What do you think?
Rate this book
Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art
- GenresArt
360 pages, Hardcover
Published April 15, 2025
3 people are currently reading
24 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 16, 2025
This is a marvelous catalog. Both text and images will repay multiple ‘visits.’
The exhibit is based on Wayne Thiebaud’s dedication to an academic approach to learning and practicing art. He has copied artworks of the masters throughout his career to keep their lessons fresh, and has carried aspects of their imagery into his own finished works. He is insistent on the value of studying their work and on the necessary continuity of art history. Not in the sense of ‘progress’ in artistic endeavor, but in recognizing mastery and always comparing one’s own work to one’s chosen heroes’ standards of integrity and effort to get at the essential of what art is.
also
He was unabashedly a figurative painter, but he also spent a year in New York studying the 1950s abstract expressionists and says that all painting is abstract. He particularly got a lot from talking to de Kooning. “he … suggested that painting was a lot more important than art.” Thiebaud adamantly denied he created Pop art, although he cheerfully admitted that he lucked out from being mistakenly associated with the movement. He actually started in advertising before getting a BA and MFA. “I don’t care much for Pop art. It’s too close, I think, to advertising, which I think is better.”
Thiebaud rigorously brought his academic approach into his teaching. The catalog is based on his own observations through the years about his academic approach. Lengthy reminiscences by several of his teaching assistants and students echo Thiebaud’s words. In fact, several pages of the book are dedicated to explanations of the demonstrations and exercises he used in his introductory drawing, painting, and art history classes for decades.
Thiebaud taught for almost 70 years—right up to his death at age 99 in 2023. He is embedded in my region. I can walk to the junior college where he started his teaching career. The University of California campus in Davis, across the causeway from Sacramento, hired him away 7 years later to join its fledgling and soon eminent art department. When I drive from Sacramento to San Francisco I see his crop fields, rivers, and vertiginous hills of blacktop and stacked buildings. He made all of them immediate through the imaginative use of light and color. In particular, the brilliant greens, oranges and blues that outline objects in his still lifes, portraits, and landscapes.
I could exhaust Goodreads word limit with quotes from this book. They are invaluable whether you are a practicing artist, an art lover, or just someone committed to excellence in a field that requires extensive knowledge of its history and perpetual return to core practice. The quotes share the pages with hundreds of plates showing Thiebaud’s ‘copying’ paintings and drawings, along with the pieces that he was looking at. His most influential sources included Degas, Morandi, fellow California figurative painters Diebenkorn and Bischoff, Velázquez, Chardin, Daumier, Eakins, Bonheur, Morisot, Matissse, van Gogh, Cezanne, iconic Japanese print makers, and Martin Ramirez.
And
With luck your library will have a copy of this catalog. With more luck this exhibit will come to a museum you can visit.
Finally:
The exhibit is based on Wayne Thiebaud’s dedication to an academic approach to learning and practicing art. He has copied artworks of the masters throughout his career to keep their lessons fresh, and has carried aspects of their imagery into his own finished works. He is insistent on the value of studying their work and on the necessary continuity of art history. Not in the sense of ‘progress’ in artistic endeavor, but in recognizing mastery and always comparing one’s own work to one’s chosen heroes’ standards of integrity and effort to get at the essential of what art is.
Warning against unthinking adherence to received theories practices, Thiebaud saw the academic tradition not as an end in itself, but rather as a means to achieve absolute artistic freedom. “The educated eye is not overwhelmed by formulas or absolutes and lives with an aspiration to produce works that elude rational imperatives. This lets us see beyond what we have already seen in order to maintain and expand the human imagination. Any respectable academic model is an inculcate example of limitations and disciplines. Limits suggest confrontations and challenges, and disciplines are the means whereby liberation and enlightenment might occur.”
also
”I’m a big lover of art history because I feel painting is both cumulative and collaborative. In other words, you look to the masters not only for inspiration, but also for tools, devices, visual conventions. It doesn’t stop with the Western tradition. I relish Middle Eastern art, Japanese art, Mexican art—every kind of visual enterprise I love, cherish, and try to steal from as much as I can.”
He was unabashedly a figurative painter, but he also spent a year in New York studying the 1950s abstract expressionists and says that all painting is abstract. He particularly got a lot from talking to de Kooning. “he … suggested that painting was a lot more important than art.” Thiebaud adamantly denied he created Pop art, although he cheerfully admitted that he lucked out from being mistakenly associated with the movement. He actually started in advertising before getting a BA and MFA. “I don’t care much for Pop art. It’s too close, I think, to advertising, which I think is better.”
Thiebaud rigorously brought his academic approach into his teaching. The catalog is based on his own observations through the years about his academic approach. Lengthy reminiscences by several of his teaching assistants and students echo Thiebaud’s words. In fact, several pages of the book are dedicated to explanations of the demonstrations and exercises he used in his introductory drawing, painting, and art history classes for decades.
”My big hero is Velasquez. If you’re referring to something like premier coup painting, wet-into-wet painting, and how it has to have within that brushstroke maybe six of eight colors, when Velazquez makes the attack, he has to know exactly and precisely where everything will fit. That’s a supreme accomplishment and it can easily go wrong. You can make a hierarchy of Velazquez and then John Singer Sargent, Seurat, and Manet, but Velazquez, he trumps it! How the hell did he do that? It’s like sport. In a game like tennis or golf, you have to train a lot in order to no longer think about what you’re doing.”
Thiebaud taught for almost 70 years—right up to his death at age 99 in 2023. He is embedded in my region. I can walk to the junior college where he started his teaching career. The University of California campus in Davis, across the causeway from Sacramento, hired him away 7 years later to join its fledgling and soon eminent art department. When I drive from Sacramento to San Francisco I see his crop fields, rivers, and vertiginous hills of blacktop and stacked buildings. He made all of them immediate through the imaginative use of light and color. In particular, the brilliant greens, oranges and blues that outline objects in his still lifes, portraits, and landscapes.
I could exhaust Goodreads word limit with quotes from this book. They are invaluable whether you are a practicing artist, an art lover, or just someone committed to excellence in a field that requires extensive knowledge of its history and perpetual return to core practice. The quotes share the pages with hundreds of plates showing Thiebaud’s ‘copying’ paintings and drawings, along with the pieces that he was looking at. His most influential sources included Degas, Morandi, fellow California figurative painters Diebenkorn and Bischoff, Velázquez, Chardin, Daumier, Eakins, Bonheur, Morisot, Matissse, van Gogh, Cezanne, iconic Japanese print makers, and Martin Ramirez.
”One of the things [Morandi] does is his sense of compression in paint. You’ll notice that most of his things are centered. But if you look carefully there’s not enough room for those objects to exist, there’s vise-like pressure on them. So that builds that tension, a marvelous kind of a feel, involving you physically in the work. That physical empathy transfer is one of the most important aspects of enjoying painting.”
And
”Cezanne rearranges objects or people or things to his ‘feel.’ He’ll fuss and fool, finding an arm looks better here than it would have there, and each time he’ll give you the agony that goes with it.”
With luck your library will have a copy of this catalog. With more luck this exhibit will come to a museum you can visit.
”A museum is a game preserve with all our extreme attitudes as human beings on reserve, and you go there to check on yourself, to extend yourself, criticize yourself, and find out about yourself.”
Finally:
”I am a real visual bandit. I steal from so many people that it is hard to identify a few in particular…Again, I am referring to a long tradition of those painters who use both representation and abstract constructs and try to get them to come together in some meaningful way. If it is too representational, it doesn’t interest me so much; if it is too abstract, it’s not as strong a concern.”
May 13, 2025
I love Thiedbaud’s art and I enjoyed the museum exhibit and this museum catalog.
He really was a thief, but a brilliant and truly artistic & creative one.
Even though I guess his art doesn’t call for it my only quibble with this book is I’d have liked to have had more full page spreads, or maybe some different ones. Otherwise; I have no criticisms of the book. It’s superbly done.
This short film, Art Thief: Lessons from Wayne Thiebaud, was part of the museum exhibit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1enM...
I wish I had been able to take some art classes with him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1enM...
Contents:
Essays:
Wayne Thiebaud, Art History and the “Bureau of Standards:
To Teach is to Paint. To Paint is to Teach.
Relentless Inventing: Notes from Wayne Thiebaud’s Classroom
Smugglers and Thieves: Modern American Painting and Art History
Foreword
Catalogue:
Appropriations
Copies
Art Collection
Appendices:
Wayne Thiebauds’ Lessons on Figure Drawing
Notes
Bibliography
Quote Citations and Photography Credits
Index
Acknowledgments
He really was a thief, but a brilliant and truly artistic & creative one.
Even though I guess his art doesn’t call for it my only quibble with this book is I’d have liked to have had more full page spreads, or maybe some different ones. Otherwise; I have no criticisms of the book. It’s superbly done.
This short film, Art Thief: Lessons from Wayne Thiebaud, was part of the museum exhibit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1enM...
I wish I had been able to take some art classes with him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1enM...
Contents:
Essays:
Wayne Thiebaud, Art History and the “Bureau of Standards:
To Teach is to Paint. To Paint is to Teach.
Relentless Inventing: Notes from Wayne Thiebaud’s Classroom
Smugglers and Thieves: Modern American Painting and Art History
Foreword
Catalogue:
Appropriations
Copies
Art Collection
Appendices:
Wayne Thiebauds’ Lessons on Figure Drawing
Notes
Bibliography
Quote Citations and Photography Credits
Index
Acknowledgments
January 1, 2026
What a brilliant thief copying dozens of works from key painters, illustrated here with color representations, an encyclopedia of art.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews