Thiebaud at SFMOMA

The 97-year-old California painter, Wayne Thiebaud, has a sweet pair of exhibits on the second floor of SFMOMA, divided between his own works along with his selection of favorite paintings from the museum's permanent collection.

I often mistake his landscape paintings with those of Richard Diebenkorn, who was a longtime friend and mutual admirer, although Thiebaud's tend not to be quite as abstract.

Living in Sacramento and teaching at UC Davis for decades, his landscapes embody California in a vivid, vertiginous way.

There are also many figure drawings and paintings, mostly of women...

...including the 1973 Girl with a Pink Hat above.

His most identifiable work are the simultaneously abstract and realistic depictions of pastries, pies, cakes, gumball machines, and other colorfully manufactured food on neutral backgrounds.

The Artist's Choice exhibit features Diebenkorn and Matisse paintings, in an echo of the blockbuster Diebenkorn/Matisse exhibit at the museum last year.

Thiebaud's other choices are idiosyncratic and interesting, including Tamayo's 1932 The Window.

About one third of the selections have descriptions of the works by Thiebaud himself, which are fascinating and blessedly free of artspeak.

Both exhibits are well worth visiting.

Upstairs on the fourth floor, the great Magritte exhibit is heading into its final two weeks, and because it was so crowded I spent most of my time looking at the people looking at the paintings, except almost everyone did so through an intermediary, whether it be the phones on their cameras, the museum-provided audio tours, or studying the signage.

One middle-aged woman was a complete anomaly as she actually engaged with the paintings themselves, looking at each of them closely, from a distance, and from different angles. I complimented her near the end of the exhibit on actually looking at the paintings rather than through her phone, and she burst into laughter. "It is crazy, isn't it?" she replied.