Suzanne Valadon: Model, Painter, Rebel at the Barnes Foundation

 

Suzanne Valadon: Model, Painter, Rebel

Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia

September 26, 2021 - January 9, 2022

Reviewed by Ed Voves

The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia recently opened an exhibition devoted to the art of Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938). This is the museum's third survey of a French woman artist, active during the late nineteenth-early twentieth century. Suzanne Valadon: Model, Painter, Rebel follows in the footsteps of Berthe Morisot, Woman Impressionist (2018) and Marie Cuttoli, the Modern Thread from Miró to Man Ray (1920).

 

The three exhibits, if considered together, trace a cultural continuum during the revolution of Modern Art. Morisot, Cuttoli and Valadon, respectively, were women of the affluent, middle and working classes. Each proved capable of creating or commissioning inspired works of art which graced the walls of their exhibitions at the Barnes. 

Of these three trend-setting women, Suzanne Valadon's life journey from artist's model to professional artist was perhaps the most extraordinary. Forging a path through the obstacle course of poverty and social class, Valadon lived and loved and painted on her own terms. 

Ed Voves, Photo (2021) 

Nancy Ireson of the Barnes Foundation

 

Suzanne Valadon: Model, Painter, Rebel is, surprisingly, the first exhibition of Valadon's art works in the U.S. For that, we have to thank Nancy Ireson of the Barnes Foundation for planning and organizing this brilliant survey of all aspects of Valadon's life and work.

Scholars and enthusiasts of Impressionism will immediately recognize Valadon's name - and more to the point, her face and figure. Valadon was the model for many key Impressionist works, including two of Renoir's 1880's dance paintings. Dance at Bougival and Dance in the City were "show-stoppers" at the landmark 2015 Discovering the Impressionists exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2015)

 Gallery view of the Discovering the Impressionists exhibition

 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Before the opening of Suzanne Valadon: Model, Painter, Rebel, I wondered if Ireson and ther colleagues at the Barnes could entice the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to send Dance at Bougival down to Philly for another visit. But instead of such a well-known favorite to open the exhibition, another, lesser-known, painting featuring Valadon was selected. The choice, unexpected and unsettling, sets a provocative tone for the whole exhibition.

The Kiss of the Siren was painted in 1882 by Gustav Wertheimer (1847-1902), an Austrian artist active in Paris. It is a very pre-Impressionist painting, though it dates to only a year before Dance at Bougival. 

Ed Voves, Photo (2021) 

Gustav Wertheimer's The Kiss of the Siren, 1882 

With its morbid mix of mythology, misogyny and erotica, The Kiss of the Sirenwould seem to be more relevant to the theories of Sigmund Freud than the life of an artist's model who yearned to draw and paint. Yet this weird painting yields revealing insights into the society in which Valedon lived and labored.                                                                                                                                                    

   Gallery view of the Suzanne Valadon exhibiton at the Barnes Foundation.

 A display of paintings for which Valadon modeled appears at right.   

                                                                                                                  

Modeling was hard work. Holding a pose for fifty minutes at a time, often in contorted body postures, was exhausting labor. And since modeling involved sessions of posing nude, the potential damage to a young woman's reputation was considerable. Modeling like acting was regarded by many people in the late 1800's as a step above prostitution.

 

Modeling was not the first career choice of Suzanne Valadon. Born in 1865, Marie-Clémentine Valadon was the daughter of an unwed mother who cleaned homes and worked as a laundress. Valadon tried to escape such toil and drudgery by performing as a circus acrobat.

 

After being injured in a fall from a trapeze, the sixteen year-old Valadon began modeling for some of the most dynamic painters in France, including  Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The Impressionists were, for their era, remarkably free of gender bias as testified by their respect for Morisot whom they regarded as a colleague rather than a "woman artist."

It was Toulouse-Lautrec who wittily compared Valadon to Suzanna, the Old Testament heroine who had been spied upon in her bath by the wicked elders.  Valadon, whose attitude to sexuality was frank and independent, evidently enjoyed the joke. She began signing her works of art with the Hebrew woman's name.

While posing, Valadon also observed the artists sketching and painting her. She had nursed a love of art from childhood and began to draw in her spare time. When Toulose-Lautrec saw her early efforts, he was much impressed. But it was Edgar Degas who paid Valadon the supreme compliment. He purchased one of her drawings - and then urged her on to further efforts, including print-making.

“From time to time in my dining room,” Degas wrote to Valadon, “I look at your drawing in red pencil, still hanging, and I always say to myself: ‘This devil … had the genius of drawing.' Why don’t you show me something else?” 

With the support and assistance of Degas, Valadon became quite expert in printing techniques, especially drypoint etching. In 1894, Valadon's skill and dedication was recognized by the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. She became the first woman artist to be admitted to the ranks of this important exhibition group.

Ed Voves, Photo (2021)

 Suzanne Valadon's Nude with Striped Blanket, 1922

The naturalness of the people Valadon depicted in her early drawings and prints, relaxed and at peace with their bodies, is key to understanding her as a person and as an artist. This naturalness was carried over to Valadon's later paintings, particularly her nudes.

 

The Barnes exhibition devotes much attention to Valadon's nudes. Valadon staked her claim to paint them from her own viewpoint as a woman and as a professional artist. That she did so, was based on personal choice but also on the artistic regard with which nudes were held - and their high-selling prices on the art market. 

Overwhelmingly - but not exclusively - Valadon's nudes are female. How different these are from the femme fatale in Gustav Wertheimer's neurotic Kiss of the Siren! The young women Valadon painted "in the state of nature" are healthy and comfortable with themselves, as unburdened from anxiety and embarrassment as they are from corsets and shirtwaistes.

Ed Voves, Photo (2021) Suzanne Valadon's Black Venus, 1919

This includes the striking and forthright Black Venus, painted in 1919. Unlike other nudes showing African women from this era, Valadon's model is free of all manner of social commentary, political symbolism and agenda. She stands an independent person, free to be herself.

Valadon remained a figurative, realist painter for her entire life. However, living and working in Montmartre, Valadon was aware of the radical developments and evolving currents of Modernism. There are certainly allusions to the work of her contemporaries in her paintings. But for the most part, these references serve as a way to assert her own unique viewpoint, what we would call today her "take" on the world.

 

Valadon was familiar with the Symbolist movement which dominated much of French art in the 1890's and early twentieth century. Valadon had modeled for the premier Symbolist painter, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898), so it is not surprising that she should have taken up the theme of Arcadia, as can be in her Joy of Life, painted in 1911.

Suzanne Valadon, Joy of Life, 1911

Another painter, Henri Matisse, painted a pastoral landscape, or perhaps "dreamscape" is more appropriate, entitled Joy of Life (1905) now in the collection of the Barnes foundation. There are certainly allusions to this icon of Modernism in Valadon's 1911 painting. But for the most part, these references serve as a way for her to assert her own unique viewpoint of such an idyllic world. It is myth setting, to be sure, but inhabited by flesh-and-blood people.

The difference between Valadon's handling of great themes of art and Matisse's interpretation is best appreciated by comparing one of her key paintings, The Blue Room, with Matisse's odalisque paintings.

 

Shortly before World War I, Matisse visited Algeria and Morocco in order to explore the culture of these countries. The influence of his visits affected Matisse's art in numerous ways. One was his series of paintings of scantily-clad young women, posing in submissive postures. Matisse's odalisques recalled Ingres' Grand Odalisque (1814), the signature work of exotic sensuality, Orientalism.

 

Valadon's The Blue Room resoundingly rejects the whole Orientalist genre, whether Matisse's paintings or Ingres'. 

Ed Voves, Photo (2021) Suzanne Valadon's The Blue Room, 1923

In The Blue Room, Valadon decorates the setting with many of the hallmarks of Matisse, particularly the colorful and richly-textured fabrics he so loved, as can be seen in the flower-printed bedspread and stripped pantaloons. Valadon's protagonist, however, is anything but a docile odalisque. Instead, she is a sturdy, self-assured, working-class woman, smoking a cigarette. She is her own woman.

With The Blue Room, Valadon effectively turned the tables on the whole tradition of male-painted portraits of women as "objects" of desire. When Valadon painted women - with or without garments - she never portrayed them as objects. She treated them the way she wished to be treated herself - as an individual.

Suzanne Valadon. Marie Coca and Her Daughter Gilberte, 1913

Valadon's Marie Coca and Her Daughter Gilberte is a fine example of her ability to create a sensitive, fully-realized portrait. The sitters was her niece and her daughter. Painted in 1913, it is a striking examination of the stresses and cares of life - of a mature woman and of a child. As with most high-caliber portraits, we are enabled to appreciate this work on the level of the individuals it portrays and also to reflect upon the timeless, universal questions it poses. 

What fears and anxieties lie behind the haunted eyes of Valadon's niece? Why does her little daughter, gazing at us with a blank, listless expression, clamp down so firmly on the head of her doll? We will never know, but this "gray area" of uncertainty is fertile ground for speculation and reflection upon the human condition.

Following World War I, Valadon continued to experiment in new genres, landscape and still life, always with notable skill and success, but always as a Realist painter. 

Suzanne Valadon, The Violin Case, 1923

Valadon's undeviating realism was an aspect of her "naturalness" and it certainly brought her financial success and popular acclaim. The 1920's and early 1930's were a time when many people, including in France, regarded Abstraction and Surrealism with suspicion, even hostility. There was a call "for a return to order" and, on the surface, Valadon's paintings went with the flow, rather than against the current.

Lack of talent or awareness of the trends in art had little to do, I think, with Valadon's decision to continue painting in a traditional, figurative style. This manner of painting testified to her basic beliefs - as an artist and as a human being.

"In what I've painted, there's not a stroke, not a line, that isn't based on nature. Nature brings me the discipline of a robust truth for the construction of my canvases, designed by me but driven always by the emotion of life."

The "emotions of life" for Valadon were frequently unhappy during the last two decades of her life. Her marriage to a much younger man, initially contented, soured and she experienced much heartache over the troubles and travail of her son, Maurice Utrillo. An artist of promise, alcoholism blighted Utrillo's career and disappointed his mother's belief in his "genius."

As the years passed, Valadon recorded her own image in several self-portraits. The Barnes exhibition displays one, painted in 1927, which is, beyond doubt, a masterpiece. Sophisticated in its composition, it is even more remarkable for its honesty. 

Suzanne Valadon, Self-Portrait, 1927

Here is the face of a person without illusions but one who refuses to look away or ignore reality. It is the face of a person who has witnessed much pain but remains capable and determined to continue seeking beauty.

Suzanne Valadon: Model, Painter, Rebel at the Barnes succeeds on every level by which an artist's retrospective can be judged. Valadon's reputation suffered somewhat over the years, as Abstract art crowded depictions of "naturalness" off the center stage of the art scene. Happily, that is no longer the case. The exhibit will later travel to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen.  

Ed Voves, Photo (2021)

 Gallery view of the Suzanne Valadon exhibit at the Barnes Foundation

Most importantly, the Barnes exhibition shows that Valadon lived and worked by a creed that we would all do well to emulate. Suzanne Valadon was not merely a successful or "professional" painter. As an artist, she created works of art which reflected her personal code of life.

"You have to be hard on yourself, be honest, and look yourself in the face."

***

Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved. 

Introductory Image: Ed Voves, Photo (2021) Suzanne Valadon's Family Portrait (Detail), 1912.  Centre Pompidou – Musée National d’Art Moderne/CCI, Paris, Gift of M. Cahen-Salvador in memory of Madame Fontenelle-Pomaret, 1976.

Ed Voves, Photo (2021) Nancy Ireson of the Barnes Foundation at the press preview for the Suzanne Valadon exhibition, September 23, 2021.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2015) Gallery view of the Discovering the Impressionists exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2015.

Ed Voves, Photo (2021) Gustav Wertheimer's The Kiss of the Siren, Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Barnes Foundation Photo (2021) Gallery display of paintings for which Suzanne Valadon modeled. On display at the exhibit, Suzanne Valadon: Model, Painter, Rebel. 

Ed Voves, Photo (2021) Suzanne Valadon's Nude with Striped Blanket, 1922. Musée d' Art Moderne de Paris. Museum Purchase, 1937.

Ed Voves, Photo (2021) Suzanne Valadon's Black Venus, 1919. Centre Pompidou – Musée National d’Art Moderne/CCI, Paris, on deposit to the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Menton, Gift of M. Charles Wakefield-Mori, 1939

Suzanne Valadon (French, 1865-1938) Joy of Life, 1911. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876–1967), 1967. © 2021 Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York / Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY 

Ed Voves, Photo (2021) Suzanne Valadon's The Blue Room, 1923.  Centre Pompidou – Musée National d’Art Moderne/CCI, Paris, on deposit to the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Limoges. State purchase, 1924.

Suzanne Valadon (French, 1865-1938) Marie Coca and Her Daughter Gilberte, 1913. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, purchased from the artist, 1937. © 2021 Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York / Image © DeA Picture Library / Art Resource, NY

Suzanne Valadon (French, 1865-1938) The Violin Case, 1923. Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Museum Purchase, 1937. © 2021 Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York / Image © Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, France/ HIP / Art Resource, NY 

Suzanne Valadon (French, 1865-1938) Self-Portrait, 1927. Collection of the City of Sannois, Val d’Oise, France, on temporary loan to the Musée de Montmartre, Paris. © 2021 Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York Image by Stéphane Pons

Ed Voves, Photo (2021) Gallery view of the Suzanne Valadon: Model, Painter, Rebel exhibition at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia.

Art Eyewitness Review: Alice Neel at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

Alice Neel: People Come First

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

March 22 - August 1, 2021

Reviewed by Ed Voves                                                                      

 OriginaL Photos by Anne Lloyd

Alice Neel waited until very late in her life to paint a formal self-portrait. Neel was seventy-five when she started, soon giving-up on the work, only to resume and complete it five years later, in 1980.

Neel's Self-Portrait was - and is - an unsettling work. It is unsparing, unsentimental, uncompromising. The list of "un's" keeps growing the longer you look at it. 

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2021) 

Gallery view of the Alice Neel exhibit, showing Neel's Self-Portrait

Neel portrayed herself in the nude, without any attempt to minimize or gloss over the ravages of time on her aging body. But the indomitable look in her eyes is the most striking feature of this work. With only four years left to live, Neel stared Death in the face, in order to fix the image of herself for the world to remember.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2021) Detail of Alice Neel's Self-Portrait, 1980

This remarkable work of art is now on view in a magnificent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met's exhibit is the first in twenty years to examine Neel's entire career in detail and it does justice to her life-long determination to live and paint her way.

It is singularly appropriate that the Met should mount an exhibition of the life and work of Alice Neel (1900-1984) at this troubled moment when so many are struggling. For the most part, Alice Neel focused on individual people or very small groups of people facing life's challenges.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2021) 

Metropolitan Museum banner for the Alice Neel exhibition 

The Met show's title, Alice Neel: People Come First testifies to Neel's artistic creed, which she summed up in profound statement.

Every person is a new universe with its own laws emphasizing some belief or phase of life immersed in time and rapidly passing by.

With the Covid-19 pandemic crisis entering its second full-year, people are starved of the human interaction or opportunity to express their individuality which we see depicted in Neel's paintings. It was truly wonderful to see the visitors to the Met's Tisch Gallery, where the Neel exhibit is displayed, relating to each other, as well as the masterpieces on the museum walls. This humane environment is something many of us took for granted before the pandemic - and hopefully will not do so again.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2021) 

Gallery view of the Alice Neel: People Come First exhibition

Neel seldom took anything for granted. It needs to be acknowledged, however, that the difficult circumstances of her life gave her few opportunities to rest on her laurels.

Alice Neel was born in Merion, PA, at the turn of the twentieth century. Merion is a suburb of Philadelphia. Neel, who showed  artistic promise from an early age, attended the Philadelphi School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art), 1921-1925. The same year of her graduation, she married a Cuban artist, Carlos Enriquez, whose portrait by Neel appears in the Met exhibition.

For a brief period, Neel's future seemed one of promise. Then, in 1927, her young daughter died. Neel suffered acute depression, culminating in a nervous collapse and an attempt to take her own life. Estranged from her husband, Neel faced the Great Depression with little to sustain her, except occasional sales of her work. Then, in 1933, she secured on-again/off-again employment with the Public Works of Art Project which operated under the direction of Juliana Force of the Whitney Museum.

Painting and devotion to social justice issues helped Neel survive the hard times of the 1930's and 1940's. The range of her work during this period, often gritty and brutally honest, is well illustrated by the works on view in the Met exhibit. Neel's cityscapes of New York and her portraits of neighbors and friends in Spanish Harlem reveal her talent for realism and her penetrating insight into human character.

Focusing on two early portraits, Kenneth Fearing and T.B. Harlem enables us to grasp the wider implications of Neel's oeuvre.

Alice Neel, Kenneth Fearing, 1935

Kenneth Fearing, painted in 1935, combines realism with elements of Symbolism and Surrealism. Against a background similar to her cityscapes, Neel portrays Fearing, a prominent left-wing poet and writer, surrounded by diminutive figures from his verses. Here, enlightenment, conjured in the vision of a light bulb, combined with elements of horror and fantasy. The skeleton holding Fearing's bleeding heart seems utterly in keeping with Fearing's character and the tenor of his socially conscious writing.

Alice Neel, T.B. Harlem, 1940

The stark reality of T.B. Harlem (1940) needed no embellishing details. The searing portrait of this dying victim of tuberculosis told its own tale and people of the time would have recognized the bandage over his chest as the result of the medical procedure to treat a collapsed lung of the T.B. patient by removing part of his rib cage. 

The martyred protagonist of T.B. Harlem was Carlos Negron, brother of Neel's lover/companion during the late 1930's, José Negron. The haunted look in the eyes of Carlos is so overwhelmingly powerful and compelling that we, today , might well miss the point that his bandage is placed exactly where the skeleton and bleeding heart were positioned in Kenneth Fearing. 

Did Neel herself make the connection in these two wounded breasts, painted five years apart? Perhaps not, but suffering, physical, emotional, psychological, runs through Neel's work like an electrical current over the long years of her career.

Another terrible torso scar appears much later in what is Neel's most famous portrait, that of Andy Warhol. Neel painted Warhol in 1970, following the  assassination attempt by Valerie Solanis. The portrait was done at Warhol's request, rather than Neel's. This is significant for it shows that Neel, after years of neglect during the high tide of Abstract Expressionism, was gaining a measure of celebrity. It also explains the ambivalence in the portrait, so different from the spirit of T.B. Harlem.

Warhol and Neel did not clash during the painting session, but the closed eye stance of Warhol may partly reflect an awareness that he and Neel were not kindred souls. In fact, Neel felt a powerful antipathy to Warhol's "brand", if not to him personally.

Alice Neel, Andy Warhol, 1970

Warhol, "as an art-world personality...  represents a certain pollution of this era," Neel stated bluntly. "I think he's the greatest advertiser living, not a great portrait painter."

Yet, in this depiction of the physical evidence of violence, Neel brilliantly captured the pain behind Warhol's averted eyes. There are moments and memories of suffering so intense that we have to close our eyes or look away. We need to do so in order that we can reconnect with our injured humanity and to grapple with the inescapable fact of our mortality. 

Pondering over human individuality and the complex emotions of the portrait sitters comes thick and fast in Alice Neel: People Come First at the Met. Indeed, it is almost impossible not to engage with Neel's portraits without deep reflection. And that is true of her cityscapes, as well, despite the seeming lack of inhabitants.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2021) Alice Neel's 107th and Broadway, 1976

Spend a few moments looking at 107th and Broadway, painted in 1976. There are people behind those windows - you can feel them, sense their eyes peering back at us. 

The same can be said of the shadow of a neighboring building as it is cast on the white-hued structure which otherwise engulfs the picture plane. There is a human presence in this ghostly form. It may seem ominous, at first, until we become aware that the shadow is of the building where Neel lived and worked during her final years of life.

These were the years when Neel finally achieved the recognition she deserved. With the long years of struggle behind her, she might have settled back and painted portraits of the "rich and famous." But the ordeal of her early career resonated with Neel for as long as she lived. A woman of great wit and earthy sensuality, Neel's empathy was greater still.

I felt this strongly as I moved back and forth, looking at three late-career portraits of mothers and their infant children: a Hindu woman and her child, Neel's daughter-in-law, Nancy and her twin daughters, and lastly, Carmen and Judy, painted in 1972.

There was something incredibly poignant about Carmen and Judy. I could not quite fathom it, until I read the "backstory" of this modern-day Madonna and Child. Carmen Gordon, whose face is frozen in a look of desperate hope, was the Haitian woman who worked and cared for Neel in her later years. Judy, underweight, listless and struggling, was Carmen's baby daughter. She died, tragically, soon after the painting was completed.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2021) Alice Neel's Carmen and Judy, 1972

Neel must have sensed, along with Carmen, that the baby was at risk. The feeling of life's preciousness so infuses this work that the bond between a mother, who had lost her daughter in 1927, with one who was about to lose her child in 1972, was already firmly established.

This gift of empathy, so evident in Carmen and Judy, was Alice Neel's greatest gift. And it remains, long years after Neel's death, a gift to us. Ours for the taking, should we choose to accept.

***

Text: Copyright of Ed Voves. Original Photos: Anne Lloyd.  All rights reserved. Images of Alice Neel paintings, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  

Introductory image: Alice Neel (American, 1900-1984) The Spanish Family, 1943. Oil on canvas: 34 × 28 in. (86.4 × 71.1 cm) Estate of Alice Neel.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2021) Gallery view of the Alice Neel People Come First exhibition, showing Alice Neel's Self Portrait, 1980. Oil on canvas: 53 1/4 × 39 3/4 × 1 in. (135.3 × 101 × 2.5 cm) National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2021) Detail of Alice Neel's Self Portrait, 1980. National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2021) Museum banner for the Alice Neel: People Come First exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2021) Gallery view of the Alice Neel: People Come First exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Alice Neel (American, 1900-1984) Kenneth Fearing, 1935. Oil on canvas: 30 1/8 × 26 in. (76.5 × 66 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Hartley S. Neel and Richard Neel, 1988.

Alice Neel (American, 1900-1984) T.B. Harlem, 1940. Oil on canvas: 30 × 30 in. (76.2 × 76.2 cm). National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay.

Alice Neel (American, 1900-1984) Andy Warhol, 1970. Oil and acrylic on linen: 60 × 40 in. (152.4 × 101.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Gift of Timothy Collins.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2021) Photo of Alice Neel's 107th and Broadway, 1976. Oil on canvas: 59 3/4 × 34 in. (151.8 × 86.4 cm). Private collection, Washington D.C..

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2021) Photo of Carmen and Judy, 1972. Oil on canvas: 40 × 29 7/8 in. (101.6 × 75.9 cm) Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Westheimer Family Collection

Wayne Thiebaud, Draftsman at the Morgan Library and Museum

Wayne Thiebaud, Draftsman

Morgan Library and Museum

May 18, 2018 - September 23, 2018

                                                                       
Reviewed by Ed Voves                                                                                                    Photos by Anne Lloyd

As I reflected on the Wayne Thiebaud exhibit at the Morgan Library and Museum, a jingle from my movie-addicted youth popped into my head.

"Let's all go the lobby and get a tasty treat!"

The dancing ice cream bar, the cheerful looking soda cup and, most of all, the popcorn container (sometimes depicted with a big smear of lipstick and "come hither" eyes) appeared on the silver screen in 1957. Its aim was to entice film fans to buy over-priced edibles. The movie ad is an unforgettable example of the power of suggestion.

So too are many of Wayne Thiebaud's drawings on view at the Morgan. Thiebaud, already an established artist, gained acclaim - and sales - in a 1962 New York City gallery show filled with images of America's favorite desserts and snacks. These instantly recognizable pictures of slices of pie and cake, hot dogs, candy apples and ice cream cones testify to the powerful appeal to indulge our taste buds. 

There is, however, a lot more to Thiebaud's work. Initially, he was styled as a Pop artist due to superficial similarities to Andy Warhol's soup can paintings and prints. Thiebaud never rejected being affiliated with Pop Art but emphasized his links to Realism.

"I see myself as a traditional painter," Thiebaud declared in a 1974 interview. "I’m very much interested in the concept of realism and the notion of inquiry into what the tradition of realism is all about.”

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Detail of Wayne Thiebaud's Mallary Ann (1966)

Ultimately it is the power of art that we recognize in Thiebaud's provocative, often powerful, images.  And it needs to be emphasized - as the Morgan exhibit does - that Thiebaud is a superb landscape artist and an accomplished portraitist, especially his portrait drawings. 

Yet, it is worth noting that Thiebaud signature arrays of pie slices, ice cream cones and other treats have a special "something" about them, a quality that reaches beyond Realism as well as Pop. Like the taste of the petites madeleines in Proust's Memories of Things Past, the images of pie slices or a gumball machine trigger recollections we have seemingly forgotten or hardly perceived to begin with.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Wayne Thiebaud's Candy Ball Machine (1977)

Let your eyes savor a Thiebaud picture of lemon meringue pie slices and you start thinking about childhood trips to a diner. Look closely at the exquisite depiction of a vintage candy machine and you'll start reaching into your pockets for change to plunk into the coin slot and get a handful bubble gum balls. In both cases, you are not looking at a still life. You are in the realm of memory.

Wayne Thiebaud's vast and varied achievements are brilliantly displayed in the Morgan exhibit. Subtitled "Draftsman," this workman-like term is both accurate for the art works covered in the Morgan exhibit and for Thiebaud as an artist. Largely self-taught, Thiebaud learned art and matured as an artist by drawing. And drawing. And drawing.

For Thibaud, learning is doing and vice versa. In the process, Thiebaud mastered the craft of drawing to a degree that would have gained him positive reviews from some of the old masters he esteems,  Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin (1699-1779) and Thomas Eakins (1844-1917).

Indicative of Thiebaud's work are three works grouped together in the Morgan display. These are variations on a theme, each dating to 1964. 

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Three Works by Wayne Thiebaud

  Three Jelly Apples, created with graphite, Nine Jelly Apples, watercolor and graphite, and Candied Apples, done with brush and ink, are inspired works in their own right. Viewed together, these multiple images are a consummate demonstration of Thiebaud's mastery of the draftsman's tool kit.

Thiebaud was born in Mesa, Arizona, in 1920. Growing-up in California, Thiebaud worked briefly for Disney Studios during a summer break in high school. Thiebaud drew “in-between” scenes for Disney cartoons and had visions of becoming a cartoonist or comic book illustrator. During World War II, he produced cartoons for U.S. armed services magazines, followed by commercial work for Universal Studios and the Rexall Drug Company. 

Thiebaud's early shows the huge influence of graphic art during the 1930's and 40's. This was the great age of comic books, "pulp" magazine illustration and advertisement art. Thiebaud tried his his hand in these genres and his early, examples of which  are on view in the Morgan exhibit, show that he could have achieved success in commercial art. 



Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Wayne Thiebaud's Railway Cars (1949)

Thiebaud used the GI Bill to earn a master’s degree in art from California State College, Sacramento. This achievement was to set him on the true course of his life's adventure in art.

Significantly, Thiebaud's degree was in in studio art and art education. He began teaching art, first at Sacramento City College, then at University of California, Davis, 1960 to 1991. In keeping with the spirit of American art duing the 1950's, Thiebaud experimented with the techniques of Abstract-Expressionism. He took a sabatical in 1956 and journeyed east to New York City.

While in NYC, Thiebaud got to know the Cedar Cafe crowd and talked painting technique with Willem de Kooning, among others. But he started drawing objects in the crowded windows of New York stores rather than "urban abstract landscapes." Before long Thiebaud's memory served up bounteous images of pies, cakes, donuts and sandwiches, which had been served in the diners where he had worked when young. Thiebaud's signature style had emerged.

Thiebaud's "eats" are what we call today "comfort food." There is a reassuring aspect to pie wedges and hot dogs. Familiarity does not breed contempt.

These images can be a bit alarming, however, especially when you see a lot of them in an exhibition like the Morgan's.  It is easy to see how critics and art patrons confused Thiebaud's pies with Andy Warhol's oeuvre. The mechanization of food stuffs, whether pastries in a diner display case or tomato soup cans on a supermarket shelf, can lead to a "glut" - of food and of images of food.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Wayne Thiebaud's Shelf of Pies (1960)

When the East Coast intelligentsia first studied Thiebaud's art, they projected social criticism into his drawings and paintings. By doing so, they created an agenda for his art which Thiebaud did not espouse. Thiebaud depicted America as it is, without apologies or complaint. In a 2017 interview the British art writer, Martin Gayford, Thiebaud noted:

 After all, I am an American. I’ve driven across the country, and you see the same thing in every restaurant from Sacramento to New York. The same meringue pies. So it began to make a lot of sense to paint them – and it was very intriguing.

Thiebaud happens to enjoy eating lemon meringue pie, as well as drawing the tart, gooey dessert. Indeed, enjoyment is an integral component of his work. Thiebaud does not "celebrate" American abundance or life-style in the way that Soviet "social realism" lamely - and unsuccessfully - tried to do under Stalin. But he does present the good things of everyday life  in the U.S.A., just as painters in ancient Egypt filled the frescoes of tombs with images of foodstuffs for the afterlife as they conceived it.

Thiebaud's flirtation with "Ab-Ex" before settling on his signature Realism mirrors the struggle of American artists down through history. From John Singleton Copley onward, American artists confronted the choice of European and European-inspired art or subjects and motifs from the good-old U.S.A. The villas of Tuscany or the Hudson Valley. Cubism or the Ash Can School.

Wayne Thiebaud chose America. But he did not focus his vision away from the future or from Modernism.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Detail of Wayne Thiebaud's Pastel Scatter (1972)

Thiebaud's Pastel Scatter is a still life very much in the tradition of John Frederick Peto. The pastel pieces tromp l'oeil just as Peto's candle sticks, flintlock pistols and crinkled letters did. You know these are just pictures but you want to pick theme up just the same. Moreover, Thiebaud treats these simple shapes with such astonishing facility of light and color that they have an effect on the mind not unlike a Rothko mural.

The same is true of Thiebaud's landscapes. He has acknowledged the influence of early American folk paintings and the work of Richard Diebenkorn. Yet, the 1972 pastel Rock Ridge or the drawing in charcoal from around 1980, River Sides are pure Wayne Thiebaud.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Wayne Thiebaud's Rock Ridge (1972)

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Wayne Thiebaud's River Sides (1980)

Both Rock Ridge and River Sides are realist works, yet are not the result of on-the-spot observation. They were (in Thiebaud's own words), "mostly just invented with perspective structures played around with to try and bring it into some sort of cohesive character."

In short, what you see on the gallery walls at the Morgan is Thiebaud's vision of America. Drawn from the mind's eye of this great American artist, from his life experience and his devotion to art, these are images of America's enduring appeal, of wide-open spaces and the "more abundant life."  


***
Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved 
Images courtesy of Anne Lloyd and the Morgan Library and Museum, New York City 

Introductory Image:                                                                                                          Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) of Wayne Thiebaud's Shelf of Pies (Detail), 1960. Brush and ink, watercolor, and charcoal. 19 x 25 inches (48.3 x 63.5 cm) Private collection. © Wayne Thiebaud/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) of Wayne Thiebaud's Mallary Ann (Detail), 1966. Graphite. 17 x 14 inches (43.2 x 35.6 cm) Allen Stone Collection © Wayne Thiebaud/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) of Wayne Thiebaud's Candy Ball Machine, 1977. Gouache and pastel. 23 3/4 x 17 3/4 inches (60.3 x 45.1 cm.) Collection of Gretchen and John Berggruen, San Francisco. © Wayne Thiebaud/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) of Wayne Thiebaud's Three Jelly Apples, 1964. Graphite. 12 x 13 1/2 inches (30.5 x 34.3 cm.) Private Collection © Wayne Thiebaud/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) of Wayne Thiebaud's Nine Jelly Apples, 1964. Watercolor and graphite. 12 x 12 inches (30.5 x 30.5 cm.) Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of George Hopper Fitch, B.A. 1932. © Wayne Thiebaud/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) of Wayne Thiebaud's Candied Apples,1964. Brush and ink, 7 x 11 7/16 inches (17.8 x 29.1 cm) Allan Stone Collection. © Wayne Thiebaud/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) of Wayne Thiebaud's Railway Cars,1949. Watercolor, wash and ink on paper. Private collection. © Wayne Thiebaud/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) of Wayne Thiebaud's Shelf of Pies,1960. Brush and ink, watercolor, and charcoal. 19 x 25 inches (48.3 x 63.5 cm) Private collection. © Wayne Thiebaud/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) of Wayne Thiebaud's Pastel Scatter,1972. Pastel on paper. 16 x 20 1/8 inches (40.6 x 51.1 cm) Thiebaud Family Collection © Wayne Thiebaud/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) of Wayne Thiebaud's Rock Ridge,1972. Pastel on illustration board.  Private Collection. 33 x 20 inches (83.8 x 50.8 cm) © Wayne Thiebaud/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) of Wayne Thiebaud's River Sides,1980. Charcoal. 22 3/4 x 29 inches (57.8.3 x 73.7 cm) © Wayne Thiebaud/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.