formerly Shakespeare and Company Books, now VIcarious Experience

Wayne Thiebaud.

Wayne Thiebaud; Karen Tsujimoto; Washington (1985); 1st; VGVG; Folio; Not Ex-Library, Not Book Club, Not Print on Demand; Dj-Multi-color pictorial w/white lettering to front, blue to spine, almost no perceptible edgewear, brodart protected; Dj- White w/multi-color pictorial to front, purple + black lettering to spine, very minimal edgewear; Hb- Dark blue w/title blind stamped to front, gilt to spine, almost no perceptible edgewear; 207pps- clean, flat, numerous color plates; Endpages-Pink w/previous owner's name blindstamped to front endpage.

A wonderfully ungimmicky,artist, Thiebaud belongs more to a classical tradition of painting than to the Pop revolution that first propelled him to national attention in the 1960s. Then, the sweet everydayness of his cake and pie pictures looked like cousins of Andy Warhol’s soup cans. But where Warhol was cool and ironic, Thiebaud was warm and gently comic, playing on a collective nostalgia just this side of sentimentality. He pushed himself as a painter—experimenting with brushstrokes, color, composition, light and shadow. The cylindrical cakes and cones of ice cream owed more to such masters of the still life as the 18th-century French painter Chardin, or the 20th-century Italian Giorgio Morandi, as critics have pointed out, than to the art trends of the time.

In 1985, while with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Karen Tsujimoto organized a Thiebaud retrospective. ‘What hasn’t changed is his mastery of painting. The fact that he can create a painting that still captivates a viewer when we’re bombarded with all this visual information in the Internet age shows how he’s also mastered the skill of understanding people.’