Wayne Thiebaud Mountains

Best known for his paintings of pies and cakes, this beloved West Coast painter explores the theme of mountains, capturing the majesty and strength of the forms. In the 2000s, California-based painter Wayne Thiebaud began focusing on a series of mountain paintings, a subject he had first addressed in the 1960s and 1970s. Rendered in his signature confectionary palette, these colorful works combine memories of mountains he had seen in childhood and observations of the summits of the Sierra Nevada Range in Yosemite. With their heroic, exaggerated proportions and unusual perspectives, these paintings seem to combine fiction and reality. Conveying a sense of the sublime and the vast magnitude of our surroundings, they draw upon the history of landscape painting of the American West.

A must-have for anyone interested in these two beloved West Coast artists, best known for their geometric abstractions of the California landscape. Featuring the pairings of more than 50 paintings, this book shows the connection of these two artists like never before. Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud were close friends; they shared the inspiration of California and experimented with perspective to capture their surroundings. The book includes important examples from Diebenkorn’s Berkeley series in addition to several works from the artist’s Ocean Park series. Inspired by the environs of the Ocean Park neighborhood in Santa Monica, where he lived at this time, these works from the 1960s are characterized by geometric abstractions of subtle line and suffused with Californian luminosity. Wayne Thiebaud began producing landscapes in the 1960s, experimenting with perspective to capture his Californian surroundings. Included are his works from the early 1970s through 2017, including his dramatic depictions of San Francisco, flattened aerial views of the Sacramento River Delta, and close-ups and cross-section views of mountains and beaches.

Delicious Metropolis brings together two of Wayne Thiebaud's most celebrated bodies of work: desserts and cityscapes. Between the two, fascinating juxtapositions develop. The layers of a Neapolitan cake echo the shadows cast across a street in the late afternoon. The pastel hues of iced sponge cakes match California's candy-colored houses. Curators, critics, and artists guide the reader through the book via insightful bite-size essays. This gorgeous hardcover offers fans and newcomers a refreshing and accessible way to enjoy the oeuvre of this iconic American painter. Complete with multicolored page edges evoking the layers of one of Thiebaud's mouthwatering cakes, it's a treat for art lovers, city-dwellers, and gourmets alike.

In Episodes with Wayne Thiebaud, Eve Aschheim and Chris Daubert interview Wayne Thiebaud in four extensive conversations in his studio. Thiebaud, known for his iconic paintings of cakes, pies and counter displays, is one of the last living painters of the Pop era. Staunchly maintaining his independence from that group and others, he went on to develop vertiginous cityscapes, deeply abstracted rural landscapes and, most recently, monolithic mountains. In these extended conversations, conducted between 2009 and 2011, Thiebaud reveals himself to be extremely well read, articulate, humorous, self-deprecating and opinionated. Covering a wide range of topics, he discusses his early years in New York, where he became friends with Willem and Elaine de Kooning and hung out at the Cedar Tavern; his return to California; the many influences on his work (Krazy Kat, Persian miniatures, de Kooning, Diebenkorn, Hopper, Balthus, de Chirico); his working methods and thoughts on painting; and his advice to young artists.

The beautiful catalogue that accompanies the critically-acclaimed exhibition currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum Best known for her striking drawings of ocean surfaces, begun in 1968 and revisited over many years both in drawings and paintings, Vija Celmins (b. 1938) has been creating exquisitely detailed renderings of natural imagery for more than five decades. The oceans were followed by desert floors and night skies--all subjects in which vast, expansive distances are distilled into luminous, meticulous, and mesmerizing small-scale artworks. For Celmins, this obsessive "redescribing" of the world is a way to understand human consciousness in relation to lived experience. The first major publication on the artist in twenty years, this comprehensive and lavishly illustrated volume explores the full range of Celmins's work produced since the 1960s--drawings and paintings as well as sculpture and prints. Scholarly essays, a narrative chronology, and a selection of excerpts from interviews with the artist illuminate her methods and techniques; survey her early years in Los Angeles, where she was part of a circle that included James Turrell and Ken Price; and trace the development of her work after she moved to New York City and befriended figures such as Robert Gober and Richard Serra.