Works of Wayne Thiebaud and Franz Kline take center stage at Elliot Fouts Gallery

The Wayne Thiebaud Foundation is collaborating with the Elliot Fouts Gallery to showcase works collected by Thiebaud, which include comic strips and a series of paintings from Franz Kline.

The Kline and Comics collection includes comic sketches crafted and collected by Thiebaud, as well as a series of phone book page paintings Thiebaud procured from Kline during a trip to his studio in 1956. The collection was curated by the Wayne Thiebaud Foundation, which is run by Thiebaud’s stepson, Matt Bult.

According to the director of the Elliot Fouts Gallery, Michelle O’Brien, it is the P Street gallery’s first noncommercial exhibit. O’Brien said the pieces were gifted to Thiebaud under the premise he would not resell them and use them as a means to instruct students.

O’Brien said she got a firsthand glimpse into Thiebaud’s academic career when she attended his last class at UC Davis. Thiebaud reminisced on his acquisition of the works in August of 2007, during which the two painters shared their thoughts on the difficulties in bridging art and academics.

“After some time and a few drinks, we agreed how difficult it is to teach art students in a seriously committed way. At that point while discussing his present method, I mentioned how important it would be for serious painting students to see how he used these sketches. He volunteered to let me ‘pick out a batch’ of his abandoned ones to show them,” Thiebaud said.

According to Bult, the partnership with the gallery allows it to serve as an annex of sorts for the foundation, which lacks the room for exhibitions. Bult said that a majority of the collection is in the medium of graphite, lead and ink.

“We thought with the black and white, the positive and negative shapes, and some of the different characteristics of abstract expressionism paired with some of the comics’ linear quality would make a good kind of comparison between fine art and commercial art,” Bult said.

A majority of the pieces are dated between the 1930s and ‘50s, and include characters such as Disney’s Goofy and the New York Evening Journal’s Krazy Kat, which Bult says offer insight into the beginnings of Thiebaud’s taste and education as an artist.

“They’re things he’s collected, people he’s been familiar with since high school. He used to enter comic competitions in magazines and send out his comics out to different magazine to try and get a little money, to get $1 or $5,” Bult said. “He did work for Disney for a while. He was a sign painter, so he does have a lot of graphic art and illustration background. He never did have the fine art school background. Something he just kind of took on his own. His schooling had more of a draftsman quality than a painter.”

The collection also houses several of Thiebaud’s sketches of Kline, which Bult says may mislead some about the nature of the personal relationship between the abstract expressionist and pop art painter.

“He’d probably only seen him a couple times. He used to go to that Cedar Bar, where a lot of guys like Pollack, Kline and de Kooning hung out. I think he kind of sat in the background and watched that and did a couple little sketches of Kline,” Bult said. “Kline himself was a cartoonist. He would do caricatures of people in the bar, and he would trade those to the bartender for his tab.”

The collection is available for viewing at the Elliot Fouts Gallery until Jan. 30, with a second Saturday reception slated for Jan. 11 from 6-9 p.m.