ARTIST THIEBAUD TAKES A BITTERSWEET VIEW

Authors sum up their careers in collections of writings. Actors, directors, composers and choreographers gather their professional achievements in festivals. The visual artist’s version of “This Is Your Life” is the retrospective--a large exhibition covering the development of an aesthetic vision, accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with theoretical essays, chronology and bibliography.

A retrospective--particularly one that travels to major museums--is the art world’s most enduring way of honoring its treasured talents, but such surveys can be unnerving.

“It’s like reading your own diary. You’re torn between how fascinating it is and how embarrassing it is,” says painter Wayne Thiebaud, whose retrospective opens Wednesday at the Newport Harbor Art Museum. “One would be an ingrate not to be happy to participate in it, but it’s a bit disconcerting to see works you haven’t seen for 25 years. You can’t imagine having painted them in that way.

“You tend just to be interested in the thing you’re doing and everything else is of secondary importance until this gob of work comes together. Then you think, ‘Well, that’s supposed to be something,’ and you hope it will be. It’s not like it’s just a bunch of pictures. But when you go to see them, you think, ‘Gee, I was hoping for something special and it’s just those damned old pictures.’ ”

Thiebaud’s “damned old pictures” have already occupied the December cover plus several inside pages of Art in America (a prestigious New York art magazine), and they are certain to bring crowds of admirers to Newport. His vividly colored, realistic depictions of cakes, pies, toys and clothing, along with lesser-known paintings of single figures and vertiginous San Francisco landscapes, are friendly artworks that have triumphed in the sphere of high art by virtue of formal discipline.

Once an aspiring cartoonist who grew from commercial into fine art, Thiebaud now adapts illustration techniques to straightforward realist painting. Laymen see his canvases as cheerful celebrations of ordinary objects or inventive exaggerations of nature. Professionals view him as a problem-solver, intent on merging several perceptual experiences in a single painting.

At 65, he seems thoroughly at ease with himself, if not with all his paintings. Genuinely modest and soft-spoken, he would rather talk about other artists than himself and is “deeply committed” to teaching painting and critical theory at UC Davis.

After raising five children, he and his wife, Betty Jean, live in a cozy Sacramento neighborhood where autumn leaves turn rich colors and fall in variegated carpets. Their home has the comfortable clarity of Thiebaud’s pictures, with objects of definite shapes and colors framed by white walls. Artworks displayed are by other artists--Balthus, Willem DeKooning, Arshile Gorky, Guy Pene du Bois--mostly traded for Thiebaud’s work through Allan Stone, his longtime New York dealer.

Wearing yellow-orange socks, navy cords and a bright, striped sweater that resembles the rainbow halations around objects in his paintings, Thiebaud greets his guest and settles into yet another interview. After the exhibition left its premiere engagement at the San Francisco Art Museum, he assumed “that would be the end of it,” but as the show moves on to Newport Beach--then Milwaukee, Columbus, Ohio, and Kansas City, Mo.--interest continues.

Thiebaud never thought his life would be like this, and he takes little credit for his achievements--for, you see, he’s been “very lucky.”

“I’m lucky to have started in commercial art. You get up every day and go to work and that’s pretty much the way I still go about it,” he says. “I suppose a lot of it is just dumb brute habit, but I don’t feel good unless I put in a day of painting.”

He also counts himself fortunate to have been hired away, in 1960, from his teaching post at Sacramento Junior College (now Sacramento City College) by UC Davis, a change that gave him more time to paint and the challenge of “higher expectations.”

But the greatest stroke of luck was his timing of his first New York exhibition. It was 1962, the era of Pop art, and though Thiebaud’s paintings have none of Pop’s irony or undercurrent of social criticism, he was widely touted as one of the vanguard.

“I don’t think I’d be known at all without Pop art, or at least not until much later,” he says. “Let’s face it; a lot of pretty damn good painters get such small ripples of attention.”

A blitz of media attention catapulted him to fame (albeit on the tails of a movement that had little to do with his view of himself as “a traditional painter”), but it also brought a moment of reckoning.

“That first reaction I got was the most dangerous thing that ever happened to me,” he recalls. “It was really temporarily overwhelming because I’d made a decision about going back to school, teaching and having a life that meant something. When I finally had a show in New York, I was already 40 years old. From having a nice, small, local reputation to having Life, Time, the Nation, (critics) Lawrence Alloway and Thomas Hess and all the people I knew about suddenly write about my work was an absolute shock. It seemed like a dream.

“The first week I came back (to California), I remember going in the studio and making this terrible mess. It was the first time in my life I thought that people might talk about what I was painting. But as soon as I painted a really rotten picture, I got over it.”

After that experience, Thiebaud finds dealing with his current retrospective relatively easy. Though rumor has it that artists are sometimes prematurely embalmed by their retrospectives, Thiebaud thinks the finality factor is only a problem “if you take the reaction too seriously--either way. The difficulty is in becoming self-conscious.”

His solution: “Start painting and making mistakes as soon as you can. Artists are always hanging on by their toenails. Lots of 35-year-olds think that painting is the most important thing in the world, but only 1/10th of 1% continue. That’s the thing that’s most terrifying to me--not having the enthusiasm to go on and work.”

The exhibition continues through Feb. 16. Thiebaud will give a public lecture at the museum Wednesday at 8 p.m. Admission to the lecture is $3 for museum members, students and seniors; $5 for others. Call (714) 759-1122 for reservations.