NARRATOR: 

In Wayne Thiebaud’s San Francisco cityscape paintings, buildings cling precariously to exaggerated, plunging hills. The impossibly angled streets are often bisected by equally steep freeways. Thiebaud made many of these works from memory, referring less to any particular location than to his overall sense of the city. Wayne Thiebaud. 

THIEBAUD: 

There are many different viewpoints simultaneously. The San Francisco pictures being a kind of composite of several different things at once.  

NARRATOR: 

Thiebaud’s cityscapes straddle a delicate balance between representation and abstraction. Critic Michael Kimmelman. 

KIMMELMAN: 

And some of those very vertiginous views of San Francisco are more real than people who have not been here probably think.  

NARRATOR: 

In the cityscapes, Thiebaud is exploring formal problems of proportion, the difference between size and scale, and spatial relationships.