared the clean-cut appearance of his predecessors such as Frank Sinatra, this new generation was drawn to the King’s slicked backed hair, casual fashions and those famous gyrating hips. For many parents, Presley was “the first rock symbolism of teenage rebellion…they did not like him, and condemned him as depraved. …prejudice doubtless figured in the adult antagonism. Regardless of whether parents were aware of the… sexual origins of the phrase rock ‘n’ roll, Presley impressed them as the visual and aural embodiment of sex” (A. Shaw, quoted by R. Serge Denisoff, Solid Gold: The Popular Record Industry, New York, 1975, p. 22). Sinatra himself opined “His kind of music is deplorable, a rancid smelling aphrodisiac. It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people” and the New York Daily News shrieked that following the King’s performance of Hound Dog on the Milton Berle show in June 1956, popular music “has reached its lowest depths in the ‘grunt and groin’ antics of one Elvis Presley” (B. Gross, quoted L. McShane, “Elvis Presley’s ‘grunt and groin’ act on ‘Milton Berle Show’ was Lady Gaga-esque act of 1950s,” New York Daily News, June 2012, accessed via www.nydailynews.com, September 7, 2014).
With his music, Presley straddled two segregated sections of society, and it was the racial tensions caused by his amalgamation of traditionally African American ballads with more mainstream musical traditions that caused the consternation and conflict amongst the generations. This upending of convention continued with the film Flaming Star, from which Warhol took the source image for Double Elvis. The storyline also deals with racial tensions as Pacer Burton, the name of Elvis’s character, is the son of a Native American mother and a white father, who encounters a conflict of loyalties when there is tension between the two communities. Thus, raising potentially uncomfortable questions about race was clearly part of the challenge that many felt Elvis interjected into the rapidly changing culture of 1950s America.
In Double Elvis, Warhol plays up the artifice of his subject. Elvis was no born film star, but a rock-and-roll artist transferred into Hollywood by the logic of commerce, much like Frank Sinatra or Buddy Holly before him. His movies were box office hits but often critically panned. As McCarthy notes, he was perhaps particularly ill-suited to the grizzled genre of the Western. “Unlike James Arness and Chuck Connors of television, or Gary Cooper and John Wayne of the screen …. Presley was hardly the living embodiment of rugged, western masculinity. His greased hair, made-up face, delicately turned collar, and tailored costume—all duly noted in the silver paintings—read as a carefully staged, and therefore utterly unconvincing performance” (D. McCarthy, “Andy Warhol’s Silver Elvises: Meaning through Context at the Ferus Gallery in 1963,” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 88, No. 2, June 2006, p. 361). Through Double Elvis’s spaceless silver background, we are made all the more acutely aware that what we are seeing is an actor posing for the camera—adopting a stock pose for a publicity shot—rather than a film still cut out from narrative sequence. The repetition is rigid and unmoving. Double Elvis pictures not the West’s cowboy ideal, a second-hand type-figure being played, somewhat ineptly, by the character of Elvis Presley.
In his study of Warhol’s oeuvre, Richard Meyer discusses the manner of the Ferus installation that not only heightens the sense of Presley as product, but also explores the commercialization of desire. Warhol offers not just an Elvis pair but a serial progression of Presley clones, a battalion of six-foot tall Elvises who fan out across the gallery walls in seemingly endless repetition. In considering this proliferation of Presleys, we might consult the following scenario from The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, from A to B and Back Again: “So today if you see a person who looks like your teenage fantasy walking down the street, it’s probably not your fantasy but someone who had the same fantasy as you and decided instead of getting it or being it, to look like it, and so he went and bought that look that you like. So forget it. Just think of all the James Deans and what it means. One does not possess or become James Dean (or Elvis Presley) but purchases his look and, in doing so, begins to attract other celebrity impersonators as well. A loosely organized collective (‘All the James Deans’) is generated through the communal imitation of an ideal image of desirability, through the mirroring of parallel fantasies played out across the surface of the body” (R. Meyer, “Most Wanted Men: Homoeroticism and the Secret of Censorship in Early Warhol”, Outlaw Representation: Censorship & Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art, Oxford 2002, pp. 151-52).
Was Warhol as detached from his subject as it appears? The biographer Victor Bockris cites an intriguing angle taken by John Carlin, whose study The Iconography of Elvis proposed artistic similarities between Warhol and the King. “Both came from humble backgrounds and meteorically captured their respective fields in a way that seemed to break entirely with the past. Each betrayed his initial talent as soon as it became known, and opted for a blank and apparently superficial parody of earlier styles which surprisingly expanded, rather than alienated, their audience. Both went into film as a means of exploring the mythic dimensions of their celebrity. On the surface both men shared a scandalous lack of taste. Particularly as both took repetition and superficiality to mask an obscure but vital aspect of their work: the desire for transcendence or annihilation without compromise, setting up a profound ambivalence on the part of both artist and audience as to whether the product was trash or tragedy” (G. Carlin, quoted in V. Bockris, The Life and Death of Andy Warhol, New York 1989, pp. 124-25).
While there are perhaps parallels in these elements of myth-making and parody, a more convincing equivalence might be drawn not between the artist and Elvis, but between Warhol and the blank, silver surface on which the image of Elvis is screened. Warhol’s own manufactured persona was that of a vacuum or mirror: he took on a role of empty, passive receptivity, conceiving his Pop art as reflective of the external world around him. There is a serious truth to his oft-cited maxim that “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, then just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it” (A. Warhol, quoted in G. Berg, “Andy: My True Story”, The East Village Other, November 1, 1966). In his early interviews, he commonly adopted a mirroring strategy of refusing to answer questions, instead bouncing them back to his interviewer. As well as the large-scale use of silver paint in the Elvis works, 1963 saw Warhol’s associate Billy Name cover the entire interior of the Factory in reflective aluminium foil; that same year, Warhol replaced his own grey hairpiece with a metallic silver wig. His use of reflection would reach its apotheosis in the Silver Clouds, floating balloons first shown at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1966, which Warhol saw as dematerialized paintings. “I thought that the way to finish off painting for me would be to have a painting that floats,” he said, “so I invented the floating silver rectangles that you fill up with helium and let out of your window … I like silver” (A. Warhol, quoted in G. Berg, “Andy: My True Story”, The East Village Other, November 1, 1966). These weightless mirror-surfaces echoed Warhol’s own role as elusive, free-floating observer, accepting and refracting his surroundings. He is present, too, in the silver blankness of Double Elvis, which reflects not only the constructed codes and conventions of Hollywood fiction, but also the real societal mechanisms they embody, in a cold dressing-room mirror.
By 1962, having stunned the art world with his early paintings of Coke bottles, soup cans and Marilyn Monroe, Warhol had cemented his position as the king of Pop in New York. Created in the summer of 1963, the “Ferus Type” Elvises were conceived to conquer the West Coast. Warhol had already completed a group of initial “Studio Type” Elvises, whose half-tone backgrounds lent them a painterly sense of illusionistic space; for his upcoming show at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, the home of Hollywood and the birthplace of the Western, he had something more dramatic in mind. With the help of his new assistant, the poet Gerard Malanga, he completed a new series whose composition would vividly embody the “silver screen” of cinema. Displaced from any sense of narrative or locale onto pure, shining surface, they became celluloid ciphers, highlighting the multiple artifice of Elvis’s performance.
The very method by which Warhol delivered them was playfully theatrical, and is almost as famous as the works themselves. Gallery director Irving Blum received not individual canvases but a single, enormous roll of canvas with a box of differently sized stretcher bars. “I called him and said, ‘Will you come?’ [to Los Angeles],” Blum recalls, “And he said, ‘I can’t. I’m very busy. Will you do it?’ I said, ‘You mean, you want me to cut them? Virtually as I think they should be cut and placed around the wall?’ And he said, ‘Yes, cut them any way that you think should ... they should be cut. I leave it to you. The only thing I really want is that they should be hung edge to edge, densely – around the gallery. So long as you can manage that, do the best you can.’ … And that’s exactly what I did” (I. Blum, interview by P. S. Smith, October 20, 1978, in Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, Ann Arbor, 1986, pp. 221-22). Today, eleven of the twenty-two extant “Ferus Type” works are in museum collections, including another Double Elvis from this series at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Warhol’s apparent relinquishing of control was in fact anything but: he had predetermined the size of each canvas with the stretcher bars he sent to Blum, which he knew would have to be matched to the groups of single, double and multi-figure Elvises. Shown in concert with a series of silkscreens depicting Liz Taylor, they made for a mesmerizing, iterated display of cinematic archetype. Importantly, 1963 saw the beginning of the artist’s own movie-making career. Warhol’s films display a decidedly anti-Hollywood sensibility, disregarding norms of length, subject matter, plot and even sound quality: his debut release, Sleep, shows us a hazy five hours and twenty minutes of the poet John Giorno sleeping, while his controversial Lonesome Cowboys (1968) subjects the Western to pornographic parody. In a similarly provocative vein, the Ferus installation can be read as a barbed comment on the repetitive nature of the Western genre. As a commercial form instantiating predictable rules and roles, the Western in fact constitutes a mass-produced product not unlike the Campbell’s Soup cans Warhol showed at the Ferus Gallery the previous year. The Elvises, themselves a packaged commodity, echoed the soup cans’ supermarket-style rows. David McCarthy writes that in its “combination of reverence and ridicule, of homage and parody, of veneration and dismissal … the Ferus exhibition was something of a put-on, a sham, a provocation by an Eastern hipster who was already making his own films and who had previously dismissed Hollywood stars as pure product … [The paintings’] camp humor mirrored back to Hollywood its essential vacuousness in churning out formulaic narratives in the pursuit of profit, at least when it came to Elvis Presley and Flaming Star” (D. McCarthy, “Andy Warhol’s Silver Elvises: Meaning through Context at the Ferus Gallery in 1963,” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 88, No. 2, June 2006, p. 365).
The place of Presley himself in Warhol’s world was central to the subversion. Famous without precedent, he allowed Warhol to get to the heart of the 1960s. “Elvis Presley is the greatest cultural force in the twentieth century,” said composer Leonard Bernstein. “He introduced the beat to everything and he changed everything—music, language, clothes. It’s a whole new social revolution—the sixties came from it” (L. Bernstein, quoted in P. Clarke Keogh, Elvis Presley: The Man, The Life, The Legend, New York, 2004, p. 2). Born in a two-room house in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1935, Presley began singing as a small child. At the age of ten he made his first public appearance in a local talent contest singing a well-known folk song—he was placed 5th. In 1948, his family moved to Memphis, Tennessee and at the age of 18, he paid for a couple of hours of studio time at Sun Records, and made a demo, in order—as he later claimed—to see what his voice sounded like. After taking a job as a truck driver, Presley continued to sing at a number of local venues and on the evening of July 5th, 1954, he was invited back into the studio to sing a number of songs for Sun Records owner Sam Philips. Philips was looking for someone who could popularize the traditionally ‘Black’ ballads that the studio specialized in, and bring them to a wider audience. At the end of the evening, after signing a wide range of different songs, Elvis launched into a rendition of Arthur Crudup’s That’s All Right. After the record received some airtime on a local radio station, the DJ was inundated with calls and messages keen to find out more about this new talent, and so began a music career that would result in Presley become the most successful musical act of all time.
According to Rolling Stone magazine it was Elvis who made rock ‘n’ roll the international language of Pop, making him an ideal subject for Warhol’s unique brand of art. In his role as the American music giant of the twentieth century, Presley single-handedly changed the course of music and culture from the mid-1950s onwards. Elvis’s first record was of rockabilly music—an up-tempo, beat driven offshoot of country music. But it was in 1956, when he released his first single under the guidance of his new manager Colonel Tom Parker, that his career really took off when Heartbreak Hotel went to number one in the U.S. Billboard charts; Presley would ultimately sell over 600 million records during his lifetime. In the mid-1950s he expanded his repertoire and embarked on a film career and over the next two decades he appeared in at least thirty-two movies, including Jailhouse Rock, Blue Hawaii and Flaming Star (from where the source material for the current painting was taken). Presley’s emergence as a cultural phenomenon coincided with the birth of the American teenager—a new consumer market that, thanks to the popularity of people like Elvis, would come to be worth billions of dollars. As early as 1956 the Wall Street Journal identified the potential of this new sector of buying power and identified the singer as a major contributor. Elvis’s popularity spawned demand for everything from new lines of clothing based on his black slacks and loose, open-necked shirts to pink portable record players for teenagers’ bedrooms. It was also responsible for a phenomenal growth in the sales of transistor radios which rocketed from sales of an estimated 100,000 in 1955 to 5,000,000 in just three years later.
In addition to the music, one reason for Elvis’s popularity amongst young people was his sense of rebellion. Compared the clean-cut appearance of his predecessors such as Frank Sinatra, this new generation was drawn to the King’s slicked backed hair, casual fashions and those famous gyrating hips. For many parents, Presley was “the first rock symbolism of teenage rebellion…they did not like him, and condemned him as depraved. …prejudice doubtless figured in the adult antagonism. Regardless of whether parents were aware of the… sexual origins of the phrase rock ‘n’ roll, Presley impressed them as the visual and aural embodiment of sex” (A. Shaw, quoted by R. Serge Denisoff, Solid Gold: The Popular Record Industry, New York, 1975, p. 22). Sinatra himself opined “His kind of music is deplorable, a rancid smelling aphrodisiac. It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people” and the New York Daily News shrieked that following the King’s performance of Hound Dog on the Milton Berle show in June 1956, popular music “has reached its lowest depths in the ‘grunt and groin’ antics of one Elvis Presley” (B. Gross, quoted L. McShane, “Elvis Presley’s ‘grunt and groin’ act on ‘Milton Berle Show’ was Lady Gaga-esque act of 1950s,” New York Daily News, June 2012, accessed via www.nydailynews.com, September 7, 2014).
With his music, Presley straddled two segregated sections of society, and it was the racial tensions caused by his amalgamation of traditionally African American ballads with more mainstream musical traditions that caused the consternation and conflict amongst the generations. This upending of convention continued with the film Flaming Star, from which Warhol took the source image for Double Elvis. The storyline also deals with racial tensions as Pacer Burton, the name of Elvis’s character, is the son of a Native American mother and a white father, who encounters a conflict of loyalties when there is tension between the two communities. Thus, raising potentially uncomfortable questions about race was clearly part of the challenge that many felt Elvis interjected into the rapidly changing culture of 1950s America.
In Double Elvis, Warhol plays up the artifice of his subject. Elvis was no born film star, but a rock-and-roll artist transferred into Hollywood by the logic of commerce, much like Frank Sinatra or Buddy Holly before him. His movies were box office hits but often critically panned. As McCarthy notes, he was perhaps particularly ill-suited to the grizzled genre of the Western. “Unlike James Arness and Chuck Connors of television, or Gary Cooper and John Wayne of the screen …. Presley was hardly the living embodiment of rugged, western masculinity. His greased hair, made-up face, delicately turned collar, and tailored costume—all duly noted in the silver paintings—read as a carefully staged, and therefore utterly unconvincing performance” (D. McCarthy, “Andy Warhol’s Silver Elvises: Meaning through Context at the Ferus Gallery in 1963,” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 88, No. 2, June 2006, p. 361). Through Double Elvis’s spaceless silver background, we are made all the more acutely aware that what we are seeing is an actor posing for the camera—adopting a stock pose for a publicity shot—rather than a film still cut out from narrative sequence. The repetition is rigid and unmoving. Double Elvis pictures not the West’s cowboy ideal, a second-hand type-figure being played, somewhat ineptly, by the character of Elvis Presley.
In his study of Warhol’s oeuvre, Richard Meyer discusses the manner of the Ferus installation that not only heightens the sense of Presley as product, but also explores the commercialization of desire. Warhol offers not just an Elvis pair but a serial progression of Presley clones, a battalion of six-foot tall Elvises who fan out across the gallery walls in seemingly endless repetition. In considering this proliferation of Presleys, we might consult the following scenario from The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, from A to B and Back Again: “So today if you see a person who looks like your teenage fantasy walking down the street, it’s probably not your fantasy but someone who had the same fantasy as you and decided instead of getting it or being it, to look like it, and so he went and bought that look that you like. So forget it. Just think of all the James Deans and what it means. One does not possess or become James Dean (or Elvis Presley) but purchases his look and, in doing so, begins to attract other celebrity impersonators as well. A loosely organized collective (‘All the James Deans’) is generated through the communal imitation of an ideal image of desirability, through the mirroring of parallel fantasies played out across the surface of the body” (R. Meyer, “Most Wanted Men: Homoeroticism and the Secret of Censorship in Early Warhol”, Outlaw Representation: Censorship & Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art, Oxford 2002, pp. 151-52).
Was Warhol as detached from his subject as it appears? The biographer Victor Bockris cites an intriguing angle taken by John Carlin, whose study The Iconography of Elvis proposed artistic similarities between Warhol and the King. “Both came from humble backgrounds and meteorically captured their respective fields in a way that seemed to break entirely with the past. Each betrayed his initial talent as soon as it became known, and opted for a blank and apparently superficial parody of earlier styles which surprisingly expanded, rather than alienated, their audience. Both went into film as a means of exploring the mythic dimensions of their celebrity. On the surface both men shared a scandalous lack of taste. Particularly as both took repetition and superficiality to mask an obscure but vital aspect of their work: the desire for transcendence or annihilation without compromise, setting up a profound ambivalence on the part of both artist and audience as to whether the product was trash or tragedy” (G. Carlin, quoted in V. Bockris, The Life and Death of Andy Warhol, New York 1989, pp. 124-25).
While there are perhaps parallels in these elements of myth-making and parody, a more convincing equivalence might be drawn not between the artist and Elvis, but between Warhol and the blank, silver surface on which the image of Elvis is screened. Warhol’s own manufactured persona was that of a vacuum or mirror: he took on a role of empty, passive receptivity, conceiving his Pop art as reflective of the external world around him. There is a serious truth to his oft-cited maxim that “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, then just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it” (A. Warhol, quoted in G. Berg, “Andy: My True Story”, The East Village Other, November 1, 1966). In his early interviews, he commonly adopted a mirroring strategy of refusing to answer questions, instead bouncing them back to his interviewer. As well as the large-scale use of silver paint in the Elvis works, 1963 saw Warhol’s associate Billy Name cover the entire interior of the Factory in reflective aluminium foil; that same year, Warhol replaced his own grey hairpiece with a metallic silver wig. His use of reflection would reach its apotheosis in the Silver Clouds, floating balloons first shown at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1966, which Warhol saw as dematerialized paintings. “I thought that the way to finish off painting for me would be to have a painting that floats,” he said, “so I invented the floating silver rectangles that you fill up with helium and let out of your window … I like silver” (A. Warhol, quoted in G. Berg, “Andy: My True Story”, The East Village Other, November 1, 1966). These weightless mirror-surfaces echoed Warhol’s own role as elusive, free-floating observer, accepting and refracting his surroundings. He is present, too, in the silver blankness of Double Elvis, which reflects not only the constructed codes and conventions of Hollywood fiction, but also the real societal mechanisms they embody, in a cold dressing-room mirror.
Beijo III (Kiss III) - Roy Lichtenstein
Beijo III (Kiss III) - Roy Lichtenstein
Coleção privada
Magna sobre tela - 162x121 - 1962
This work will appear in the forthcoming Catalogue Raisonné
being prepared by the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation.
Painted by one of the foremost figures of American Pop Art, Kiss III (1962) is a pivotal work from one of Roy Lichtenstein’s most lauded bodies of work—diverging from his Abstract Expressionist compatriots—as the artist brought together the previously divergent worlds of popular culture and high art. Painted the same year as the artist’s inaugural solo exhibition at the legendary Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, works such as this began pulling from the pages of comic books and enlarging the sampled imagery with meticulous detail. While effectively reproducing extant imagery, Lichtenstein was clear that his works should be viewed for their formal qualities rather than their enticing subject matter. He noted, “My use of evenly repeated dots and diagonal lines and uninflected color areas suggest that my work is right where it is, right on the canvas, definitely not a window into the world” (R. Lichtenstein, quoted in J. Cowart, (ed.), Roy Lichtenstein: Beginning to End, exh. cat., Fundación Juan March, Madrid, 2007, p. 52). By positioning himself as a crossover between the formalist doctrines of Clement Greenberg and the populist materials of periodicals and advertisements, Lichtenstein established a dichotomy between the perception of high and low art as one of the essential points of his expansive oeuvre, and firmly cemented himself as a figurehead of American art in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Clearly depicted with bold black outlines, on the surface Kiss III depicts a man and woman sharing a close embrace. Both figures have their eyes closed as the man’s large hand presses down on the woman’s shoulder. Their lips are planted in a passionate kiss that is echoed in the energetic shapes making up the explosive background. Rendered in primary colors with black and white additions, the composition mirrors the color scheme of mass market printing. By creating halftones through the use of small dots of color, Lichtenstein is able to further mimic these processes that rely on a restricted ink palette. While the areas of blue, red and yellow are flat and pure in their application, the peach skin and violet of the woman’s jacket show evidence of the artist’s replication of the Ben-Day dots used to create subtle shifts in color with a four-color printing process. Bands of intensity create subtle striping in these areas and further allude to cheap printing and the color illustrations of comics and newspaper advertisements. This interest in the very processes of image making was remarked upon by the artist’s second wife Dorothy when she intoned: “...when Roy worked, he would start with a very strong image, but once he decided what he was going to paint, he would try to get beyond the image to look at it as marks on a canvas--to look at it from as much of an abstract perspective as possible so that he wouldn’t just be reproducing a picture of something. [...] He was very interested in form and style” (D. Lichtenstein, quoted in J. Koons, “Conversation,” Women, exh. cat., New York, 2008, p.10). Rather than creating his own tableaus in the style of other comic artists, Lichtenstein investigated the processes by which these reproducible arts were made and distributed to a wide audience. Carefully selecting scenes like that of Kiss III, with its white starburst and bold black rays on a red ground behind the titular kiss, the artist engaged the audience immediately with the representative subject matter, and then asked them to further investigate the process through intense framing choices and the translation of printed matter into an exacting homage in acrylic on canvas.
Although not initiated by a concrete group of artists, Pop was characterized in the United States by a common reaction to the images employed by mass media and entertainment in the mid-20th century. Artists like Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist all approached the issue in different modes, but were united by their fascination with, and inevitable hesitance to accept without question, the inundation of advertisements and pop culture in America. Lichtenstein’s tact was to focus on images that were prevalent and cheap, but to paint them outside of their original tabloid context in order to highlight the artist’s hand as it converged nearly seamlessly with the bold, graphic style. While often categorized as a painter of comic-style panels, Lichtenstein’s actual appropriation from artists like Jack Kirby and other mainstays of American comics was primarily limited to the early 1960s period from which Kiss III hails. The printed originals were never copied exactly, but were instead used as a point of departure to explore framing, composition and to create a visual point of reference for audiences that would already have been aware of the style being employed by comic book artists. From these works, Lichtenstein established a recognizable iconography that easily traversed the boundary between gallery and supermarket pulp. Donald Judd, writing about a 1963 exhibition, noted, “Lichtenstein is representing representation—which is very different from simply representing an object or a view. The main quality of the work comes from the contrast between the comic panel, apparently copied, and the art, nevertheless present” (D. Judd, “A critical review of the 1963 exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery,” Arts Magazine, New York, November, 1963). The artist was interested less in creating new images than in starting a conversation about the proliferation of certain types of imagery within a broader cultural context.
During the 1940s and 50s, Lichtenstein dabbled in Cubism and the omnipresent Abstract Expressionism. Paradoxically, out of this deeply personal tendency the artist arrived at his detached, seemingly anonymous signature style. “I was sort of immersed in Abstract Expressionism,” Lichtenstein noted. “It was a kind of Abstract Expressionism with cartoons within the expressionist image. It’s too hard to picture, I think, and the paintings themselves weren’t very successful. [...] I did abstract paintings of sort of striped brushstrokes and within these in a kind of scribbly way were images of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny. In doing these paintings I had, of course, the original strip cartoons to look at, and the idea of doing one without apparent alteration just occurred to me. [...] I had this cartoon painting in my studio, and it was a little too formidable. [...] Having been more or less schooled as an Abstract Expressionist, it was quite difficult psychologically to do anything else” (R. Lichtenstein “BBC Interview with David Sylvester,” recorded in New York, January 1966, and reproduced in Some Kind of Reality: Roy Lichtenstein, exh. cat., Anthony D’Offay, London, 1997, p. 7). Even though works like Kiss III seem like mechanical productions, further enhanced by Lichtenstein’s use of even coats of Magna (an early acrylic paint), his precision in application belies a deft hand and a unified formal vision. Furthermore, by adopting the simplified style of mass market imagery, Lichtenstein merged the idea of the printed material with the physical picture plane. He was quick to note that the subjects were secondary to him in the overall process of his work, saying, “I don’t think the importance of the art has anything to do with the importance of the subject matter. I think importance resides more in the unity of the composition and in the inventiveness of perception” (R. Lichtenstein, quoted in Roy Lichtenstein Beginning to End, Fundación Juan March, Madrid, 2007, p. 128). Drawing on the all-over aesthetic of his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries, and by filling the canvas to the very edge, the artist placed emphasis not so much on the subject matter but on the literal structure of a painting as a flat surface.
In 1961, Lichtenstein broke with his earlier practice and began to reproduce the visual qualities of printed ephemera. Among his subjects were works based on advertisements (like Girl with Ball [1961]) and comics that featured war stories and romantic themes (of which Kiss III is a prime example). “At that time,” Lichtenstein later recounted, “I was interested in anything I could use as a subject that was emotionally strong—usually love, war, or something that was highly charged and emotional subject matter to be opposite to the removed and deliberate painting techniques. Cartooning itself usually consists of very highly charged subject matter carried out in standard, obvious, and removed techniques” (R. Lichtenstein, quoted in J. Coplands, (ed.), Roy Lichtenstein, New York, 1972, p. 89). In these paintings, he preferred the flat, simple colors of commercial printing as well as the thick black outlines that were used to hide the imperfections inherent to offset printing on a massive scale. Arguably the most recognizable aspect the artist borrowed from his mainstream source material was the use of Ben-Day dots on a scale that rendered their original purpose of blending colors and half tones useless and instead evolved into a stylistic trope that became one of Lichtenstein’s calling cards. In early works like Kiss III, the dots are small and still hint at their origin, however in later works, the dots become visual indicators of the artist’s origins and his sly tribute to mechanical processes. By using stencils to fill his compositions with these tightly ordered points of color, Lichtenstein made sure that his paintings were obvious in their reference to mass-produced printing techniques. He wanted to make sure viewers knew that the works were not representative of the immediate subject matter, but rather the printed material from which he had borrowed.
Particularly influential to Lichtenstein’s career was his tutelage under the painter Hoyt T. Sherman who introduced his pupils to modernism during the early 1940s. Sherman was interested in ideas of perception, especially as they related to the everyday and the separation of pictorial representation from the real world. Thinking about a scene’s formal qualities over its context or perceived meaning was central to these teachings, and became one of the core tenets of Lichtenstein’s early practice. Sherman employed a “Flash Room” in his classes which Lichtenstein described as “a darkened room where images would be flashed on a screen for very brief intervals-about a tenth of a second. Something very simple to start, maybe just a few marks. And you would have a pile of paper, and you’d try to draw it. You’d get a very strong afterimage, a total impression, and then you’d draw it in the dark-the point being that you’d have to sense where the parts were in relation to the whole. The images became progressively more complex, and eventually you would go out and try to work the same way elsewhere-would try to bring home the same kind of sensing to your drawing without the mechanical aid of a flash room” (R. Lichtenstein, quoted in C. Tomkins, The Art of Roy Lichtenstein: Mural with Blue Brushstroke, New York, 1987, p. 14). Creating vivid compositions from the briefest of glances helped Lichtenstein to hone in on the strongest elements of his appropriated material and successfully frame them in a way that created powerful connections without the aid of text, extraneous context, or extensive narrative structure.
Maybe the most perplexing but telling aspect of Lichtenstein’s storied career was his ability to translate a near-universal mode into one of the most iconic personal styles of the 20th century. The artist, commenting on his approach, noted, “All painters take a personal attitude toward painting. What makes each object in the work is that it is organized by that artist’s vision. The style and the content are also different from anyone else’s. They are unified by the point of view—mine. This is the big tradition of art” (R. Lichtenstein, quoted in C. Tomkins, op. cit., p. 42). Keenly aware of art historical traditions as well as the influx of the mass media of capitalist advertising and entertainment, Lichtenstein’s ability to traverse the edges of these two mainstream modes resulted in a perfect fusion that grew into one of the most important American art movements.
Painted by one of the foremost figures of American Pop Art, Kiss III (1962) is a pivotal work from one of Roy Lichtenstein’s most lauded bodies of work—diverging from his Abstract Expressionist compatriots—as the artist brought together the previously divergent worlds of popular culture and high art. Painted the same year as the artist’s inaugural solo exhibition at the legendary Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, works such as this began pulling from the pages of comic books and enlarging the sampled imagery with meticulous detail. While effectively reproducing extant imagery, Lichtenstein was clear that his works should be viewed for their formal qualities rather than their enticing subject matter. He noted, “My use of evenly repeated dots and diagonal lines and uninflected color areas suggest that my work is right where it is, right on the canvas, definitely not a window into the world” (R. Lichtenstein, quoted in J. Cowart, (ed.), Roy Lichtenstein: Beginning to End, exh. cat., Fundación Juan March, Madrid, 2007, p. 52). By positioning himself as a crossover between the formalist doctrines of Clement Greenberg and the populist materials of periodicals and advertisements, Lichtenstein established a dichotomy between the perception of high and low art as one of the essential points of his expansive oeuvre, and firmly cemented himself as a figurehead of American art in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Clearly depicted with bold black outlines, on the surface Kiss III depicts a man and woman sharing a close embrace. Both figures have their eyes closed as the man’s large hand presses down on the woman’s shoulder. Their lips are planted in a passionate kiss that is echoed in the energetic shapes making up the explosive background. Rendered in primary colors with black and white additions, the composition mirrors the color scheme of mass market printing. By creating halftones through the use of small dots of color, Lichtenstein is able to further mimic these processes that rely on a restricted ink palette. While the areas of blue, red and yellow are flat and pure in their application, the peach skin and violet of the woman’s jacket show evidence of the artist’s replication of the Ben-Day dots used to create subtle shifts in color with a four-color printing process. Bands of intensity create subtle striping in these areas and further allude to cheap printing and the color illustrations of comics and newspaper advertisements. This interest in the very processes of image making was remarked upon by the artist’s second wife Dorothy when she intoned: “...when Roy worked, he would start with a very strong image, but once he decided what he was going to paint, he would try to get beyond the image to look at it as marks on a canvas--to look at it from as much of an abstract perspective as possible so that he wouldn’t just be reproducing a picture of something. [...] He was very interested in form and style” (D. Lichtenstein, quoted in J. Koons, “Conversation,” Women, exh. cat., New York, 2008, p.10). Rather than creating his own tableaus in the style of other comic artists, Lichtenstein investigated the processes by which these reproducible arts were made and distributed to a wide audience. Carefully selecting scenes like that of Kiss III, with its white starburst and bold black rays on a red ground behind the titular kiss, the artist engaged the audience immediately with the representative subject matter, and then asked them to further investigate the process through intense framing choices and the translation of printed matter into an exacting homage in acrylic on canvas.
Although not initiated by a concrete group of artists, Pop was characterized in the United States by a common reaction to the images employed by mass media and entertainment in the mid-20th century. Artists like Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist all approached the issue in different modes, but were united by their fascination with, and inevitable hesitance to accept without question, the inundation of advertisements and pop culture in America. Lichtenstein’s tact was to focus on images that were prevalent and cheap, but to paint them outside of their original tabloid context in order to highlight the artist’s hand as it converged nearly seamlessly with the bold, graphic style. While often categorized as a painter of comic-style panels, Lichtenstein’s actual appropriation from artists like Jack Kirby and other mainstays of American comics was primarily limited to the early 1960s period from which Kiss III hails. The printed originals were never copied exactly, but were instead used as a point of departure to explore framing, composition and to create a visual point of reference for audiences that would already have been aware of the style being employed by comic book artists. From these works, Lichtenstein established a recognizable iconography that easily traversed the boundary between gallery and supermarket pulp. Donald Judd, writing about a 1963 exhibition, noted, “Lichtenstein is representing representation—which is very different from simply representing an object or a view. The main quality of the work comes from the contrast between the comic panel, apparently copied, and the art, nevertheless present” (D. Judd, “A critical review of the 1963 exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery,” Arts Magazine, New York, November, 1963). The artist was interested less in creating new images than in starting a conversation about the proliferation of certain types of imagery within a broader cultural context.
During the 1940s and 50s, Lichtenstein dabbled in Cubism and the omnipresent Abstract Expressionism. Paradoxically, out of this deeply personal tendency the artist arrived at his detached, seemingly anonymous signature style. “I was sort of immersed in Abstract Expressionism,” Lichtenstein noted. “It was a kind of Abstract Expressionism with cartoons within the expressionist image. It’s too hard to picture, I think, and the paintings themselves weren’t very successful. [...] I did abstract paintings of sort of striped brushstrokes and within these in a kind of scribbly way were images of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny. In doing these paintings I had, of course, the original strip cartoons to look at, and the idea of doing one without apparent alteration just occurred to me. [...] I had this cartoon painting in my studio, and it was a little too formidable. [...] Having been more or less schooled as an Abstract Expressionist, it was quite difficult psychologically to do anything else” (R. Lichtenstein “BBC Interview with David Sylvester,” recorded in New York, January 1966, and reproduced in Some Kind of Reality: Roy Lichtenstein, exh. cat., Anthony D’Offay, London, 1997, p. 7). Even though works like Kiss III seem like mechanical productions, further enhanced by Lichtenstein’s use of even coats of Magna (an early acrylic paint), his precision in application belies a deft hand and a unified formal vision. Furthermore, by adopting the simplified style of mass market imagery, Lichtenstein merged the idea of the printed material with the physical picture plane. He was quick to note that the subjects were secondary to him in the overall process of his work, saying, “I don’t think the importance of the art has anything to do with the importance of the subject matter. I think importance resides more in the unity of the composition and in the inventiveness of perception” (R. Lichtenstein, quoted in Roy Lichtenstein Beginning to End, Fundación Juan March, Madrid, 2007, p. 128). Drawing on the all-over aesthetic of his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries, and by filling the canvas to the very edge, the artist placed emphasis not so much on the subject matter but on the literal structure of a painting as a flat surface.
In 1961, Lichtenstein broke with his earlier practice and began to reproduce the visual qualities of printed ephemera. Among his subjects were works based on advertisements (like Girl with Ball [1961]) and comics that featured war stories and romantic themes (of which Kiss III is a prime example). “At that time,” Lichtenstein later recounted, “I was interested in anything I could use as a subject that was emotionally strong—usually love, war, or something that was highly charged and emotional subject matter to be opposite to the removed and deliberate painting techniques. Cartooning itself usually consists of very highly charged subject matter carried out in standard, obvious, and removed techniques” (R. Lichtenstein, quoted in J. Coplands, (ed.), Roy Lichtenstein, New York, 1972, p. 89). In these paintings, he preferred the flat, simple colors of commercial printing as well as the thick black outlines that were used to hide the imperfections inherent to offset printing on a massive scale. Arguably the most recognizable aspect the artist borrowed from his mainstream source material was the use of Ben-Day dots on a scale that rendered their original purpose of blending colors and half tones useless and instead evolved into a stylistic trope that became one of Lichtenstein’s calling cards. In early works like Kiss III, the dots are small and still hint at their origin, however in later works, the dots become visual indicators of the artist’s origins and his sly tribute to mechanical processes. By using stencils to fill his compositions with these tightly ordered points of color, Lichtenstein made sure that his paintings were obvious in their reference to mass-produced printing techniques. He wanted to make sure viewers knew that the works were not representative of the immediate subject matter, but rather the printed material from which he had borrowed.
Particularly influential to Lichtenstein’s career was his tutelage under the painter Hoyt T. Sherman who introduced his pupils to modernism during the early 1940s. Sherman was interested in ideas of perception, especially as they related to the everyday and the separation of pictorial representation from the real world. Thinking about a scene’s formal qualities over its context or perceived meaning was central to these teachings, and became one of the core tenets of Lichtenstein’s early practice. Sherman employed a “Flash Room” in his classes which Lichtenstein described as “a darkened room where images would be flashed on a screen for very brief intervals-about a tenth of a second. Something very simple to start, maybe just a few marks. And you would have a pile of paper, and you’d try to draw it. You’d get a very strong afterimage, a total impression, and then you’d draw it in the dark-the point being that you’d have to sense where the parts were in relation to the whole. The images became progressively more complex, and eventually you would go out and try to work the same way elsewhere-would try to bring home the same kind of sensing to your drawing without the mechanical aid of a flash room” (R. Lichtenstein, quoted in C. Tomkins, The Art of Roy Lichtenstein: Mural with Blue Brushstroke, New York, 1987, p. 14). Creating vivid compositions from the briefest of glances helped Lichtenstein to hone in on the strongest elements of his appropriated material and successfully frame them in a way that created powerful connections without the aid of text, extraneous context, or extensive narrative structure.
Maybe the most perplexing but telling aspect of Lichtenstein’s storied career was his ability to translate a near-universal mode into one of the most iconic personal styles of the 20th century. The artist, commenting on his approach, noted, “All painters take a personal attitude toward painting. What makes each object in the work is that it is organized by that artist’s vision. The style and the content are also different from anyone else’s. They are unified by the point of view—mine. This is the big tradition of art” (R. Lichtenstein, quoted in C. Tomkins, op. cit., p. 42). Keenly aware of art historical traditions as well as the influx of the mass media of capitalist advertising and entertainment, Lichtenstein’s ability to traverse the edges of these two mainstream modes resulted in a perfect fusion that grew into one of the most important American art movements.
Nota do blog: Vendido em leilão da Christie’s por USD
31,135,000. Mais de R$ 170.000.000,00. Inacreditável...
Liz, Liz de Cores Mais Antigas (Liz, Early Colored Liz) - Andy Warhol
Liz, Liz de Cores Mais Antigas (Liz, Early Colored Liz) - Andy Warhol
Coleção privada
Tinta sintética e serigrafia sobre tela - 101x101 - 1963
Andy Warhol’s Liz is an iconic tribute to one of the major
silver screen goddesses in the artist’s Pop pantheon. Painted at the height of
Elizabeth Taylor’s fame, Liz is a unique painting from a group of
thirteen colorful portraits of the actress that Warhol executed in the fall of
1963. In this cerulean blue portrait, Warhol immortalizes the actress as an
embodiment of the cult of celebrity. Closely related to the candy-colored
Marilyn paintings that he executed in the previous year, Liz shows
Warhol’s genius for color in full force. The brilliant blue background offsets
Taylor’s luminous skin, as well as her trademark scarlet lips and violet eyes,
magnifying the most characteristic features of her celebrated beauty. Although
Warhol employed the mass media technique of screen printing, he brought a high
level of personal involvement to the Liz series, carefully
embellishing her skin, eyes and make-up with hand-applied paint.
As perhaps the greatest cinematic icon of the silver screen in the latter half of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Taylor was clearly a fitting subject for Warhol’s celebrity-oriented art. For a man who—ever since boyhood—had held an almost obsessive fascination for the glittering allure and glamour of Hollywood and for young female starlets like Shirley Temple and Natalie Wood, it would seem in retrospect only to have been a matter of time before such a major iconic presence such as Liz Taylor entered the Warholian canon. Indeed, of all the many famous stars that Andy Warhol knew and painted, he seems to have held Elizabeth Taylor in especially high regard, seeing her throughout his life as the absolute epitome of glamour. When asked once in 1964 if he would like to meet her, he immediately became coy and bashful, cooing ecstatically in response, “Ohhhh, Elizabeth Taylor, Ohhhhh. She’s so glamorous” (A. Warhol quoted in K. Goldsmith, I’ll be your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, New York, 2004, p. 26). When later in life Warhol met Taylor, growing to become friends with her in the late 1970s and 80s, he was famously heard to quip how as a choice of afterlife, he would like to be reincarnated as a “big ring” on Taylor’s finger. Not only was Elizabeth Taylor one of the great screen goddesses of her age and an enduring icon of glamour, it was her history as a child star, her many marriages and, in the early 1960s, the relatively recent tragedy of the death of her husband Mike Todd and rumored scandal of her romance with Richard Burton, that led to her status as a superstar who was seldom out of the gossip columns and her image rarely out of the papers.
Created at approximately the same time as his depictions of electric chairs and car crashes, Warhol’s full-face images of Marilyn, Jackie and Liz followed on the heels of deaths and disasters in all three of his subjects’ lives: Taylor’s catastrophic illness in 1961, Monroe’s suicide in August 1962, and John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963. Indeed, during the early to mid-1960s, Liz was a frequent subject of media attention for her flourishing career, fragile health and complicated romances. Warhol depicted her in numerous roles, both personal and professional. She first appeared in one of his tabloid paintings, Daily News, a painting documenting her catastrophic illness of 1961, which had interrupted the filming of Cleopatra. She resurfaced in allusion only, in The Men in Her Life, a work based on a 1957 photograph, which included both her current husband, Mike Todd, and her future one, Eddie Fisher. Most often, however, Warhol was intrigued with Liz as Hollywood starlet: he multiplied images of her characters in National Velvet and Cleopatra, or more simply portrayed her celebrated beauty in numerous full-face portraits, as in the present work. Of his 1963 portraits, Warhol claimed, “I started those a long time ago, when she was so sick and everybody said she was going to die. Now I’m doing them all over, putting bright colors on her lips and eyes” (A. Warhol, quoted in After the Party: Andy Warhol Works 1956-1986, exh. cat., London, 1997, p. 69). In this respect, the present painting is outstanding, and indeed recuperative in many respects. This example not only incorporates a blue background, which reprises the dominant color of Warhol’s earlier Cleopatra image, but it also includes a deep violet hue in Liz’s irises, reproducing Taylor’s actual eye color, a most characteristic feature of her celebrated beauty.
As a canonization of the actress and as a comment on the manufactured nature of fame, Warhol achieved his desired aesthetic effect in the iconic Liz by employing silkscreen. As a process that he had begun on an experimental basis in 1962, Warhol recognized both the instant electricity and underlying artificiality it generated; indeed, the inky superimpositions of photo-derived screens on the bright, hand-painted hues epitomized Pop in their brand-like distinctness. Using the Duchampian methodology that he brought to his previous celebrity portraits such as the Marilyns, he created Liz using a publicity image of the actress, later cropping the bust-length image just below the chin, and sizing the screen to an enlargement of this detail.
Basing his process in the “readymade” and in he mechanical nature of the silkscreen, Warhol nonetheless brought a personal involvement to his portraits from the mid-sixties compared to some of his later more removed adaptations. With works like Liz, he started with a preliminary application of the screen on black canvas. Then, he brushed on background colors and each area of local color, such as the skin tone, eye shadow and lips, by hand in a rough appliqué of patterns. Finally, he added the black frame of the face to the colored map of the under painting. The effect, which is visible in the present work, was one of forced flatness, at once seductively alluring and shallowly artificial—keenly in keeping with the glamorous facade of Hollywood. In the present portrait, Liz’s luminous soft pink skin, green-shadowed eyes, and arresting scarlet lips are of unrivaled beauty.
Despite the compositional crafted nature and forced flatness, Liz bears a poignant touch of humanity. While Warhol famously quipped, “I think everybody should be a machine,” his silk screening process eschews the potential for machine-like perfection and instead relishes in premeditated misalignments and compositional irregularities (A. Warhol, quoted in G.R. Swenson, “What is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Painters, Part I,” Art News62, no. 7, November 1963, p. 26). The intended effects, insinuate a physical dissolution that evokes a fleeting presence, indicating the inherent transience of fame: “The silkscreened image, reproduced whole, has the character of an involuntary imprint. It is a memorial in the sense that it resembles memory -- sometimes vividly present, sometimes elusive, always open to embellishment as well as loss” (T. Crow, “Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol,” After the Party: Andy Warhol Works 1956-1986, exh. cat., Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 1997, p. 22). Warhol’s insistent link between fame and nostalgia, in fact, is the very basis of these works, which are often generated from old photographs; the one used to create present work, for example, is a publicity photograph from 1950, which predates the painting by some thirteen years.
Inspired at a time when Elizabeth Taylor suffered bouts of debilitating sickness, Liz is an extraordinary instance of Warhol’s celebrity portraits that both captures and transcends the vagaries of life. Seen here, more than forty years after its creation, Liz stands as an enduring icon of American culture and a symbol of feminine beauty. Created shortly before Warhol’s serialized reproductions of the Mona Lisa, Liz can be thought of as a latter-day version of enigmatic feminine appeal.
As perhaps the greatest cinematic icon of the silver screen in the latter half of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Taylor was clearly a fitting subject for Warhol’s celebrity-oriented art. For a man who—ever since boyhood—had held an almost obsessive fascination for the glittering allure and glamour of Hollywood and for young female starlets like Shirley Temple and Natalie Wood, it would seem in retrospect only to have been a matter of time before such a major iconic presence such as Liz Taylor entered the Warholian canon. Indeed, of all the many famous stars that Andy Warhol knew and painted, he seems to have held Elizabeth Taylor in especially high regard, seeing her throughout his life as the absolute epitome of glamour. When asked once in 1964 if he would like to meet her, he immediately became coy and bashful, cooing ecstatically in response, “Ohhhh, Elizabeth Taylor, Ohhhhh. She’s so glamorous” (A. Warhol quoted in K. Goldsmith, I’ll be your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, New York, 2004, p. 26). When later in life Warhol met Taylor, growing to become friends with her in the late 1970s and 80s, he was famously heard to quip how as a choice of afterlife, he would like to be reincarnated as a “big ring” on Taylor’s finger. Not only was Elizabeth Taylor one of the great screen goddesses of her age and an enduring icon of glamour, it was her history as a child star, her many marriages and, in the early 1960s, the relatively recent tragedy of the death of her husband Mike Todd and rumored scandal of her romance with Richard Burton, that led to her status as a superstar who was seldom out of the gossip columns and her image rarely out of the papers.
Created at approximately the same time as his depictions of electric chairs and car crashes, Warhol’s full-face images of Marilyn, Jackie and Liz followed on the heels of deaths and disasters in all three of his subjects’ lives: Taylor’s catastrophic illness in 1961, Monroe’s suicide in August 1962, and John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963. Indeed, during the early to mid-1960s, Liz was a frequent subject of media attention for her flourishing career, fragile health and complicated romances. Warhol depicted her in numerous roles, both personal and professional. She first appeared in one of his tabloid paintings, Daily News, a painting documenting her catastrophic illness of 1961, which had interrupted the filming of Cleopatra. She resurfaced in allusion only, in The Men in Her Life, a work based on a 1957 photograph, which included both her current husband, Mike Todd, and her future one, Eddie Fisher. Most often, however, Warhol was intrigued with Liz as Hollywood starlet: he multiplied images of her characters in National Velvet and Cleopatra, or more simply portrayed her celebrated beauty in numerous full-face portraits, as in the present work. Of his 1963 portraits, Warhol claimed, “I started those a long time ago, when she was so sick and everybody said she was going to die. Now I’m doing them all over, putting bright colors on her lips and eyes” (A. Warhol, quoted in After the Party: Andy Warhol Works 1956-1986, exh. cat., London, 1997, p. 69). In this respect, the present painting is outstanding, and indeed recuperative in many respects. This example not only incorporates a blue background, which reprises the dominant color of Warhol’s earlier Cleopatra image, but it also includes a deep violet hue in Liz’s irises, reproducing Taylor’s actual eye color, a most characteristic feature of her celebrated beauty.
As a canonization of the actress and as a comment on the manufactured nature of fame, Warhol achieved his desired aesthetic effect in the iconic Liz by employing silkscreen. As a process that he had begun on an experimental basis in 1962, Warhol recognized both the instant electricity and underlying artificiality it generated; indeed, the inky superimpositions of photo-derived screens on the bright, hand-painted hues epitomized Pop in their brand-like distinctness. Using the Duchampian methodology that he brought to his previous celebrity portraits such as the Marilyns, he created Liz using a publicity image of the actress, later cropping the bust-length image just below the chin, and sizing the screen to an enlargement of this detail.
Basing his process in the “readymade” and in he mechanical nature of the silkscreen, Warhol nonetheless brought a personal involvement to his portraits from the mid-sixties compared to some of his later more removed adaptations. With works like Liz, he started with a preliminary application of the screen on black canvas. Then, he brushed on background colors and each area of local color, such as the skin tone, eye shadow and lips, by hand in a rough appliqué of patterns. Finally, he added the black frame of the face to the colored map of the under painting. The effect, which is visible in the present work, was one of forced flatness, at once seductively alluring and shallowly artificial—keenly in keeping with the glamorous facade of Hollywood. In the present portrait, Liz’s luminous soft pink skin, green-shadowed eyes, and arresting scarlet lips are of unrivaled beauty.
Despite the compositional crafted nature and forced flatness, Liz bears a poignant touch of humanity. While Warhol famously quipped, “I think everybody should be a machine,” his silk screening process eschews the potential for machine-like perfection and instead relishes in premeditated misalignments and compositional irregularities (A. Warhol, quoted in G.R. Swenson, “What is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Painters, Part I,” Art News62, no. 7, November 1963, p. 26). The intended effects, insinuate a physical dissolution that evokes a fleeting presence, indicating the inherent transience of fame: “The silkscreened image, reproduced whole, has the character of an involuntary imprint. It is a memorial in the sense that it resembles memory -- sometimes vividly present, sometimes elusive, always open to embellishment as well as loss” (T. Crow, “Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol,” After the Party: Andy Warhol Works 1956-1986, exh. cat., Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 1997, p. 22). Warhol’s insistent link between fame and nostalgia, in fact, is the very basis of these works, which are often generated from old photographs; the one used to create present work, for example, is a publicity photograph from 1950, which predates the painting by some thirteen years.
Inspired at a time when Elizabeth Taylor suffered bouts of debilitating sickness, Liz is an extraordinary instance of Warhol’s celebrity portraits that both captures and transcends the vagaries of life. Seen here, more than forty years after its creation, Liz stands as an enduring icon of American culture and a symbol of feminine beauty. Created shortly before Warhol’s serialized reproductions of the Mona Lisa, Liz can be thought of as a latter-day version of enigmatic feminine appeal.
Nota do blog: Vendida em leilão da Christie’s por USD
19,343,000.
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).
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.
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.
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.
(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.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.
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