“I'm not just interested in the pictorial aspects of the landscape—see a pretty place and try to paint it—but in some way to manage it, manipulate it, or see what I can turn it into.'"
E xecuted in 1993, Hillside Streets is an exquisite example of Wayne Thiebaud’s renowned palette and thoughtful handling of paint that creates a dialogue between realism and abstraction. Hillside Streets captures the best of Thiebaud - the intensity of color, the play of shadow, and the conversation between architecture, street, and sky of the city of San Francisco, the artist's favorite American city. Thiebaud has long been recognized as one of America’s most prominent and celebrated artists known for his paintings of sweets, pies, cakes, and cityscapes that dramatize and restructure space and perspective. The improbable distortion of Thiebaud’s San Francisco streetscapes, with their steep hills and dramatic horizon lines, demonstrates the complexities of form and structure inherent in Thiebaud’s practice. The thick impastoed of accents of paint lend the work a luminosity that brings to mind Thiebaud’s iconic compositions of delectable sweets, painted throughout his impressive and storied career. In Hillside Streets, Thiebaud’s display of mastery of paint and sensibility for color and texture packs a powerful punch, inviting viewers to return, again and again, to examine and revel in the moody surface.
Market Precedents for Thiebaud Cityscapes Sold at Replica Shoes ’s
“I was playing around with the abstract notion of edge–I was fascinated, living in San Francisco, by the way different streets just came in and then just vanished.”
Painted almost 20 years after Thiebaud’s move to San Francisco, Hillside Streets demonstrates the artist’s fascination with the contradictions of urban life coexisting in a scene of dramatized topography and shifting perspectives. The precise articulation of the buildings and California sky demonstrate the artist’s keen interest in representation, yet the focus on atmospheric color and light rather than line or ground reveals Thiebaud’s masterful technique and concern with abstraction as a device. The dynamic topography of San Francisco, with its steep hills and dramatic viewpoints, was the perfect inspiration and platform for exaggerating spatial dynamics and investigating the intricacies of composing a painting. "Going to San Francisco I was... fascinated by those plunging streets, where you get down to an intersection, and all four streets take off in different directions and positions. There was a sense of displacement or indeterminate fixed positional stability. That led me to this sense of 'verticality' that you get in San Francisco. You look at a hill, and visually, it doesn't look as if the cars would be able to stay on it and grip. It's a very precarious state of tension, like a tightrope walk." (Wayne Thiebaud quoted in: Susan Stowens, “Wayne Thiebaud: Beyond Pop Art,” American Artist 44, No. 458, September 1980, p. 102-4).
Beyond the vanishing streets, Thiebaud creates a steep and skewed horizon line, exaggerating the hills of San Francisco in a playful and dramatic way that seem to roll up and down beyond the limits of the canvas. In his abstract renderings of the buildings, parks, streets and trees of the city, Thiebaud ensures the shapes and vivid colors of this scene are not perceived as merely abstract forms. Thiebaud plays with both light and dark in Hillside Streets. Closet to the viewer, dark streets and trees are highlighted most delicately with hints of pastels which create a more brooding feeling. As the improbable landscape continues into teh background, the palette becomes lighter and softer. Rolling San Francisco hills, streets, and buildings extend far beyond the horizon line, continuing into the pale pink sky. However, Thiebaud’s cityscapes such as Hillside Streets provided the perfect forum through which he could explore the opposing tensions between modern abstraction and classic representation. As he observed, “There is an element of oriental art in them, that kind of flattening out of planes–and a lot of playing around...San Francisco is a fantasy city. It’s easy to make it into a pretend city, a kind of fairy tale” (The artist in Exh. Cat., Wayne Thiebaud: A Retrospective, 2000, p. 58).
A colorful tribute to the artist's beloved Californian surroundings, Hillside Streets is a striking example of Wayne Thiebaud's celebrated cityscape paintings. Depicting the distinct topography of San Francisco's undulating roads, the present work synthesizes Thiebaud's singular rendering of spatial abstraction, quintessential pastel hues, and a career-long exploration of popular mass culture. Reinterpreting the traditional genre of landscape painting, the present work encapsulates the aesthetic and formal concerns that saturate Thiebaud's cityscapes. Through his work, Thiebaud explores non-objective experimentation with form, color and composition. His mastery of the arrangement of color and form are in full display in Hillside Streets, making this piece the ultimate example of Thiebaud at his very best.
