ART REVIEW : Thiebaud Retrospective Opens Pepperdine Complex

Pepperdine University is blessed with a spectacular view of the Pacific from its aerie above the Malibu coast. Over the weekend it opened a weeklong arts festival to launch a new cultural complex--fortunately not into the water. Designed by the architectural firm of Neptune & Thomas, the $12-million, 50,000-square-foot complex is called the Ahmanson Fine Arts Center. It is as architecturally stark as the rest of the minimalist Mediterranean campus but includes facilities that mark the aesthetic capstone of the school--a theater, recital hall and facilities for the tiny art department with its three instructors and 25 student majors.

Most germane to the art public, however, is the establishment of a crisp new two-story, 2,000-square-foot gallery. Its director, Tom Gabbard, opens promisingly with a retrospective of the art of Bay Area populist Pop master Wayne Thiebaud, whose reputation stretches back to the ‘60s when his images of pre-cholesterol goodies like marbled hard candy and gummy lemon meringue pies caused him to be bracketed with the emergent cheeky Pop school.

That’s not wrong, but it’s a bit misleading as we see in this 40-plus work retrospective selected by the artist himself. In many ways Thiebaud links to the whole history of American realist genre art updated through an awareness of the varying eddies of modernism. In some ways he is a species of hip Norman Rockwell casting a bright-blue shadow.

Thiebaud started by doing illustration and retains many of its best skills. He draws accurately and deftly, getting the appearances of things down with sober and detached accuracy. He has an illustrator’s knack of punching up color so we look where he wants us to look when he wants us to look there.

He’s a better painter than most illustrators, making surfaces as rich as his gooey cake frostings and creating nuances of light that are meaningless in work made for reproduction. Unlike illustrators, he doesn’t tell stories. He contemplates the joys and muffled desperation of middle-class American life.

In many ways, he is an intimist like Bonnard, making regular-folks portraits of his friends, wife and himself, looking avuncular. He sees a family at the beach seeming cosmically insignificant and smiles. Unlike Bonnard, who rarely questioned the charms of everyday life, Thiebaud betrays a restless American ambition for Bigger Things.

He can’t just paint a rack of cakes and let it go at that. He has to remind us that he knows about abstract minimalist color-field painting in the process. His landscapes of the vertiginous San Francisco hills are probably the best ever painted of the subject, but he can’t resist tweaking Richard Diebenkorn in the process or massing his forms to compete with the tensions of Abstract Expressionism. “Farm Pond” is a masterpiece of Bay Area brooding, but it seems unnecessarily pedantic to make it a conscious gloss on Edvard Munch.

Thiebaud is a first-rate artist--and was honored at the recent Governor’s Awards for the Arts at the Beverly Hilton. Too bad his art shares the insecure intellectual’s need to establish his credentials by intoning: “As Winston Churchill once said . . . .” That’s silly. Thiebaud can speak for himself.

* Pepperdine University, 24255 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu; gallery open noon to 4 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday; Thiebaud exhibition on view through Sunday; (310) 456-4522.