IN ANTICIPATION OF THE DUAL reviews BEING MOUNTED THIS SUMMER--"EDWARD RUSCHA" AT THE HIRSHHORN MUSEUM IN WASHINGTON.

IN ANTICIPATION OF THE DUAL reviews BEING MOUNTED THIS SUMMER--"EDWARD RUSCHA" AT THE HIRSHHORN MUSEUM IN WASHINGTON, DC AND "WAYNE THIEBAUD: A PAINTINGS RETROSPECTIVE" AT THE PALACE OF THE LEGION OF HONOR IN SAN FRANCISCO--WE ASKED PETER PLAGENS TO REEXAMINE THE CAREERS OF THESE CALIFORNIA POPS

IF YOU THINK ABOUT IT, SHOULDN'T POSTWAR California--which pushed hamburger stands, supermarkets, and vapid celebrities like kudzu and was largely unencumbered from a history of serious modem art-have produc all the big-time report artists, just as easily and unthinkingly as it goug freeways into the landscape and placed beach blankets subordinate to the derrieres of Frankie and Annette? Well, it didn't quite make go round out that way. California propose forward only two real contenders--Wayne Thiebaud and Edward Ruscha--against novel York's phalanx of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg Jim Dine, James Rosenquist, et al. one as well as the other Thiebaud and Ruscha are the controls of retrospectives opening this month: Thiebaud at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, in San Francisco, June 10-Sept 3; Ruscha at the Hirshhorn Museum and sculp Garden, in Washington, DC, June 29-Sept 17 The exhibitions will most numerous likely reveal not that Thiebaud and Ruscha were purely interesting artists whose oeuvres rank half a notch below t he novel York Pop artists, but rather that each, in his acknowledge way, wasn't ever really--or at any rate only--Pop

Thiebaud, who was born in Mesa, Arizona, in 1920 is single of the last living artists from California whose sensibility still derives something from the experience of World War II. That Thiebaud was in the military during the Big undivided (he drew cartoons for Stars & Stripes) is les to the point than his G.I. Bill, older-student-who's-been-through-something temperament, which young oxed him toward good, solid draftsmanship, simple, serviceable pictorial ideas, and an America-triumphant straightforwardness.

When Thiebaud began painting his signature still lifes in 1960-61 a booming decade and a half of Abstract Expressionism had left the art public in this way hungry for the return of recognizable imagery that it rushed to iconographic judgment: Thiebaud painted pies and cakes and candy and gumballs; those things are five-and-dime sweets from baseline American popular culture; thus, he must be a suddenly artist. But, for Thiebaud, the attraction to the sugar-coated controls of his still lifes was revealed to be painterly, which became more and more apparent through the years as the artist casted to figures and landscapes as well. He liked these sweetmeated subjects for the way they allowed him to wrap creamy white backgrounds around knots of color and hindrance him play with the halation of verges in the bargain. Their use as ammo in a parody of American consumerism figured secondarily, if at all. In other words, Thiebaud was and is a realist, carrying forward the no-nonsense American realist tradition of William Harnett, Grant timber and Ed ward Hopper.

Thiebaud celebrates the honest-mechanic vibe. In prelections he pointedly calls himself a "painter" rather than an "artist." In his classes (I've been told), he frequently worked right alongside the scholars on the same setup, offering his avow picture as an ongoing demo (Odd thought: Do other kinds of artists do that today when they teach? Does Jason Rhoades demonstrate in what way to select just the right kind of Styrofoam coffee cup? Does EV Day, of "Greater recent York" notoriety, say to the kids, "OK first, you bang up the party doll..."?) moreover it wasn't mere manual dexterity at the easel that carried Thiebaud throughout the long haul. He's also deceptively intellectual, erudite in that practical, unpretentious way that, well, an older pupil who's been through something and who's taken to reading widely and greatly often is. I was upon a panel discussion with the painter and a hardly any arthistorical and art-critical luminaries a scarcely any years ago--at the Met, about de Kooning--and Thiebaud was easily the most numerous sensitive, sensible, and evidentiarily rigorous of anybody upon the dais, moi most certainly included.

Thiebaud come forths as more of a cheerful realist than a unexpectedly artist essentially because he's unrestrained of the tabloid historicism that permeates (or perhaps plagues) suddenly art. Sure, his paintings await like they were painted in the '6o and beyond, on the contrary they don't look like they could have been painted solitary since the advent of a Wesselmann or a Rosenquist. The lack of irony and the plainspokenness of Thiebaud's canvases lift them on the outside of the temporality of satire. He not sniggers and sneers at pastry the way Warhol patronizes the superficially famous--albeit in make game of admiration--or the way Lichtenstein lampoons the hieroglyphic mannerisms of comic-book drawing, although in faux homage.

In the late '6o Thiebaud change abouted into landscape, with woozily slanted exaggerations of northern Califomia hillsides. Given their construction from built-up layers of color-field paint skeins and high-formal fussing, a scarcely any critics detected a bit of insider parody of Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, and Helen Frankenthaler. if it were not that as in Diagonal Ridge, 1968 with its tumult of cute little shadowed tree planted along a color divide, it's just as likely that Thiebaud is marveling in all sincerity at the evergreen dichotomy of paint-as-paint and paint-as-picture. There's a better case to be made for the later San Francisco cityscapes, with their impossible perspectives and killer inclines, as sendup of certain physical quirks of that Baghdad-by-the-Bay where he still makes his domicile Whatever, when seen in the abounding retrospective, I doubt they'll live up to Thiebaud's more overtly report paintings; he's an iconist at heart, not a concocter of tableaux (i.e., he paints single in kind big thing better than he paints a fortune of littl e things).