A n endlessly engaging and candy-coated cityscape, Wayne Thiebaud’s Toward Twin Peaks represents an early example of the luscious San Francisco street scenes that compose one of the artist’s most celebrated series. Executed in 1976, the present work has remained in the same collects ion since the year of its creation over 40 years ago, bespeaking the perpetual dynamic fascination that is created through such remarkable detail, kaleidoscopic palette, and witty visual play. The inimitable balance between mimetic representation and modern abstraction that defines Thiebaud’s signature style is here displayed in the familiar yet dreamlike depiction of the artist’s beloved city. The present work’s superior exhibition history – having been shown at several prestigious American institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art – further affirms the significance of Toward Twin Peaks within Thiebaud’s oeuvre. As with his greatest compositions, this canvas masterfully balances representation and abstraction, seriousness and wit, touch and control, rendering urban scenes into surreal aesthetic fantasies.
Toward Twin Peaks captures the post-war landscape of San Francisco, marking a significant shift from the still-life and figurative subjects that primarily preoccupied the artist in the 1960s and early 1970s. Painted in 1976, just four years after Thiebaud’s move to the city, Toward Twin Peaks demonstrates the artist’s fascination with the contradictions of urban life coexisting in a scene of extreme foreshortening and shifting perspectives. The precise articulation of intersecting streets that expand map-like from the main central boulevard out to the edges of the canvas demonstrates the artist’s skilled draftsmanship, while the buildings formed entirely from color, distinguishable only as contrasting tones, allow the landscape to elide into abstraction. The hazy billow of smoke that dominates the upper right of the canvas further exaggerates the abstracted effect by visually joining the fore- and background of the composition into a single plane. Inspired by Chinese and Japanese painting and their influence on the spatial innovations of Paul Cézanne and other modernist painters, Thiebaud's work demonstrates a compression of expansive space into a foreshortened perspective. 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., San Francisco, Replica Handbags s Museum, Wayne Thiebaud: A Retrospective, 2000, p. 58). A playful celebration of color, line, and light, Toward Twin Peaks typifies the style of visual love letter Thiebaud offers to the dramatic and improbable geometry of San Francisco in his confectionary cityscapes.
In his first urban scenes of the 1970s, Thiebaud worked on the very street corners he was painting, but he found the results too limiting. Inspired by the example of Edward Hopper, Thiebaud moved back to his studio, relying on memory and imagination, leading to increased complexity and freedom of invention. In these works, Thiebaud’s streetscapes are built from networks of faceted, interlocking planes of light and color, which convincingly portray the dramatic vantage points and pitched angles of San Francisco, while verging at the same t.mes on pure abstractions through the collapse of perspective and simplification of form. Toward Twin Peaks is an early example of this style: not yet displaying the theatrically heightened skyscrapers or impossible verticals of his later works, yet already demonstrating the great attention to detail and use of prolonged streets as anchors for the composition that would come to define the series. Here, two-dimensional and three-dimensional space are conflated, with depth, distance, light and shadow flattened into a mosaic-like framework, arranged by the artist for emotional effect.
"When Thiebaud wants to stretch for a big effect, he has no trouble with drama, expansiveness, or even a kind of sublimity...Steep precipices that overwhelm human presence and excite a sense of terribilita, danger, or fear are common...Integral with the grandeur of nature, or nature transformed by man, is the power of natural light to illuminate, even dazzle and inspire...The light is more than a matter of energy and science. It is an embodiment of emotion. For Thiebaud it surely is not religious or symbolic in a conventional sense, but is nevertheless celebratory and life affirming."
Image © Max Yavno collects ion Center for Creative Photography / 1998 Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation
While form is integral to the conceptual structure of Toward Twin Peaks, color also takes on an expanded role in Thiebaud’s artistic world. Famous for his bold use of vibrant, often clashing colors to depict mundane objects and scenes, the artist uses color as an important compositional tool in the present work. Each edifice is distinguished from the next only by the clash in tone; a blue tower stands out against a yellow wall, while a long green park marks a break between two purple roofs. Shadows take on an abstracted life of their own in an orchestrated play of light and dark, warm and cool. Thiebaud’s full spectrum of candied hues lends the scene a sunny warmth, adding an atmospheric narrative to his reimagined city scene. In Toward Twin Peaks, color and shape inform each other, each amplifying the other’s evocative resonance to create a sense of wonder rooted at the intersection of lived experience and the limitless potential inherent to imagination.
