The roadways in Wayne Thiebaud’s Untitled (Study for “City Police Car”), 1977, seem to defy the laws of gravity. A lone police car is positioned at an intersection with streets that veer steeply upwards in various directions, distorting the space in which the cars and buildings occupy. Creating multiple vantage points through which the cars—and in turn, the viewer—can pass through the scene, the present work exemplifies the artist’s distinct cityscape practice. Created four years after Thiebaud’s move to San Francisco, this masterful drawing examines the city’s influence on his art and the beginnings of his renowned manipulation of traditional landscapes.
“I was playing around with the abstract notion of edge – I was fascinated, living in San Francisco, by the way different streets just came in and then just vanished.”
—Wayne ThiebaudOften choosing to manipulate the horizon line to explore the representation of San Francisco’s steep terrain, Thiebaud engages in a conversation between architecture, street and sky. He said, “Going to San Francisco I was... fascinated by those plunging streets, where you get down to an intersection, and all four streets take off in different directions and positions. There was a sense of displacement or indeterminate fixed positional stability. That led me to this sense of ‘verticality’ that you get in San Francisco. You look at a hill, and visually, it doesn’t look as if the cars would be able to stay on it and grip. It's a very precarious state of tension, like a tightrope walk.”i Accentuating the city’s topography, this drawing creates a feeling that is at once familiar and foreign. As is typical in Thiebaud’s landscapes and cityscapes, the scene is not dutifully rendered, allowing for the artist’s observation and self-invented spaces to combine to create a constructed setting.
Wayne Thiebaud, Police Car, 1984, Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento. Artwork: © 2023 Wayne Thiebaud Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Such unrealistic perspectives in the present work provoke a dialogue between realism and abstraction. The street directly ahead of the police car seems to be vertical, parallel with the office buildings in the left of the image and seemingly untraversable. In placing the buildings and street on the same plane, Thiebaud disorients the viewer, establishing what he refers to as “a new positional direction for the viewer to try and get some sense of the loss of convenience or comfort of standing and looking at things, to throw people off a bit.”ii Further disrupting this traditional way of viewing art, the present work presents a kind of gravitational pull towards the center of the composition, emphasizing the tension between two- and three-dimensional space. Though the view may be abstracted, the details in elements like the police car give a heightened sense of realism to the scene. Even in the drawing, there is a distinct attention to light and shadow that is emblematic of Thiebaud’s practice, one which is further explored in his painted works.
i Wayne Thiebaud, quoted in Susa Stowens, “Wayne Thiebaud: Beyond Pop Art,” American Artist 44, no. 458, September 1980, pp. 102–104.
ii Wayne Thiebaud, quoted in Gail Gordon, ”Thiebaud Puts a Visual Feast on Canvas,” California Aggie, Davis, February 9, 1983, p. 2.
Provenance
Allan Stone Projects, New York
Acquired from the above by the present ownerExhibited
New York, Allan Stone Projects, Wayne Thiebaud: Land Survey, October 26–December 23, 2017
150
Untitled (Study for "City Police Car")
signed and dated “♥ Thiebaud 1977” lower right; inscribed “Intersection and Police Car #33” on the reverse
pencil on paper
30 x 22 in. (76.2 x 55.9 cm)
Executed in 1977.
Estimate
$250,000 - 350,000
Annie Dolan
Specialist, Head of Sale, Morning Session
+1 212 940 1288
adolan@phillips.com
20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session
New York Auction 15 November 2023
126
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137
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145
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