Thiebaud, Rosenquist and white bread

Intentionally excluded from the weekend roundup: Kenneth Baker reviews a show of new Wayne Thiebaud paintings here.

Baker focuses in on this 12-by-16-inch oil on canvas board titled Peanut Butter Sandwich (2009): "... it looks like an allusion to Jasper Johns' famous lead relief 'Bread' (1969), doctored by Francis Bacon. I doubt that Thiebaud thinks deliberately about such references, or even about his self-references. He inhabits his art as a painter can hope to do only after the first half century or so of practice."

I think Baker's probably right. After all, Thiebaud is 88. In the last four decades or so he's shown no particular need to overtly measure himself up against his peers or against the canon. Thiebaud's still-lifes are unquestionably Thiebaud's still-lifes and not de Heem still-lifes translated into Thiebaud.

But... while Baker was thinking of Johns, I was thinking of James Rosenquist's White Bread (at right). As far as I'm concerned, it's one of the smartest paintings of the 1960s, a 54-by-60-inch tour de spread. The National Gallery of Art acquired White Bread, its first Rosenquist, last year. It's on view in the museum's East Building contemporary art galleries.

White Bread is relentlessly witty. While it shows a knife laying down yellow onto a blank canvas (on bread), the canvas lacks any sign of painterly touch. It's a sly joke about the unnecessary drama of Clyfford Still's heavily and obviously knifed surfaces.

Then again, it might also be a knowing wink about how a big abstraction (or at least a painting with big abstracty section) doesn't require self-conscious brushiness. Or about how canvas was still worth spreading oil paint on even as other artists were painting wood blocks to look like boxes of Heinz ketchup. Perhaps it's a sly needling of the fetish for finishes that was so evident in the early 1960s cavalcade of minimalism shows in New York. And the NGA's text on the painting makes the obvious connection between the '64 Rosenquist and a 1963 Roy Lichtenstein, Mustard on White (below), which is Magna on Plexiglass. (The Lichtenstein is 31 inches-by-37 inches.)

If you read it (or either) as a painting not about art, it's a clever commentary on American popular culture: American consumerism is the bland leading the bland. Or covering it. Or the blandness is spreading.

Meanwhile, back at the Thiebaud: Just as Warhol's paintings about painting don't need brushes (or knives) to make their points, the Thiebaud doesn't need to go out of its way to play in Rosenquist's or Lichtenstein's game. All three of those '60s stars used or referenced commercial painting techniques so as to tweak painting. Thiebaud has never been interested in jabbing his medium in the eye. Instead, Thiebaud's paintings have always been about the allure of paint, about the temptation of something sweet, familiar and seemingly facile. (Thiebaud certainly tends toward Morandi, but Thiebaud's subjects are more important on their own than Morandi's ever were.)

However: Who prepares (or eats) an open-faced peanut butter sandwich? It's almost like Thiebaud is saying that he doesn't want to direct us to interpretation, that he's leaving his paintings open for us to consider any way we want.