A rare portrait by a famed California master is about to hit the market for the first time, and its seller is the subject.
At 18 years old, Blair Sabol was already a fashion rebel, a quality that a California art professor and painter named Wayne Thiebaud seemed to appreciate at first sight. Sabol would go on to have a career as an irreverent chronicler of style for publications including the Village Voice and Baron Wolman’s pioneering San Francisco publication Rags, earning her the nickname the “Abbie Hoffman of Seventh Avenue.”
The daughter of NFL Films founder Ed Sabol and arts patron Audrey Sabol, Blair Sabol was sent home from high school in Lower Merion, Pa., for wearing a yellow mod-style dress and a pair of white go-go boots, cutting-edge style for 1965. After “barely” graduating, the future fashion journalist told the Chronicle, she asked her parents for an appointment with New York hairdresser Vidal Sassoon, who was breaking women out of conservative bouffants with his new five-point bob.
It was in that dress (a copy of a design by futuristic French fashion house Courrèges), the white Bloomingdales go-go boots and Sassoon’s sharp new cut that Sabol sat for Thiebaud in his garage studio in Sacramento. The two met on a trip Sabol and her mother took to California to see artists Ed Ruscha, Joe Good and gallerist Irving Blum ahead of an exhibition Audrey Sabol was involved with focusing on art from the state…