Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art
By Timothy Anglin Burgard with Rachel Teagle, Eve Aschheim, and Lauren Palmor
Acclaimed artist Wayne Thiebaud (American, 1920–2021) earned accolades for his poetic renderings of the prosaic particulars of American life, but he openly admitted, “It’s hard for me to think of artists who weren’t influential on me because I’m such a blatant thief.”
Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art explores the artist’s long-standing engagement with art history and his respect for the academic tradition, featuring his virtuosic appropriations and reinterpretations of old and new European and American artworks, thus offering crucial insights into his creative process.
This full-color publication also includes thirty-two of Thiebaud’s copies after artists spanning from Rembrandt van Rijn to Edgar Degas to Giorgio Morandi, as well as sixty-one original artworks, from Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres to Henri Matisse to Richard Diebenkorn, that he acquired for his personal collection.
This book’s four scholarly essays explore Thiebaud’s long engagement with the concept of appropriation, the centrality of his seventy-year teaching career to the evolution of his philosophy of art, and the parallel interest of the artist’s contemporaries in the intersection of art from the past with the present. Above all, Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art illustrates Thiebaud’s perception of art history as an encyclopedic “bureau of standards”—a rich repository and resource that offers working artists community with their predecessors and communion with their artworks.
Contributors
Timothy Anglin Burgard is the distinguished senior curator and Ednah Root Curator in Charge of American Art for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Rachel Teagle is the founding director of the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at the University of California, Davis.
Eve Aschheim is an abstract painter and draftsperson. She holds an MFA from the University of California, Davis, where she attended Wayne Thiebaud’s courses and served as his teaching assistant.
Lauren Palmor is associate curator of American art for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.