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1st appeared 08 August 2000 NINA'S ARTS NOTES
Thiebaud at the Legion The paintings of Wayne Thiebaud are always delightful and often deceptive. He is best known for painting luscious cakes and ice cream sundaes so real you can taste them, for immortalizing vanishing features of the American scene such as old fashioned delis, jukeboxes, and pinball machines, and for his steep San Francisco streetscapes. But these are only part of this beloved California artist’s story. Thiebaud lives in Sacramento
and has taught for 40 years at UC Davis. He is now 80, a fitting occasion
to present The food paintings of the 1950s and 60s always amuse us and that pleases Thiebaud, who believes that painting is about pleasure. American popular foods, he has said, "seemed like interesting subject matter and offered a good set of formal problems -- color, the light, the food shapes. So it was a kind of natural progression. I must say that when I first made a painting of some pies on a plate I just started giggling. (I thought) that’s the end of me as a serious artist, of people taking me seriously. But I couldn’t leave it alone." He did, and later turned to cityscapes and rural landscapes of Northern California. And to human figures: in this show are his slinky "Revue Girl" of 1963; several portraits of women with strong, unsmiling faces, and a group of five seated figures from 1965, not really a group as each is isolated, self-absorbed.
The recent "Waterland" (1996) and "Green River Lands" (1998) are peaceful and pastoral, without people or houses, and as mysterious in their pastel yellows, pinks, and greens as the urban streets and towers. In all, Thiebaud makes a wonderful experience for the whole family. And once again, as with the fabulous Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology at the Asian, our Fine Arts Museums have produced a superb catalogue. Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective through September 3. The Legion of Honor is in Lincoln Park, 34th Avenue and Clement Street. Open Tue. through Sun., 9:30 to 5, free admission second Wed. of each month. Very pleasant cafe open until 4 p.m. (Glorious views of the ocean and across the Golden Gate channel to the Marin Headlands. See also George Segal’s Holocaust Memorial, white figures behind barbed wire, across the road from the Legion, to the left of the monstrous red industrial Thing the City has seen fit to place on this beautiful belvedere.)
Surgeon General’s Warning: Caution, this play contains IDEAS! In a previous Daybreak column we ran a note about this play, R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (and Mystery) of the Universe" because it sounded interesting. It is that and much more: a highly stimulating and rewarding experience in the theater. But hurry -- there is only this current week left of the play's San Francisco run. It closes August 13.
Bucky Fuller’s Geodesic Domes are the lightest, strongest, and most cost-effective structures ever devised: thousands of them now dot the globe and his phrase "Spaceship Earth" has gone into the language, but the all-embracing extent of his creative mind is perhaps more amazing than in his lifetime. Fuller was kicked out of Harvard twice but his brilliant and original ideas later won him 25 US patents and 47 honorary degrees in the arts, science, engineering, and the humanities. Fuller believed it possible to anticipate and solve humanity’s major problems through the highest technology by providing "more and more life support for everybody, with less and less resources." He claimed that "there is no energy crisis, only a crisis of ignorance," and his research demonstrated that humanity could satisfy 100% of its energy needs while phasing out fossil fuels and atomic energy. This is meaty stuff but Jacobs and Campbell manage to turn it into real drama and make Bucky an intensely sympathetic figure. R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (and Mystery) of the Universe runs through Sept. 3 at the Lorraine Hansberry Theater, 620 Sutter Street at Mason, Wed-Sat eves 8 p.m.; Sun. 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Tickets by phone at 415/392-4400, or online. A San Francisco resident for 20 years, Nina Beckwith is a longtime arts writer and music critic and a former Time magazine overseas correspondent. She was founding editor of the UC Berkeley Library newsletter Bene Legere and worked for six years with the late Dr. Peter Ostwald, Director of the UCSF Health Program for Performing Artists. |
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of his works in a remarkable retrospective, handsomely displayed at
the California Palace of the Legion of Honor. From here it will travel
to Fort Worth, Washington, and New York.
Thiebaud’s
cityscapes experiment with structuring the picture space itself. Often
he fills the space with impossibly steep roadways lined by tall blank
buildings as in Wide Downstreet of 1994. The food paintings
are cheerful but to me there is menace in that painting of twelve
perpendicular asphalt lanes, divided by a flower median, with tiny
cars crawling up to the dizzy level of the topmost highrise or descending
into a bottomless abyss. And menace, too, in "Resort Town," also from
1994, where a precipitous ridge and clustered highrises stand on the
edge of a deep black sea which bleeds into a poisonous smoky red at
the horizon.
Conceived,
adapted and directed by D. W. Jacobs, it’s a one-man show performed
by the very talented Ron Campbell in which some of the vast range
of ideas and writings of a unique American visionary are explored,
along with glimpses of his life and family. And it is riveting as
theater: at my performance the audience was so rapt they didn’t
even seem to breathe.