Bologna, November 13, 2020. The Morandi Museum of Bologna joins the wishes for the hundred years that the great artist Wayne thiebaud will be on Sunday 15 November.
Born in 1920 in Mesa, Arizona, Thiebaud is considered a key figure in American contemporary art and beyond: his works are exhibited in the collections of important museums such as the MoMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.
In 2011 the Morandi Museum hosted the personal Wayne Thiebaud at Museo Morandi curated by Alessia Masi with the collaboration of Carla Crawford, making her works dialogue with those of Giorgio Morandi. Following the exhibition, the artist generously donated 8 works to the museum and the city of Bologna, including the extraordinary painting Tulip Sundae from 2010.
Courtesy Istituzione Bologna Musei | Morandi Museum
Photo Matteo Monti, 2011
Frequently associated with Pop Art, Thiebaud has however always refused to be inscribed in an art movement, just like Morandi. If to apparently bring him closer to Pop artists is the choice of the painted subjects - symbolic objects of consumerism such as sweets, candies, chewing gum, hot dogs, cosmetics, toys - to differentiate it from the depersonalizing and mechanical clichés typical of Pop painting are the absence of criticism as well as celebration of American culture, the research in the painting technique, the slow brushstroke, pasty and material, the use of modulated and discreet light, the careful attention to the perspective system and the formal and geometric aspects of the composition through which it brings out the soul of the objects. It is in particular this attention to the discipline of painting - speaking of himself he has always defined himself "painter" more than an artist - to unite Thiebaud with Giorgio Morandi and other reference models such as Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin and Edward Hopper.
Wayne Thiebaud's generous tribute to the Morandi Museum testifies to the his admiration for the great Bolognese painter. An admiration already publicly declared in a famous interview published in the New York Times in 1981 and testified in the interview published on the occasion of the 2011 Bologna exhibition of which we report an excerpt:
“There are many lessons to be learned by studying Morandi's work. Things that have to do with issues that, in my opinion, every serious painter should be aware of. I think one of these is there wonder of intimacy and love for the prolonged gaze: to stare for a long time but at the same time move the eye to really discover what is behind it; and then there are so many subtleties, elements that can seem like one thing at a time and another the moment after. There is always, in Morandi, that feeling of “instability”, and despite this a feeling of sweet, complete wholeness. It is always a joy to be able to look at his work, which for us painters also contains a warning: it warns us against the temptation to exceed, to overdo it. Drama is fine, but melodrama is not. Yes, you can really learn a lot from him ".
