Sacramento's Wayne Thiebaud is known for his paintings of common everyday things, desserts, figure paintings, cityscapes and landscapes. San Francisco's Legion of Honor Museum is currently presenting an extraordinary exhibition,Wayne Thiebaud, Art Comes from Art, now through August 17, 2025.

This exhibition is different from anything I have ever seen in a museum exhibition before. Each of the paintings on exhibit, be it one of his desserts, cityscapes, landscapes, figurative paintings, nudes or instruments, is accompanied by a placard with a photo of the painting which Thiebaud "stole" from, either overtly or covertly. These placards often contain a Thiebaud quotation where he owns up to what idea or ideas he stole from the original painting.

Wayne Thiebaud freely admitted to being an "art thief." While discussing his artistic method, Thiebaud famously declared, "Art is not delivered in the morning paper, it has to be stolen from Mount Olympus!" He also quipped, "It's hard for me to think of artists who weren't an influence on me, because I'm such an obsessive thief."

Below is a selection of paintings currently on exhibit along with photos of the painting or paintings from which Wayne Thiebaud "stole" ideas.

As an artist and an art teacher, Wayne loved being a member of the artistic community, past, present and future. Wayne spoke with artists every day, whether speaking with one of his art students, or a contemporary peer, or artists from long ago by studying and contemplating their art. Wayne said, "I love art history and love to go to museums. Seeing that another human being has invented a whole other kind of reality, a frozen moment in eternal time. It's astonishing!"

Thiebaud believed that art was not an evolutionary process. Art has never been a linear progression. Instead, Thiebaud thought of art as being a continuous cycle of appropriation and reinterpretation, artists building upon and transforming the ideas of those who came before them. He truly believed that no one period or style of art is superior to any other. The work cavemen did on the walls of their cave is just as valid as any other. Wayne considered himself fortunate to have been able to be a small part of this world of creativity and expression.

Wayne taught his students to be "art thieves" just as he was. His former student and friend Grace Munakata recalled Wayne's approach to teaching art. She wrote, "Wayne encouraged us to copy work of artists we admired. Rather than faithfully replicating an artist's painting, we were told to integrate from that artist what interested us. ...  He gave us an assignment, we were told to copy a masterwork. We matched colors, brush marks, and rhythms as closely as possible. Wayne told us that by remaking it ourselves, we were engaging in a visceral, firsthand way to understand a painting’s structure."

Some of Wayne Thiebaud's most interesting reinterpretations seemingly have nothing to do with the painting which served as his idea source. Thiebaud's Display Cakes doesn't seem to have anything to do with Edgar Degas' The Millinery Shop.

Thiebaud seems to have transformed Degas' round hats on stands into circular decorated cakes on stands. The cakes seem impossibly balanced, hovering in the air. Degas' hats and Thiebaud's cakes are both on display, tempting consumers in a dazzling array of color and style.

Thiebaud said, "The kind of painting I admire in the tradition of representational painting, comes from painters who are able to combine perceptual manifestations and conceptual enterprises."

In Confections, Thiebaud pays direct tribute to Giorgio Morandi's Still Life of 1941. Thiebaud said, "I have taken Morandi paintings and worked with them directly next to my own paintings to try to make mine look more like his."

At first glance, Thiebaud's Cakes and Pies and Cotan's Still Life with Fruits and Vegetables seem to have as little to do with each other, as much as a side of broccoli has to do with a hot fudge sundae.

But Cotan treated his subjects like actors on a stage, giving each the opportunity to shine. His vegetables are spotlighted and appear to be floating. Thiebaud's cakes are displayed on high pedestals, elevated and balanced on a thin dowel with no base. Both artists use an effective and array of colors to tempt the eye as well as the appetite.

Wayne Thiebaud loved Flemish and Dutch paintings of the 17th century, especially their lavishly portrayed tables laden with feasts of rich and exotic foods. It's easy to point out similarities with Thiebaud's Buffet and van Hulsdonk's Still Life with Meat, Vegetables and Fruit, even though Thiebaud's painting was done well over three centuries later.

Thiebaud said, "The potential of still-life painting is infinite, and all you have to do is look at what people are doing in still life, but remembering that when you go to the Metropolitan Museum and see a Dutch painting this big, including ten or fifteen objects -- that's a challenge. You've got to come up with something that is the measure of that, so you can spend a lifetime."

Thiebaud's Three Machines and artist Laren Maclver's Penny Candy Vendors both focus on the gum ball, the smallest and most basic of American consumerism. This most common of the penny candies represented the whole cycle of consumerism ... the imagined ideal, to the pleasure of possession, to the state of diminishing returns and finally to a sense of loss ... until the next gum ball.

Thebaid said, "Well, I must have seen things that represented what it was possible to do. I remember later on seeing a painting by a wonderful woman painter, Loren Maclver, a gum ball machine. I didn't see it until years later, but it's in the Metropolitan Museum."

Wayne Thiebaud spent most of the 1956-57 academic year in New York where he met with most of the prominent Abstract Expressionists of the time, gauging his work with theirs. Thiebaud learned a great deal in New York, especially from Willem de Kooning, but rather than working in New York, he chose to remain in Sacramento for the whole of his career.

Thiebaud's Sacramento is perhaps his most direct appropriation of another artist's work. He took Jonas Lie's Path of Gold and replaced New York with Sacramento, the East River with the Sacramento River and the Brooklyn Bridge with Sacramento's Tower Bridge. Both paintings have the same bird's eye perspective with smoky boats plying the shimmering river waters, although the East River has considerably more traffic than the Sacramento.

Thiebaud said Window Views was inspired by Bonnard's Dining Room Overlooking the Garden. Both paintings fuse a flat window divided vertically with a foreground table. Elmer Bischoff was also inspired by Bonnard's painting in his Interior with Cityscape, but adds a gulf between the woman seated at the table and the man standing at the window.

Thiebaud's window reveals an overwhelming size of San Francisco with its high hills and steep streets and a single person seated just beneath an expansive window view of San Francisco's steep, nearly vertical streets.

Although Rough Road is not a "cityscape," it has a highway on a familiar steep vertical rise which characterized his San Francisco cityscapes.

Wayne Thiebaud was inspired by Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman's "zip" or "stripe" paintings. Thiebaud said, "If you're dealing with the sublime, you're making a caricature of something -- a single line down the canvas for Barnett Newman is a sublime idea."

Thiebaud's Road Through also draws inspiration from Martin Ramirez's drawing of a similar hill. Ramirez was a resident of a psychiatric hospital in central California where Thiebaud visited him. Thiebaud strongly believed that there was no difference between so called "fine" and "folk" art.

Wayne Thiebaud admired Piet Mondrian for his ability to paint both representational flower studies and geometric abstractions. Thiebaud's Office and Shopping Mall takes Mondrian's abstracted grids in New York City 2, making them into steel beams of a building while simultaneously creating both flattened and deeply recessive space.

Thiebaud said, "When Piet Mondrian was talking to a friend in the New York studio, he walked to his window, pulled down the blind, and said, 'I can't stand all that disorganization out there.' To make a life of order out of the buzzing confusions of this wondrous but difficult world demands our best efforts. As far as I can see, thoughtful paintings that try to do this have always been extremely rare. Negotiating the perceptual world into a conceptual entity of some interest and dimension is a challenge of the championship level."

Richard Diebenkorn used abstraction to evoke representation, while Thiebaud used representation that verged on abstraction.

Although Thiebaud's Day Streets is not a visual match for Diebenkorn's Ocean Park #30, it easy to see both artists playing with the same artistic ideas.

In an academic sense, Thiebaud's cityscape creates physical disorientation and psychological unease. But for a casual art lover, it's an incredibly fun painting with its challenging three dimensional ideas clashing with being depicted in a two dimensional way.

In Dark City (San Francisco), Wayne Thiebaud borrowed from both Charles Sheeler's Skyscrapers and Geogia O'Keeffe's New York Night. All three of these cityscapes are tightly cropped. Thiebaud shows the buildings as rectangular geometric slabs and places them in a nighttime setting like Georgia O'Keeffe.

Thiebaud said, "You still want to be sure to acknowledge the influences, like Diebenkorn, who was a big influence, and so many good influences -- Edward Hopper and all those great early New York City painters. Whenever I go to the Met, I can't resist going to see all those terrific old paintings."

Wayne Thiebaud often talked about how the San Francisco cityscapes by Richard Diebenkorn influenced him, but Thiebaud also liked Diebenkorn's landscapes, often with strong horizontal strata, sharp diagonals all done with a luminous color palette.

Thiebaud said, "I knew so little about color. It was only when I fell in love with some of the things that Dick loved, like the color in Persian and Indian miniatures, which also influenced Matisse and Bonnard."

Wayne Thiebaud was comfortable with mountains. They were all around him in his youth in Utah. Once in Sacramento, he often visited the High Sierra. He enjoyed studying the mountain paintings of Hudson River School artists Thomas Hill and William Keith at Sacramento's Crocker Museum.

Thiebaud's Blue Ridge Mountain draws elements from Bridalveil Falls by a follower of artist Thomas Hill. Both paintings have a limited sky, focusing on the plunging waters and walls of the soaring cliffs.

Wayne Thiebaud's The Sea Rolls In recalls Marsden Hartley's coastal paintings in the State of Maine. During the 1950's, Thiebaud's role models were artists such as Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning. But as time moved on, he turned to earlier American artists such as Lyonel Feininger, John Marin and Marsden Hartley.

Milton Avery was a representational artist, maintaining that style until the end of his career, but he also responded to new developments in contemporary art, especially the Abstract Expressionist works of Mark Rothko, who gave the eulogy at Avery's funeral.

Thiebaud painted numerous coastal landscapes, often with three color fields like Avery's Sand Sea and Sky.

In Thiebaud's Surfer Ridge, he animates the geometric abstraction adding human figures and even a surfer's dog.

Laguna Rise is one of the most unbelievable of Thiebaud's city images. Thiebaud's loved painting San Francisco with its buildings and hills He described The City as a "fairy tale," not too far from columnist Herb Caen's most memorable description of San Francisco as "Bagdad by the Bay."

Thiebaud once commented on having seen Goya's A City on a Rock. Francisco de Goya's A City on the Rock is now believed to have been done by one of his students. It portrays a city surrounded by dangers, using its natural location high on a rock as a strategic defense.

Wayne Thiebaud often reflected contemporary art in his own works. It was his way to say that representation is not opposed to abstraction, but goes with it. He said, "I'm just essentially a traditional representational painter, and by that I mean, always interested in imagery, trying to make a representational painting that has as much abstraction as seems to fit that particular mode of representation."

Thiebaud's childhood memories growing up in Utah lead to a life-long fascination with mountains. But this painting draws its inspiration from the poured-pigment Veil paintings of Morris Louis, which for Thiebaud resembled cliff faces he had known from his earliest memories.

He said, "Well, the technique at first was very much influenced by the painter Morris Louis ... So, I started dyeing. I got some big irrigation canvas and tacked it up on the wall, and began staining it with these compositional notions, and tried to investigate the idea of this sort of watercolor wet-on-wet technique. And I just stole his procedure, and made them into mountains and put trees on the top of them, which is kind of ridiculous. But I liked those concepts of extremism."

At first glance, Thiebaud's Eating Figures and Degas' L'Absinthe drinkers seem to have little in common. After all, fast paced American life often accompanied with fast food has little to do with the 19th century Paris cafe scene.

But despite their unrelated settings, both Thiebaud and Degas are sharing a mood, where these individuals attempt to remedy the weariness of the moment by feeding themselves on fast food or by drinking absinthe.

Edgar Degas' The Bellelli Family is famous because it captures members of the family in emotional isolation from each other.

Looking at Thiebaud's Five Seated Figures, it's easy to see that these people are uneasy. They don't want to be with each other. There is no eye contact between any two of them. Their posture is self contained, not at all receptive to any interaction whatsoever. After looking at the painting for a while, it's easy to get the sense that these people aren't really there at all. The shadows of the chairs are consistent with the furniture, but the shadows of the people on the chairs are almost totally absent.

For Girl with Ice Cream Cone, Thiebaud's wife Betty Jean was pressed into model duty. Here she poses with an ice cream cone, emulating the radical perspective in Andrea Mategna's Lamentaion Over the Dead Christ. Both paintings have the model's feet prominently filling the foreground.

Thiebaud said, "I love that painting ... foreshortening, the caricature that he came up with ... absolutely a delight. I mean it's as much a cartoon as it is a couple of feet and I love that -- that's the stuff that really attracts me a great deal. So In Girl with Ice Cream Cone, you see a little bit of an evidence of that, the difference let's say between those big bare feet sticking in your eye almost, and then the little hand way back in the back with a little blue shadow."

Tapestry Skirt is a portrait of Betty Jean Thiebaud, the artist's wife. This painting was a challenge for Thiebaud because he was reinterpreting one of the most famous American paintings ever created, Whistler's Arrangement in Grey and Black No 1, popularly known as "Whistler's Mother."

In Thiebaud's Tapestry Skirt, Betty Thiebaud is facing in the opposite direction and also turns her head to the viewer while Whistler has his mother in profile. Also contrasting with Whistler's subtle color harmonies is Betty Thiebaud's colorful skirt, with a marvelous selection of blues, purples and greens.

Wayne Thiebaud had great admiration for Walt Kuhn because he played an important role in keeping the figurative tradition in American Art alive during the ascent of abstract art. Kuhn's flattened and abstracted elements of his circus and vaudeville figure paintings was a big influence on Thiebaud.

Thiebaud's The Review Girl is wearing a fringed costume with a headdress topped with flamboyant feathers. She poses confidently, but her tiny shadow renders her more like a paper doll. Walt Kuhn's Salute and Plumes both have their subject looking forward, drawing attention to the figure's costume and feathered headress.

Thiebaud's full length seated Nude borrows its composition from Edvard Munch's Puberty. But where Munch focuses on the transition from girlhood to womanhood, Thiebaud shows us a mature woman, alert and symmetrical with a straight forward gaze. Visually, Thiebaud manipulates the space, making it appear that the woman is seated upon two horizontal lines. Munch's subjects often were expressive giving clues of their inner lives.

To the contrary, Thiebaud avoided obvious expressive emotions. He said, "Purely formal problems have always been what's most important to me, and I try to downplay subject matter because I'm afraid it limits how people think about pictures."

The pose of Thiebaud's Nude in Interior showing this woman seated on a "too-small" bed is derived from Henri Matisse's nude Carmelina. In both paintings the figures have an enlarged right hand. Matisse's painting has a small image of the artist reflected in the mirror to the model's right. In Thiebaud's pastel, a man is pictured. Is he real, a reflection, or the woman's imagined visage?

This portrait of Wayne Thiebaud's Martin guitar invites us to view it with our sight, our hearing and our touch. Thiebaud's Guitar appears to float in the air. Guitars usually do not come with hanging hardware, allowing it to appear as if it had a flying spirit.

Picasso's Guitar, now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is created with two-dimensional sheet metal and plays with our preconceived ideas of how three dimensional ideas should be depicted.

Picasso said, "Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth."

In 1955, Wayne Thiebaud visited artist Franz Kline in his New York Studio and saw Kline's The Bridge.

Thiebaud's Electric Chair is an atypically serious subject for him. His treatment of this subject with bold brushstrokes was probably influenced by Franz Kline's The Bridge. During his visit with Kline, Thiebaud was struck by the Abstract Expressionist's interest in art history.

Thiebaud wrote, "It was just shocking to hear someone like Franz Kline talking about Vermeer, until you thought about his work. And it was shocking to know how much de Kooning liked Fairfield Porter, for instance. It was interesting to hear Barnett Newman extol and be so ecstatic over the Mona Lisa and what he would say about it."

Franz Kline 1910-1962, The Bridge, 1955
Williams-Proctor Art Institute, Utica, NY

"Trompe-l'œil"  is a French artistic term for a highly realistic optical illusion of three dimensional space. 

In Violin and Shadow, Thiebaud is admiring the "trompe l'oeil" (fool the eye) tradition used a century earlier by American artist William Michael Harnett in his The Old Violin.

Here, Wayne Thiebaud gives us a subject which is nearly vertical with an angled shadow. The pegs of the violin appear larger in the shadow than on the actual violin.

Thiebaud said, "Well, I think trompe l'oeil painting is like a magic trick. It has its place and I think it's part of the picture of what painting can do. What's interesting to me is it fails when it tries to have anything deeper than a coin or a piece of paper. Once you put a violin in there, it hurts. You know?"

Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art runs through August 17th. Make a plan and get to San Francisco to see this one, it's far too good to miss!

Enjoy getting to know Wayne Thiebaud. Discover his art, his philosopy of art and his joy at being part of the greater art community. See in Wayne's art the wide ranging influences that inspired him.

Having seen the exhibition, I believe Thiebaud achieved his goal. This "art thief" was fortunate enough to be "part of all that."

After his long, memorable and illustrious career, Wayne Thiebaud died on Christmas Day, 2021, at the age of 101. His legacy for us is good news. Each of us can be part "of all that" too. We, like Wayne, can dare to steal inspiration from those who came before us -- we can dare to steal "from Olympus."
-------------
Beyond the exhibition, the Legion of Honor's Cafe was impressive! We enjoyed a coffee and a gnosh in the Cafe.

Planning a visit to Bodega Bay Heritage Gallery?

Here's a tip:

Please look at our online collection beforehand. We have more paintings than our gallery can hold at one time. If any of our online collection interests you, call or text (707-875-2911) in advance, telling us which painting or paintings interest you, and we'll have the painting(s) at the galllery when you arrive.