Photos courtesy of the Nelson Gallery at UC Davis and Karin Higgins/UC Davis Publications; produced by Susanne Rockwell, UC Davis News Service
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Students, campus benefit from longtime professor’s art donation
World-renowned artist Wayne Thiebaud and his wife, Betty Jean, have given the campus a rare birthday gift: 20 of Thiebaud’s hand worked prints valued at an estimated $860,000.
One, Cakes and Pies, will be featured in a series of limited-edition posters in honor of the UC Davis centennial, which is being celebrated during the 2008-09 academic year.
The others will be exhibited at the Richard L. Nelson Gallery and Fine Arts Collection on campus in January 2010 and made available right away for art students to study. The prints can also be previewed in the slide show on this Web page.
“The university has been so good to us, it’s good to be able to support it a little bit,” said Thiebaud, a professor emeritus of art at UC Davis.
Professor of art
The artist, UC Davis and big campus milestones go way back.
Thiebaud first joined the art department faculty in 1960, and continues to teach occasional classes.
When the University of California system celebrated its 125th anniversary during the 1992-1993 academic year, he created an original work of art, Celebration Cakes, in commemoration. The pastel-on-paper image featured nine frosted layer cakes, one for each of the UC campuses then in existence.
The 20 newly acquired Thiebaud works comprise etchings, aquatints, linocuts and lithographs created by the artist between 1964 and 2008.
He augmented each image, using colored pencil, graphite, watercolor or charcoal, to create one-of-a-kind works of art. Cakes and Pies, for example, was created in 2007 and printed in black and white. On the print now in the university’s fine art collection, Thiebaud retouched each dessert, using pastels to turn cherries red, frosting pink and shadows blue.
Thiebaud is known for this process, in which he revisits and reworks a drawing or painting. He does it, he wrote in a 1992 book, “Vision and Revision,” because the prints “from time to time … flirt an invitation my way.”
They beckon him: “Change me, rework me, overhaul my parts, give me a facelift.”
Heeding the call allows him to forestall the “absolute resolution” of a work — which can be “dangerously close to the art of taxidermy,” Thiebaud wrote. In contrast, the potential to revisit and change a work allows him to relate to it as “a living thing.”
Insights for students
Art professor emeritus Wayne Thiebaud, center, explains hand-worked changes he made to one of the 20 prints that he gave to the Nelson Gallery. With him are Nelson Gallery’s Renny Pritikin, left, and Robin Bernhard. (Karin Higgins/UC Davis photo)
Comparing initial prints to reworked ones can offer special insights for students, according to Renny Pritikin, director of the Nelson.
“Students can be overwhelmed and intimidated when confronted by acclaimed and perfect masterpieces,” Pritikin says. “What is particularly important to Wayne is for students to be able to see, at first hand, works in progress, the obvious touch of the artist’s hand in continuing to find ways to augment, change, and reinvent.”
Thiebaud recently sat down with Pritikin and Nelson Gallery collections manager Robin Bernhard to explain how he reworked each of the 20 prints he has given the university.
“(Experimenting with) size and scale is a great teaching device,” the artist commented as he looked at one of the retouched prints, “Cloud Ridge.” “Prints are good at teaching that.”
Looking at another work, “Gumball Machine,” he commented: “It’s fun to paint one almost like a child. To a child, a gumball machine is a magic object.”
Thiebaud put the last touches on some of the prints in the collection decades ago. Looking at his work again from a distance of years is an odd experience, he told Pritikin.
“Remember what it was like to go back and read your diary? It’s a little bit like that,” he said.
Enriching a collection
‘If you love doing something well and you take pride in it — it could be ditch digging — that’s a marvelous thing. If you take your work seriously and do it well, then you have a kind of paradise.’
Wayne Thiebaud, UC Davis art professor emeritus
With the acquisition of the new prints, the university now has 114 works by Thiebaud, on top of several hundred gifts of works by other artists he gave UC Davis from his private collection.
In 1996, he gave 31 of his personal works on paper to the university’s Fine Arts Collection, including rapidly executed sketchbook pages in pen and ink, exacting figure studies in pencil and charcoal, etchings of landscape reworked in pen and ink and color and still-life studies in pastel, valued at more than $125,000.
Between 1971 and 1992, the artist gave the university more than 300 works by other artists, all from his private collection, including works by fellow UC Davis art professors Robert Arneson, Roy de Forest and Manuel Neri, other prominent American artists including Franz Kline, Elaine de Kooning and Gregory Kondos, and prints from Henri Matisse, William Hogarth and others.
“These generous gifts are an invaluable teaching tool for students and teachers to have access to in the Nelson Gallery archives,” Bernhard said. “They reflect Thiebaud’s vast personal interests in art, and have augmented our holdings with works that range in style from 20th century prints to a 19th century collection of Indian/Persian miniature paintings.”
‘Painter’ not ‘artist’
Thiebaud started out as a commercial artist in the 1930s. During the next eight decades, he established himself as one of the most important and honored artists of his generation — although he prefers to be called a “painter” rather than an artist.
“You have to be careful about calling yourself an artist,” he told UC Davis News Service producer Paul Pfotenhauer in a recent interview. “That’s for posterity to decide. It’s better to say you’re in pursuit of a proud tradition…. Your challenge is not to embarrass that tradition.”
‘You have to be careful about calling yourself an artist. That’s for posterity to decide. It’s better to say you’re in pursuit of a proud tradition…. Your challenge is not to embarrass that tradition.’
Wayne Thiebaud, UC Davis art professor emeritus
A raft of the nation’s most prestigious arts honors attest that he has not. President Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Arts in 1994. California Gov. Gray Davis presented him with the Governor’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts in 1991.
He is an elected member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, an academician of the National Academy of Design and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
He is a recipient of the National Arts Club’s Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts Award, the American Academy of Design’s Lifetime Achievement Award for Art, and many other major awards, including four honorary degrees.
“If you love doing something well and you take pride in it — it could be ditch digging — that’s a marvelous thing. If you take your work seriously and do it well, then you have a kind of paradise,” Thiebaud reflected in his interview with Pfotenhauer.
Choosing a life as an artist “is a personal decision to try something,” he continued. “It’s a luxury, an indulgence. And you don’t whine about it. You drive a cab; you do what you have to do, because it’s your passion.”
“I’m sure lucky to be able to do it.”