Wayne Thiebaud was a thief. And unabashedly so.

As a young California-based artist, Wayne Thiebaud had limited opportunity to examine masterworks—how the brushwork, texture and layering of color affected perception—firsthand. Unable to travel to see art by his heroes in the world’s great museums, he honed his approach by mining his extensive collection of art books and reproductions of artworks from magazines and postcards. From these, he appropriated composition, theme, and color from artists he admired to render his own personal vision through borrowing, copying, and reinterpreting the works.

For Thiebaud (1920–2021), studying art, whether a reproduction on paper or hanging in a museum, was an opportunity to converse with his predecessors; indeed, he viewed art history as a continuum connecting artists of the past, present, and future. “Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art,” organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco at the Legion of Honor (on view through August 17), is the first exhibition to highlight Thiebaud’s extensive homages to these masterworks.

Although these appropriations, reinterpretations, and outright copies represent just a fraction of Thiebaud’s prolific creative output, they allow us to see his still lifes, portraits, and landscapes through a new lens. The show presents 65 examples of his wide-ranging reinterpretations of old and new European and American artworks from 1957 to 2020 paired with reference images of the originals and includes 28 copies of artworks by masters—notably Rembrandt van Rijn, Édouard Manet, and Giorgio Morandi, who would likely have been impressed and honored by his devotion to their works.

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WRITTEN BY PATTI ZIELINSKI

This story appeared in the Summer 2025 issue of MILIEU.