Wayne Thiebaud: the “melancholic painter of broken promises” at the Beyeler Foundation

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The Beyeler Foundation continues to offer significant retrospectives of American artists and after the exhibition dedicated to Giorgia O’Keeffe, offers an important selection of works by Wayne Thiebaud (1920-2021), to be precise 65 paintings from American public collections, but also from individuals; between portraits, still lifes, landscapes and multi-perspective urban views, many of which are poorly exposed.

The American art scene

In order to better understand the paradigms that led to the artistic canons of this painter, we need to keep in mind the original scenario from which the Great Country moved. The need to give rise to an American school stems from the assumption that the “New World” necessarily had to equip itself with cultural movements that were indicative of the expression of the “good American”. The boundless dimensions in which one was lost as far as the eye could see implied a feeling of isolation, from which, in a certain sense, arose the need to “inculcate” even in an artificial way, a feeling of belonging that totally ignored the traditions of the populations originals of the natives, by whom the Pilgrim Fathers could not feel represented. It was necessary to promote a reassuring scenario that was capable of enclosing the tacit promises of opulence that the Promised Land heralded, and that needed to be further cemented following the great Depression of 1929.

The identity emblem of a nation was expressed through the invention of genres that were crossed by the epic of the West, by the stories of Fitzgerald, by the noirs of Hammet and Chandler, of the positive imagery transposed by James Stewart from the European vision of Frank Goat. And again from the Musicals, from Jazz and for the figurative part from billboards, from comics, from the birth of the New Yorker.

From these assumptions in the modern era, the expansion was consolidated

From the mass media, declined by the use of jingles and advertising films, with the aim of continuing to make citizens, now transformed into consumers, desire the constant search for the Eldorado, represented by the perennial desire to possess a given object .