Moderated by Crocker Art Museum Associate Director & Chief Curator Scott A. Shields, Ph.D., this informative discussion between three people connected to Wayne Thiebaud will center around insights and unique experiences. Join the artist’s daughter, model, and writer Twinka Thiebaud; painter and professor Hearne Pardee; and critic and art historian Julia Friedman, Ph.D., for a singular program on Thiebaud and his life.
When: December 5th, 2 PM (PST)
October was a watershed month for the museum world. A week before the month started, the National Gallery of Art announced that the long-anticipated Philip Guston retrospective, already delayed because of pandemic-related closures, was to be postponed for another four years, until the summer of 2024, for reasons that could be best described as ideological. By the end of the month, the administration’s decision to postpone was amended with a new date of 2022, now two years out. The initial postponement prompted an impressive public pushback, which likely caused the NGA to cave in, offering a compromise date. I attempted to explain what had happened, and why, in an essay recently published by the Athenaeum Review.
“If considerations of “impact” supersede considerations of merit in the choice of the art, then the Directors were absolutely right to halt the show because some of the work, according to the “impact” argument, is unpalatable for consumption within a culture that prioritizes viewers’ emotional safety. But should the argument that is at the base of the “Philip Guston Now” postponement become a precedent, then art museums will be transformed into consciousness-raising platforms where ideological considerations will overtake aesthetics and art history. This path had already been trodden by the infamous 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition mounted in Munich, where the public was “educated” on the art of modernist decay, with the help of derogatory wall texts aimed to reveal the ideological misdeeds of the painters who dared to distort color and human form. That exhibition was built on the premise that modernist art was harmful to the spirit and body of the German people. Its potential harmful impact was to be mitigated with the proper ideological framing of the offending artwork.”
According to Wayne Thiebaud, his latest painting, which he cheekily named “100 Year-old clown,” is the summation of his clown series that has been in the works for the last five years. “Clowns” will be exhibited at the Laguna Art Museum December 6, 2020–April 4, 2012.
“It is difficult to say whether One-hundred-year-old Clown is a genre-bending painting (in that it contains elements of and references to portraiture, landscape, and still life), or a painting outside any genre. Could it be that Thiebaud, who has been fortunate enough to have had over seven decades of experience and growth as a painter, has made the ultimate breakthrough into a meta-generic space? Thiebaud’s early interest in painters who, in the poet and critic John Yau’s words, “reinvented particular genres such as still life, landscape, and cityscape” (Yau cites Cézanne, Morandi, de Chirico, and Hopper), logically led to his own reconceptualization of painting genres to the point of merging and layering them in a single masterwork. Although Thiebaud’s reputation has long been established (Karen Wilkin hailed Thiebaud as “an American master” in 2015), it wasn’t until his latest body of work, launched that same year, that the nonagenarian painter changed his perspective from the observer to the object of observation, vicariously stepping into the ring of his circus-themed paintings and drawings. Not content with limiting himself to the still lifes and landscapes that already secured his place in the canon, Thiebaud began a new chapter, painting without presumption, but with the hope of sorting out some decades-old memories, thoughts, and sensations.”
My article “Past continuous” about the painting and its role in Thiebaud’s oeuvre was just published by The New Criterion. An essay-length version of this article is forthcoming in the catalogue for the LAM “Wayne Thiebaud: Clowns” exhibition.
Here is a recent article I wrote after the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was just published by the Athenaeum Review. Ginsburg credited this dexterity, and her understanding that language is more than a tool for communicating the semantic meaning, to the time she was an undergraduate at Cornell, where she attended the lectures by one of the greatest literary figures in the 20th century—Vladimir Nabokov.
Vladimir Nabokov writing at his desk, Cornell University, 1957. Photo: Cornell University Archives.
“Ginsburg was the first one to admit her debt to Nabokov’s teaching method, underscoring how illogical it is to condemn the inherently hierarchical and taste-based nature of lecturing. The currently fashionable assault on lecturing is at best a myopic fad, and at worst a case of closet schadenfreude. The basic claim behind the denigration of lecturing as a teaching method is that it is not sufficiently “student-oriented.” Students, we are told, learn better when they can relate to the material on a personal level. Clearly, the operating assumption here is that the material on offer is fundamentally boring, so that the only way to make it more digestible is to present everything through the prism of students’ “lived experience.” The classroom, then, becomes “an interactive learning space” and college professors turn into “learning facilitators.” Out with the lectures and in with the “active learning”! The next time an opponent of lecturing asserts the supposed superiority of “student-oriented” learning, it might be worth pondering whether an anti-meritocratic classroom dedicated to the safe space exchange of (certain) personal viewpoints and “lived experiences” inadvertently stunts the intellect of students, reaffirming whatever prejudices and superstitions they brought to the classroom in the first place.”
An article for The New Criterion co-authored with friend and colleague Professor David Hawkes. It was recently republished in the New Discourses.
“The most ruthless, radical fringes of all great revolutions have drawn much of their initial support from more peaceful, moderate parties. They have also been unvaryingly efficient at eliminating their erstwhile allies once their purpose has been served. The English Independents ditched the Presbyterians, the French Jacobins guillotined the Girondins, the Russian Bolsheviks sent the Mensheviks to the gulag. To the immediate right of the extreme Left is often the most dangerous place to be. There are many liberal members of the American upper-middle class who would do well to remember that today.”
My latest contribution to The New Criterion is about what we can (and should) learn from George Orwell’s 1945 essay “Politics and the English Language.”
Ed Ruscha, Words…, 1987, acrylic on canvas, 64 x 64 inches. © Edward J. Ruscha IV
“The present degradation of political discourse is buttressed by the decline of language. This decline is nearly indistinguishable from the sort Orwell complained about in 1945—it is still a mixture of “vagueness and sheer incompetence.” When political language relies on “dying metaphors” (“a few bad apples”), “operators, or verbal false limbs” (“use our voices”), “pretentious diction” (“decolonize the museum”), and plain “lack of precision” (“defund the police”), actual meaning cannot manifest itself, and is supplanted by what Orwell called “emotional meaning”: “People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning—they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another—but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying.” Instead of endeavoring to clarify their thinking by clarifying their language, political actors on all sides use terms with implied (but not always established) definitions.”
Wayne Thiebaud 100: Paintings, Prints, and Drawings, is a forthcoming catalogue for the eponymous centennial exhibition at Sacramento’s Crocker Museum. In 1951 the Crocker also hosted Thiebaud’s first solo show entitled Influences on a Young Painter.
My contribution to the volume is an essay “Nothing is Unimportant” that presents Thiebaud’s most recent circus-themed body of work, putting it in the context of his persistent focus the craft of painting and the authenticity of human experience.
The great modernist eccentric Alexei Remizov was a “writers’ writer” whose innovative poetic prose has long since entered the Russian literary canon. Gradually expanding his working methods to make drawing an integral part of the writing process, during the 1930s and 1940s, Remizov created hundreds of albums that combined texts with collages and india ink and watercolor illustrations. (more) Northwestern University Press 7 x 10, 300 pgs, Trade Cloth ISBN 0-8101-2617-6 / $69.95
Between June 2014 and April 2015, Dave Hickey posted almost 3,000 digital comments on social media, prompting nearly 700,000 words in response from art lovers, acolytes, and skeptics. Wasted Words is an unedited comprehensive transcript of these exchanges. This polyphonic digital discourse reveals the range of Hickey’s strong opinions, as he embarks on a crypto-enlightenment project for the benefit of "dunces" and "pricks." Paperback, 586 pages, 2016 ISBN-10: 1517287103
Dustbunnies is an assemblage of “swept up” fragments that came from a vast digital discourse that took place in Dave Hickey’s social media space between June 2014 and March 2015. During that time Hickey posted almost 3,000 comments, prompting nearly 700,000 words in response from art lovers, acolytes and skeptics. Wasted Words, the resulting volume, is an unedited comprehensive transcript of these exchanges. Its pendant publication, Dustbunnies, distills Hickey’s richly aphoristic comments, extracted from various discussion threads. Paperback, 124 pages, 2016 ISBN-10: 152327266X
Celebrating the 100th birthday of one of America's most respected and beloved artists, Wayne Thiebaud 100: Paintings, Prints, and Drawings honors a lifetime of extraordinary achievements across many genres. Best known for his tantalizing paintings of desserts, Thiebaud has long been affiliated with Pop Art, though his body of work is far more expansive, continuing to grow as the artist approaches his milestone birthday. Across the decades, Thiebaud has explored various details of American life through his art from urban views and rural landscapes to clowns and household items all the time continuing to explore the food subjects that made him famous. Wayne Thiebaud 100 accompanies an exhibition of the same name, organized by the Crocker Art Museum. In addition to the 100 paintings, prints, and drawings featured in the exhibition, this publication includes numerous other contextual paintings by Thiebaud, art by the masters who inspired him, and photographs of the artist with family and friends, taken over the course of his extraordinary career. Hardcover : 212 pages ISBN-10 : 1087501172 Dimensions : 9.8 x 0.9 x 11.3 inches ISBN-13 : 978-1087501178
Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society since Gorbachev Adele Marie Barker (Editor), Eliot Borenstein (Contributor), Julia Friedman (Contributor), Adam Weiner (Contributor), Elizabeth Kristofovich Zelensky (Contributor), Robert Edelman (Contributor) With the collapse of the Soviet empire in the late 1980s, the Russian social landscape has undergone its most dramatic changes since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, turning the once bland and monolithic state-run marketplace into a virtual maze of specialty shops—from sushi bars to discotheques and tattoo parlors... (more) Paperback: 488 pages Publisher: Duke University Press Books (June 10, 1999) Language: English ISBN-10: 0822323133 ISBN-13: 978-0822323136
“A Powerless Seeker: Merezhkovsky’s Romance as Life-Writing” by Julia Friedman In Symbolism, its Origins and Consequences. Edited by Rosina Neginsky. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2010 Hardcover: 665 pages Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing New edition edition (October 1, 2010) Language: English ISBN-10: 1443823929 ISBN-13: 978-1443823920
“The Writing-Drawing Continuum of Alexei Remizov,” by Julia Friedman "Elective affinities" - a notion originally borrowed by Goethe for his 1809 novel of the same title from eighteenth-century chemistry - here refers to the active role of the two partners in the relationship of the pictorial and the verbal... In In Elective Affinities: Word & Image Interactions 6, 2008 Edited by Catriona McLeod, Véronique Plesch and Charlotte Schoell-Glass. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi Paperback: 422 pages Publisher: Rodopi (June 20, 2009) Language: English ISBN-10: 9042026189 ISBN-13: 978-9042026186
“Alexei Remizov’s Creative Act,” by Julia Friedman. Edited by Maurice Geracht and Frédéric Ogée. In Interfaces: Image Text Language, vol. 29, 2010
Julia Friedman
