Wayne Thiebaud: Presumably and primarily, art, whether we like it or not, seems to come from other art.

Tim Burgard: Thiebaud once declared in an interview, “It’s hard for me to think of artists who weren’t influential on me, because I’m such an obsessive thief.”

Grace Munakata: He had this routine every day. Getting up, go to the studio, break for lunch, go back to the studio, play tennis.

Matt Bult: Wayne always took on painting and teaching as a job 12, 14 hours a day, standing up, painting in front of the easel.

Archival: He is essentially self-taught as a painter. He has worked as a cartoonist and advertising art director.

Munakata: He would say before going to the studio, “Okay, it’s time to go off and make mistakes!”

Archival: At the age of 40, he began shows at the Allen Stone Gallery in New York City. This was divided into three categories of subject matter: still lifes, figures, and landscapes.

Bult: He’s always called a Pop artist when they have collective books and retrospectives. He just did not like that term. He didn’t think Pop art was about painting, which, Wayne’s thing is about painting.

Burgard: He never lost his sense of wonder at the power of mere oil paint to transform itself into luscious cake frosting.

Munakata: Wedges of pie. You have the lemon meringue. You have the chocolate cake. Whipped cream with red berries on top.

Burgard: Thiebaud was the perennial student, constantly looking to art of the past and present to learn its lessons.

Thiebaud: Well, they’re great lessons and great influences, and I’ve actually stolen things from them. I do try to do what they do.

Burgard: Wayne Thiebaud was a great intellectual and philosopher of art, and he had many extraordinary observations. One of his most famous quotes is, “Art is not delivered like the morning paper. It has to be stolen from Mount Olympus.”

Munakata: In copying something, Wayne felt you’re accounting for how this painting was constructed. The use of the color, the kind of rhythms that are going into it. Especially for beginning students, its way of practicing by trying to mimic.

Burgard: Having spent time with Thiebaud’s works, I think his appropriations and reinterpretations fall into three main categories.

Burgard: One is overt theft. He’s paying tribute to great artists that he admires, and you can see this in his Standing Man, which is a clear homage to Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Pierrot or “clown.” Watteau’s clown looks quite bereft and perhaps a little sad. While his compatriots behind him are all partying, he is standing there alone.

Burgard: Thiebaud’s Standing Man also looks quite sad and pensive, and he looks very stiff and awkward, as if he’s being fitted for a suit or even standing in a police lineup.

Burgard: The second type of appropriation and reinterpretation is covert theft. This is where Thiebaud conceals the source imagery for his own work, and an example is Thiebaud’s Eating Figures, which are inspired by Edgar Degas’s L’Absinthe.

Burgard: The Degas shows a woman and a man seated in a dingy Parisian café, enjoying a glass of absinthe and a glass of wine. They look quite downcast and perhaps even depressed.

Burgard: Thiebaud’s Eating Figures show a modern man and woman. They look like they’re out in the blazing sun, perhaps at a barbecue, and they are holding hot dogs and looking at them with some distaste.

Burgard: Now, at first glance, these two paintings have nothing to do with each other. But then you realize what connects them is the mood that they convey. Both couples have this world weariness that cannot be alleviated by intoxicating drinks or fast food.

Burgard: Thiebaud’s third type of appropriation is what I call intuitive transformation. An example of this is his three Display Cakes, which is inspired by Degas’s Millinery Shop.

Burgard: So at first you look at the hat shop and the bakery cakes and you think there couldn’t possibly be a connection. But Thiebaud is drawn to two things. One is formal, which is the way in which Degas’s hats on stands seem to float up to the picture plane, just the way that Thiebaud’s cakes do the same.

Burgard: And the other one is a little more conceptual, which is that the very beautiful hats are really designed to attract a consumer who might purchase them. And of course, the luscious cakes are exactly the same.

Burgard: I think one thing that connects all three types of Thiebaud’s reinterpretations is that they acknowledge Thiebaud’s debt to these artists, and they also seem to declare that Thiebaud is a student of these great artists, even though they might have lived and died decades, if not centuries, ago.

Thiebaud: I love art history and I love to go to museums. Seeing that another human being has invented, in a sense, a whole other kind of reality. It’s a frozen moment in eternal time. It’s astonishing.

Burgard: I think the turning point for Thiebaud’s evolution, both as an artist and as an art historian, occurred during the years he worked at the Rexall drug company in the advertising department from 1946 to 1949. There he met the art director Robert Mallory, who really became Thiebaud’s mentor. They started going to museums. He started reading art history books. And I think, really opened Thiebaud’s eyes that a mentor could be someone from the past.

Burgard: In 1956 to ’57, he went to New York City and met all his heroes, some of the great abstract expressionists, artists like Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. And contrary to their public persona that these were fire-breathing radicals that were completely rejecting tradition, he found the exact opposite. They talked constantly about the old master artists from the past, and how they actually dovetailed with what they were creating at that very moment.

Bult: de Kooning and Kline, they told him, “Don’t just try to create art. Do something that you feel is you.” And he came back from there with a different approach.

Burgard: And this was a sense of permission for Thiebaud to return to Sacramento, fully embrace his subject matter, for which he’s best known.

Bult: Wayne came from a Mormon background with a lot of food, and he was fascinated how Americana would take food and display it. That’s when he started, you know, just doing: a simple triangle becomes a piece of pie. A circle is a plate.

Burgard: Thiebaud not only saw the history of art as a great library of human experience, but as a vast well of ideas and inspiration that he could draw upon. This gave you allies over the centuries who could stand with you and support you and inspire you to make the type of art that you wanted to make.

Thiebaud: I get a lot out of teaching. It keeps you, in some ways, honest. If you are willing to say, “Look, I can’t give you any answers to anything. I can give you some tools to get at answers.”

Munakata: I met Wayne in his Theory and Criticism of Painting class. He would give great lectures about ways of seeing cultures. Wayne enjoyed a kind of Socratic method on a one-on-one basis, asking you questions about what you’re seeing. And by asking the right questions, you elicit these responses of “See, you got it!”

Bult: Teaching has been the main structure of his life. When he got a job at City College, he really didn’t have very much art history background, and they wanted him to teach art survey course. So he just got all these books and started learning and teaching himself before he could teach it to other people. And he’s done that his whole life.

Burgard: Wayne liked to teach by example, working right alongside his students, often with the same exercises that he assigned to them. He didn’t want to tell them what to do. He wanted to inspire them to find their own unique personality through their art. When you think about Wayne Thiebaud’s legacy, nothing could be farther from the ideals and principles of Pop art than Wayne Thiebaud’s own painting.

Thiebaud: These kinds of paintings are probably the best known ones. I actually think sometimes that this is candy I’m spreading on here. Or sweet stuff. Caramel.

Bult: His paint application was a thick impasto that replicates pie and cake frosting.

Burgard: He actually referred to the application of paint as caressing the canvas. They are deeply sensual. They are personal. They are tactile. They are almost everything that pop art is not. And that’s what makes them truly great works of art in the painterly tradition.

Bult: I think Wayne will have a long lasting legacy because of his imagery, how it relates to people. They feel happy around his work.

Munakata: Wayne generated an incredible body of work, the still lifes to the figures. The landscapes, to the crazy, sinuous freeway scapes.

Burgard: Burgard: When viewers leave the exhibition, Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art, the last painting they will see is his self-portrait as a one-hundred-year-old clown, painted one year before he passed away in 2021.

Thiebaud: How do you fit into something like art history? How in the world do you ever feel in any way related to our greatest painters? You’d like to think that you’re at least part of that community in some small way. And that would be my hope, I guess.