I went to the Legion of Honor museum in San Francisco today! This beautiful museum is 101 years old and was featured in the 1958 Hitchcock film Vertigo. Its formal name is the California Palace of the Legion of Honor.

Anyway, my friend Susie is a member there and she invited me and her friend Beth to see to the Wayne Thiebaud exhibit at the museum today.  

I love art but I wasn’t familiar with Thiebaud before today. He’s a very unusual artist whose career spanned over six decades. He was a professor at Sacramento City College and the University of California, Davis. When I look him up, he’s identified with the Pop Art movement because of paintings like these:

But Thiebaud used widely different subjects and styles.

Everyone has influences, of course, but most artists I know are highly individualistic, either consciously or unconsciously. Part of their gift is that they are uniquely original. Thiebaud called himself an “art thief” and talked a lot about “stealing” from other artists. He even explicitly named the artists and works he was copying.

The museum put a small picture of the art that inspired Thiebaud next to each painting. To my eye, they didn’t resemble each other. He had his own style but Thiebaud himself said, “I don’t feel myself being particularly original. I love the idea of being in the tradition of bravura painting, starting with maybe Velázquez and coming down all the way to Manet through hundreds of wonderful bravura painters. So that certainly can’t be counted as original. Who’s to say about originality?”

I think the name of this piece was Dark City.

The other interesting thing about Thiebaud is that he didn’t move through phases in his art. You know Picasso had his blue period, then he went to his rose period, and eventually to cubism. Thiebaud would return to his themes over and over. For instance, he’s famous for his cakes. He painted cakes in the 1960s, then he would return to it in the 1980s or 2000s.  He would also go back and adjust paintings he’d finished many years earlier.

I love art, but I love words more. Thiebaud has a magnificent quote:

My friend Charlene once told me you can always tell where you are in the city by finding the Sutro Tower. There’s some fog in this picture from the museum’s lawn, but it’s there!