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Wayne Thiebaud, Reservoir and Orchard, 2001, oil on canvas, 40 x 40 inches (101.6 x 101.6 cm), Collection of Wayne and Betty Jean Thiebaud. Art © Wayne Thiebaud / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Left to Right:

Pie Counter, 1963, Lent by Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Larry Aldrich Foundation Fund (64.11)

Lollipops, 1962, Lent by Private Collection

Cafe Cart, 2012

Left to Right:

The Speaker, 2003-08

Girl in White, 1979-96, Lent by Private Collection, New York

Five Seated Figures, 1965, Lent by Wayne and Betty Jean Thiebaud

Open Monday - Saturday, 10 am to 5 pm

Acquavella Galleries is pleased to announce Wayne Thiebaud: A Retrospective, from October 23rd to November 30th 2012. Curated by John Wilmerding, the exhibition will include paintings, works on paper and prints spanning the length of the artist's career from the mid 1950s to today. The exhibition will include all of the artist's major subjects: confections and diner foods, figures and portraits, San Francisco cityscapes, Sacramento Delta panoramas and his California mountain series. In addition to significant loans from the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; and Phoenix Art Musuem, the exhibition will also include multiple work from the artist's personal holdings. "Like many artists, he's held on to some of the best examples of his work from every period," explained Mr. Wilmerding.

Wayne Thiebaud is one of the most celebrated artists working today. Best known for painting everyday objects from gumball machines to bakeshop windows, Thiebaud uses tactile brushwork, saturated colors and luminous light for a range of subjects he describes as "people, places and things." Although associated with Pop art of the 1960s, Thiebaud depicts subjects that reflect a nostalgia and reverence for American culture that sets him apart from the stark commercialism of Warhol and his contemporaries. Thiebaud takes a formal approach to issues of color, light, composition and space, stating that his only intention when he paints is to "get the painting to a point of resolution." This formality lends itself to all of his many subjects and is one the reasons why the masterful quality of his paintings has remained consistent over sixty years. It is this consistency that Wilmerding hopes to highlight in the exhibition. "We are delighted to be representing Wayne Thiebaud, a major figure in the development of 20th century art whose work is just as relevant and impressive today as it was when he first gained critical acclaim in the early 60's," said Eleanor Acquavella.

Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1920) lives and works in Sacramento, CA. He has been widely recognized for his achievements as an artist and has received various prestigious awards such as the National Medal of Arts from President William Clinton, 1994; the Lifetime Achievement Award for Art from the American Academy of Design, NY, 2001 and he was inducted into The California Hall of Fame in 2010 at The California Museum, Sacramento, CA. His work has been exhibited in major museums and institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne, Germany; Phoenix Art Museum, AZ and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA. Thiebaud's works are also in permanent collections at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Crocker Art Museum, CA and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

John Wilmerding is the Sarofim Professor of American Art, Emeritus, at Princeton University. He has written more than twenty books on American art and artists, including most recently monographs and catalogues on Tom Wesselmann, Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, and George Segal. The fully illustrated catalogue Wayne Thiebaud: A Retrospective will be co-distributed by Rizzoli and will contain two essays - "Wayne Thiebaud: 'The Emperor of Ice Cream'" by John Wilmerding and "The Lonely Crowd: Men and Women in the Art of Wayne Thiebaud" by art historian Pepe Karmel.

For interviews, background and images, please contact:

Prentice Cultural Communications

(212) 228-4048 or Bettina@PrenticeArt.com

"People, places, and things" is how Thiebaud has described his range of subjects, but such simplicity does a disservice to the emotional weight and sheer visual appeal his hand has consistently given them. Beyond the usual buffet of desserts and diner foods (such as Four Ice Cream Cones, 1964, above), this museum-level retrospective, curated by John Wilmerding, will include well over 60 paintings, works on paper, and prints of figures and landscapes from San Francisco to the Sacramento Delta.

Wayne Thiebaud's paintings of pristine cakes, pies and ice cream sundaes have become such iconic symbols of mid-20th century American life that it's easy to forget their artistry and audacity. This career-spanning survey, curated by Princeton art historian John Wilmerding, should serve as a reminder, offering museum loans and, even more enticing, works that the artist has held in his collection for decades.

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Wayne Thiebaud, Reservoir and Orchard, 2001, oil on canvas, 40 x 40 inches (101.6 x 101.6 cm), Collection of Wayne and Betty Jean Thiebaud.

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Wayne Thiebaud, Cold Case, 2010/2011/2013, oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches (121.9 x 152.4 cm), Art © Wayne Thiebaud / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

New York, NY - Acquavella Galleries is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by iconic American artist Wayne Thiebaud, on view from October 1 - November 21, 2014. The exhibition includes a total of 49 works - 35 paintings and 14 works on paper. Many of the works included are being shown to the public for the first time, and several are compositions the artist has been working on for over thirty years. This is Thiebaud's second exhibition with the gallery.

Celebrated for his works that highlight the commonplace, the 93-year-old Thiebaud continues to shed painterly light on the people, places and things that surround him on a daily basis. Despite his association with pop artists of the 1960s, Thiebaud's method is more aligned with the still life tradition - and this preoccupation with scrupulously representing his subjects sets him apart from his contemporaries. Ordinary objects rendered in the tactility of Thiebaud's brushwork become resplendent, and thus his canvases radiate a particularly American optimism and nostalgia for the familiar.

The works on view in this exhibition touch upon recognizable themes in the context of Thiebaud's oeuvre. Cold Case (2010-2013) revisits his most famous subject - confections. Similarly, Cupcakes & Donuts (2006/2012) and Ring Circle (2012-2014) both explore the artist's preexisting interest in modes of commercial display. The splendor of California's landscape is once again depicted in Bluffs (2013) - this time in a cake-like pink. The figures in this exhibition, among them Robed Woman with Letter (1976/2013), are familiarly stoic and simultaneously confessional. "We are thrilled to be presenting Thiebaud's recent work," said Eleanor Acquavella "this exhibition is a testament to his unique ability to illuminate the everyday and elevate the ordinary."

Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1920) lives and works in Sacramento, CA. He has been widely recognized for his achievements as an artist and has received various prestigious awards such as the National Medal of Arts from President Clinton, 1994; the Lifetime Achievement Award for Art from the American Academy of Design, NY, 2001 and he was inducted into The California Hall of Fame at The California Museum, Sacramento, CA in 2010. Thiebaud was the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2001, and his work has been exhibited in major museums and institutions worldwide. Thiebaud's work can also be found in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Crocker Art Museum, CA; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

For interviews, background and images, please contact:

Prentice Cultural Communications

(212) 228-4048 or Shannon@PrenticeArt.com

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Wayne Thiebaud, Cold Case, 2010/2011/2013, oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches (121.9 x 152.4 cm), Art © Wayne Thiebaud / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY New York, NY - Acquavella Galleries is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by iconic American artist Wayne Thiebaud, on view from October 1 - November 21, 2014.

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"Mountains are a subject matter of unending challenges.... It's such a rich subject matter that's been treated very, very well by so many other wonderful painters-and that's another, I think, helpful thing to me because I look constantly at the Hudson River School and the primitive paintings, folk paintings, wonderful Japanese and Chinese paintings of mountains-an extraordinary legacy of the beauty of mountains." -- Wayne Thiebaud⠀

Canyon Pass, 2019

Oil on canvas

60 x 60 inches (152.4 x 152.4 cm)

© Wayne Thiebaud / Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York

Left to Right
Mountain Roads, 2010-13/2019

Rock Mesa, 2010

Road Through, 1983

© Wayne Thiebaud / Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York

Left to Right
Road Through, 1983

Plateau, 1969

Cloud Ridge, 1967

Mesa, 1968

Dark Ridge & Clouds, c. 1990

Study for Downhill, 1967

Hillside Trees, 1968

Around Yountville, 2008-11/2018

Blue Ridge Mountain, 2010

Laguna Rise, 2003-12/2018

© Wayne Thiebaud / Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York

Left to Right
Plateau, 1969

Cloud Ridge, 1967

Mesa, 1968

Dark Ridge & Clouds, c. 1990

Study for Downhill, 1967

Hillside Trees, 1968

© Wayne Thiebaud / Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York

Left to Right
Around Yountville, 2008-11/2018

Blue Ridge Mountain, 2010

Laguna Rise, 2003-12/2018

© Wayne Thiebaud / Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York

Left to Right
Mountain Roads, 2010-213/2019

Rock Mesa, 2010

Road Through, 1983

Plateau, 1969

Cloud Ridge, 1967

Mesa, 1968

Dark Ridge & Clouds, c. 1990

Study for Downhill, 1967

Hillside Trees, 1968

© Wayne Thiebaud / Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York

Left to Right
Canyon Pass, 2019

Hillside, c. 1967

© Wayne Thiebaud / Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York

Left to Right
Mountain Fire, 2019

The Pass, 2019

© Wayne Thiebaud / Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York

Left to Right
Blue Mountain Cloud, 2013

Mountainside Cave, 2019

Canyon Clouds, 2010

© Wayne Thiebaud / Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York

Left to Right
Big Rock Mountain, 2004-12/2019

Rock Island Split, 2019

© Wayne Thiebaud / Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York

Left to Right
Passing Cloud, 2014/2019

Blue Mountain Cloud, 2013

© Wayne Thiebaud / Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York

Acquavella Galleries Presents
Wayne Thiebaud Mountains 1965-2019
On View November 5 - December 13, 2019
Opening Reception: November 4, 6:00-8:00pm

New York, NY, 2019 - Acquavella Galleries is pleased to present Wayne Thiebaud: Mountains 1965-2019, featuring 33 works by the distinguished American painter. While Thiebaud is most often acclaimed for his bright and upbeat paintings of desserts and everyday objects, Thiebaud's depictions of California mountains have been an enduring focus of the artist's practice for more than 50 years. The works in the exhibition are comprised of a range of media, including acrylic, charcoal, graphite, oil and watercolor on board, canvas and paper.

Distinct from traditional landscape paintings, Thiebaud's mountain series invokes at once the conflicting natures of abstraction and representation. The works on view concentrate on the Sierra Nevada range and feature the artist's immediately recognizable exaggerated palette, and meticulous impasto technique while introducing experiments with skewed perspective and sense of scale. To fully interpret his immense and daunting subjects the artist eliminates all signs of human presence. The abstracted, yet material mountains present the grandeur of nature's force.

Wayne Thiebaud began producing landscapes in the 1960s, focusing on dizzying and dramatic depictions of San Francisco, flattened aerial views of the Sacramento River Delta, and foreboding representations of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Turning 99 this year, the artist lives and works in Sacramento, painting landscapes and portraits as well as his signature still lifes.

A fully illustrated hardcover catalogue will accompany the exhibition and will include critical essays by art historian Margaretta M. Lovell and curator and writer Michael M. Thomas.

For interviews, background and images, please contact:

David Simantov
Blue Medium, Inc
Tel: +1-212-675-1800 david@bluemedium.com

Emily Crowley
Acquavella Galleries
Tel: +1-212-734-6300
emily@acquavellagalleries.com

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"Mountains are a subject matter of unending challenges.... It's such a rich subject matter that's been treated very, very well by so many other wonderful painters-and that's another, I think, helpful thing to me because I look constantly at the Hudson River School and the primitive paintings, folk paintings, wonderful Japanese and Chinese paintings of mountains-an extraordinary legacy of the beauty of mountains."

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"[Painting] is a wonderful combination of memory, imagination, and direct observation. A lot has to do with yearning. Primarily, what I'm interested in and always have been is this wonderful, personally involving search to find out all I can about painting, to be willing to take risks, and try things that don't seem to be logical, and find out how my feelings and experiences as a boy growing up in American can be reflected in a painting."

- Wayne Thiebaud

Acquavella Galleries is pleased to present Wayne Thiebaud from December 20 through February 20 at its new Palm Beach location. The exhibition serves as a compact retrospective of the distinguished American painter, who celebrated his 100th birthday this fall. Featuring eighteen works ranging from 1971-2020, the exhibition will be the first dedicated to a living artist in Acquavella's Palm Beach gallery.

Wayne Thiebaud features many of the most celebrated subjects from the artist's career. From iconic paintings of sundaes, cupcakes, and wedding cakes to striking, vertiginous cityscapes of San Francisco and luminous riverscapes of the Sacramento River Delta, Thiebaud reimagines American subjects and vistas in vibrant colors and unique perspectives. Today, seventy years after his first solo exhibition, he continues to produce new work and push his exploration beyond the subjects that have captivated him since the 1960s.

In several of his recent works, such as Cupcake Window (2018/2020) and Courtland Reservoir (2019/2020), Thiebaud revisits some of his most familiar themes, which he approaches in new ways through his choices of composition, palette, perspective, and technique. In Cupcake Window, Thiebaud paints rows of neatly arranged cupcakes, their frostings characteristically rendered in thick impasto, from a different perspective. The vantage point set from within the bakery, the viewer looks both at and over these delicious rows of treats which are placed in the foreground against the large, abstract expanse of the shop window. The painting unexpectedly becomes at once a study of geometric abstraction and of lusciously rendered form. In Courtland Reservoir, Thiebaud represents the watery landscape and farmlands of the Sacramento River Delta in vivid, candy-colored hues. Masterfully employing impasto, the artist applies thickly rendered paint to give life to the trees and their dramatically cast shadows, and also pulls the medium across the luminous cobalt pool of the reservoir to evoke the rippling surface of the body of water.

A fully illustrated hardcover catalogue will accompany the exhibition.

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MEDIA CONTACTS

For interviews, background and images, please contact:

David Simantov
Blue Medium, Inc
Tel: +1-212-675-1800 / david@bluemedium.com

Emily Crowley
Acquavella Galleries
Tel: +1-212-734-6300 /emily@acquavellagalleries.com

All works of art by Wayne Thiebaud are © 2020 Wayne Thiebaud / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS).

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"[Painting] is a wonderful combination of memory, imagination, and direct observation. A lot has to do with yearning. Primarily, what I'm interested in and always have been is this wonderful, personally involving search to find out all I can about painting, to be willing to take risks, and try things that don't seem to be logical, and find out how my feelings and experiences as a boy growing up in American can be reflected in a painting."

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A technique used by Wayne Thiebaud where paint is laid thickly on a surface so that brushstrokes and palette knife marks are visible.
Other notable artists known to use this technique are Alfred Currie, Cordelia Wilson, and Van Gough.

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Summary of Wayne Thiebaud

While rooted in the everyday, West Coast artist Wayne Thiebaud's compositions spring from his imagination and have a poetic, sometimes melancholic, quality about them. Thiebaud bucked artistic trends to create his own vision of American culture. Trained as a commercial artist and uninterested in the histrionics surrounding Abstract Expressionism, Thiebaud concentrated his attention on ordinary objects, thus garnering comparisons to Pop Art of the 1960s, yet Thiebaud brushed away such comparisons, saying he was "just an old-fashioned painter."

A popular teacher, Thiebaud was a generous mentor, and artists such as Mel Ramos, Fritz Scholder, and Faith Bromberg have spoken his praises. Further, Thiebaud's embrace of Americana - as seen through his bakery cases and landscapes - has endeared him to a wider audience that see something of themselves in his paintings.

Accomplishments

Thiebaud began his artistic path studying commercial art and illustration before turning to fine arts study, and this early training continues to inform his work. The linear, even illustrative, quality of his paintings suggest advertisements and commercial photographs. Thiebaud has always felt that the line between commercial and fine art is too rigidly drawn, and his work constantly transgresses that border.

While often associated with Pop Art because of a shared subject matter, Thiebaud is more often than not absorbed in traditional problems of painting - how to create depth without sacrificing the two-dimensionality of painting and how objects relate to one another. Through seemingly simple still lifes, Thiebaud evokes stories of plenty and loss, prompting an emotional response from the viewer that is absent in Pop Art.

Thiebaud has often spoken of the "Americanness" of his paintings. His depictions of cakes, pastries, everyday objects, and landscapes convey an earnestness and curiosity that can be traced back to the likes of Edward Hopper and earlier American art. While some have spoken of a melancholic, even sinister, mood in some of his paintings, they lack a biting critique, or rebuke, of American consumer culture and instead offer a meditation on it.

Important Art by Wayne Thiebaud

Cakes

An orderly array of cakes sit atop cake stands as if in a baker's display case. The overlapping cakes and their shadows create a tight, gridded composition that feels static, and yet the thin cake stands hardly seem capable of holding up the sumptuously decorated cakes, threatening the possibility of toppled pastries. Thiebaud compresses, or flattens, the space by using a simple, monochrome background, barely distinguishing between the wall and the surface on which the cakes sit, as well as employing a skewed perspective. This space combined with a limited palette of subdued pastel shades, with a few red, pink, and yellow accents, creates a unified composition. While most of the cakes are differently decorated, save the two in the center, the overall effect is of similarity and repetition.

The use of solid outlines and shadows on a stark background is typical of Thiebaud's work in the 1960s, which has much in common with advertising images, and its subject matter - common consumer items - aligns it with much of Pop Art, but its thickly applied paint sets it apart from much of the movement. Curator Megan Fizell writes, "The frosting upon Wayne Thiebaud's 1963 painting, Cakes, is so thickly applied that I am often tempted to reach out, run my finger along one of the perfect cake-tops to taste the sugary dessert." As such, the painting exemplifies "object transference" (a term Thiebaud used to describe his own work), meaning that the paint literally mimics the element it depicts - in this case frosting. To further compound this tendency, American artist Sharon Core recreated the painting as a still life and then photographed it. To achieve the look of the heavy brushstrokes, she replicated the effect in frosting - thus completing the cycle of imitation between the subject and its representation.

Oil on canvas - The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Green Dress

Thiebaud's daughter, Twinka, wearing a simple green dress, sits on a stool, holding a piece of paper, perhaps a work of art. She casts a slight shadow on the cream-colored floor and wall, and she looks out toward the viewer. Thiebaud uses a repeating color palette to create a harmonious composition; the emerald of the dress is used in the sitter's cheekbone, the orange of the stool reappears in the hem of the outfit and the paper she holds and is similar to the color of her hair.

Thiebaud's second wife, Betty Jean, described Thiebaud's approach to portraiture, saying, "The muteness of figures reduces them to objectness. They occupy the space like a toy or tree, in a frozen moment of time." Here, as in his cake paintings, the subject is shown against a muted background, emphasized with a shadow - a technique commonly used in commercial illustration - with the effect of both focusing the viewer's attention and isolating the subject from any context. When coupled with the sitter's inscrutable - almost blank - expression, this lack of context results in a sense of detachment, which, while not unusual in Thiebaud's work (or indeed his portraiture), is more surprising given his personal connection to the sitter. In this sense, the sitter is as unreachable as Thiebaud's cakes, despite the detail with which she is painted.

Thiebaud began this painting in 1966, returning to complete it 51 years later. To some, this revisiting suggests longing and nostalgia, but at the same time returning to one's work after a break is a practice Thiebaud routinely recommended to his students, saying, "It's difficult to see the work with any clarity until years later."

Oil on canvas - Collection of the artist

Two Paint Cans

Here, two paint cans, one open with paint dribbled down the side, the other sealed and clean, sit side by side. This humble still life reads as a classic study of color and volume; art historian Mara Holt Skov explains that Thiebaud "sees each new painting as an opportunity for him to confront anew the classic problems of painting - the making of an illusion of 3-D space on a 2-D plane using fluid materials, specific tools and an unfailing supply of physical, intellectual and emotional effort." The familiar, spare, cream-colored background highlights the complexity of the reflective, paint-covered surfaces of the cans.

With Two Paint Cans Thiebaud elevates the ordinary into something more profound. He said, "The wonderful thing about common objects, of almost any kind, is exactly what the poets talk about. They are talking about a transcendent potential, that they can be more than they are. For instance, let's say a bunch of kitchen objects like [18 th century French painter] Chardin: copper pipes, clay pots, a loaf of bread. Your job as a painter is to make them different enough and special enough that when you go back to look at the kitchen's actual objects, they seem wanting." On another note, though, one senses that Thiebaud is also making subtle references to painters who came before. The paint splattered surface under the cans is reminiscent of paintings by Jackson Pollock or Cy Twombly, and one wonders if the subject matter - two cans - might be a sly nod to Jasper Johns' famous Painted Bronze (Ale Cans) (1960).

The title of the work states specifically the number of objects portrayed, a common practice for Thiebaud and one that led Susan Goldman Rubin to put together the children's book Counting with Wayne Thiebaud (2007).

Oil on paper mounted on board - Thiebaud Family Collection

Bakery Case

Pastries and cakes sparsely populate a simple bakery case. The sleekness of the case and the simplicity of the sweets inside contrast sharply with the ornately decorated wedding cake that sits atop the case. As with many of his paintings, the paint application is quite thick, emphasizing the tactility of the objects depicted. While similar in subject matter to his 1963 Cakes, the addition of the bakery case both produces more depth in the composition and places almost all of the pastries just out of the viewer's reach.

One possible reading, inspired by Thiebaud's experience of growing up during the Great Depression, is that the bakery case instantiates the unattainable. The depiction of food and consumer goods behind shop windows or cases is common in his work, perhaps challenging popular advertising that suggests goods are easily within reach and attainable. Furthermore, the empty space in the case juxtaposes the ideas of abundance and scarcity. The theater of the bakery case also inspired Thiebaud; he recalled, "I would really think of the bakery counters, of the way the counter was lit, where the pies were placed, but I wanted just a piece of the experience. From when I worked in restaurants.... [It was] always poetic to me." In this accounting, the pastries become characters, lit on a stage, and are more than they appear.

Oil on canvas - Thiebaud Family Collection

Fall Fields

In its vibrant colors and steep perspective, Fall Fields is typical of Thiebaud's landscape paintings. A road trip across the United States inspired Thiebaud, but while based on observation, Thiebaud exaggerated particular shapes, patterns, and colors - flattening and distorting the landscape almost to the point of abstraction, giving the painting an imaginative quality that renders it both terrestrial and dreamlike. As the critic John Yau writes, "Thiebaud conflated the forms and colors of the observable world with those of the imagined world so that they were virtually indistinguishable from each other."

The particular perspective of this work is reminiscent of illustration and of film, perhaps recalling Thiebaud's earlier training. Some critics have compared it to Hockney's Going up Garrowby Hill (2000) which shares its skewed perspective and vibrant palette; however, while Garrowby Hill depicts Yorkshire in England, Thiebaud insists on the importance of "Americanness" in his work. Art critic Laura Cumming explains, "Thiebaud's joy in America extends out through the landscape, no matter how industrial. Gold and pink striped fields somehow keep their terrestrial reality, despite the celestial colors, because he puts so much exactitude into the drawing that underpins every work." Others have offered a more sinister interpretation - suggesting that the painting represents the teetering and imminent toppling of the American Dream.

Oil and acrylic on canvas - Collection of the artist

Biography of Wayne Thiebaud

Childhood

Wayne Thiebaud was born in Mesa, Arizona in 1920. When he was only six months old, his family moved to Los Angeles, where he spent much of his early life in Long Beach, California. He also lived for a number of years on his uncle's ranch in Utah, as his large Mormon family retained roots in the Southwest.

During high school, Thiebaud developed an interest in stage design and lighting. Between the ages of 15 and 18, he worked part-time designing posters for a movie theater. He also worked at a cafe in Long Beach named "Mile High and Red Hot," where "Mile High" referred to an ice cream flavor and "Red Hot" to a hot dog. At 16, Thiebaud took a summer apprenticeship in the animation department of Walt Disney Studios. Here he drew thousands of individual frames of characters such as Goofy, Pinocchio, and Jiminy Cricket. The frames, which when shown in quick succession would give the impression of movement, were known as "in-betweens."

Education and Early Training

Although Thiebaud showed artistic talent from a young age, he was disinclined to pursue fine arts training due to the economy during the Depression. Instead, he studied commercial art at Long Beach Polytechnic High School and at the Frank Wiggins Trade School (now Los Angeles Trade-Technical College). He intended to learn sign painting, but once there he was encouraged to study commercial art and illustration.

World War II brought a temporary halt to Thiebaud's early career as a cartoonist and graphic designer, although his artistic skills did keep him out of combat. From 1942 to 1945, he served in the Army Air Force, assigned to the Special Services Department as an artist and cartoonist, and he was ultimately transferred to the First Air Force Motion Picture Unit, commanded by future president Ronald Reagan. During the war, he met his first wife Patricia Patterson, with whom he had two daughters. The first, Twinka, was born in 1945 and the second, Mallary Ann, in 1951.

After the war, Thiebaud returned to his work as a commercial artist. While working for Rexall drugstore chain, he met Robert Mallary, who encouraged Thiebaud to continue his education by studying fine art. At nearly 30 years old, Thiebaud enrolled at San Jose State College (now San Jose State University) before transferring to Sacramento State College (now California State University, Sacramento), where he earned his bachelor's and master's degrees.

While working towards a new career in fine art, Thiebaud supported his family through teaching, which he continued until the 1990s. Michael Tompkins, Thiebaud's student and assistant in the 1980s, said of his teaching style, "He preferred teaching undergraduates and 'raw beginners' .... He wanted people who were wide open. Without any irony, he told us his work was about scrambling around with the basic issues, like a baseball player who still goes to spring training each year to brush up on the basics." Thiebaud believed that in teaching, "you have to constantly rethink things."

Mature Period

From 1956-57, Thiebaud spent a sabbatical year in New York City, where he met Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns. It was at this time that Thiebaud began to explore a new style and subject matter - applying the bright colors and hyper-realistic shadows of commercial art to a series of paintings of cakes, pies, and candies in shop windows. With few galleries in Sacramento at this time, he exhibited in shops, restaurants and even the concession stand at a theater.

Although deeply inspired by his experience in New York, Thiebaud never felt part of the city's art scene - finding its seriousness off-putting. Nevertheless, it was here that the artist first received critical acclaim. In 1961, Thiebaud met New York art dealer Allan Stone, who, although initially unmoved by the slides he saw of Thiebaud's food paintings, agreed to represent him after making contact a year later. Stone became a close personal friend to Thiebaud as well as his exclusive dealer until the former's death. He said of the artist, "I have had the pleasure of friendship with a complex and talented man, a terrific teacher and cook, the best raconteur in the west with a spin serve, and a great painter whose magical touch is exceeded only by his genuine modesty and humility. Thiebaud's dedication to painting and his pursuit of excellence inspire all who are lucky enough to come in contact with him. He is a very special man."

In addition to exhibitions at Stone's gallery, Thiebaud's work was featured in two major group shows in 1962 - the Pasadena Art Museum's New Painting of Common Objects and the Sidney Janis Gallery's International Exhibition of the New Realists. In both, Thiebaud's paintings were shown alongside the work of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol - though the artist later expressed dislike for Warhol's "flat" and "mechanical" paintings. While most consider the Pasadena Art Museum's New Painting of Common Objects the first exhibition of Pop Art in America, Thiebaud does not now consider himself a Pop artist.

Late Period

The artist's first marriage broke up in 1958, and he later married filmmaker Betty Jean Carr, with whom he had a son, Paul. Paul took over from Stone as Thiebaud's art dealer until he died in 2010. His daughter Twinka, from his first marriage, became a well-known artist's model, author, and painter.

In the mid-1960s, the artist made his first prints at Crown Point Press - a practice he would continue for the rest of his career. As a reaction perhaps to other artists beginning to adopt Pop Art motifs, Thiebaud turned first to portraiture and then to landscapes. Both display a characteristic style; his portraits are meticulously detailed but with a detached sense of solidity that renders his subjects more like objects than people, while the dramatic perspectives of his landscapes are such that they read almost as flat arrangements of color and form.

Beginning his landscapes in the 1970s, Thiebaud continued to produce these works for the next 20 years. Living now in California, he has recently painted a series of mountains; while the subject matter diverges from his earlier still lifes, Thiebaud still renders them with thick brush strokes of paint, reminiscent of the frosting of his earlier cakes.

Although Thiebaud is now in his nineties, he continues to paint twice a day. When he is not painting, he spends time with his wife and with friends such as fellow artist Fred Dalkey. Thiebaud is also a keen tennis player, often mixing his paints in the lids of tennis ball containers.

The Legacy of Wayne Thiebaud

Thiebaud's transition from commercial to fine art is an experience he shares with other post-war artists such as Willem de Kooning and Warhol. Speaking of his regard for commercial art and artists, he says, "Those wonderful people showed me what to do - sign painters, women's fashion illustrators. There's a lot of craft in it, and that's admirable. They would tell you very quickly: 'You've got to shape up! You can't do that lettering like that!' ... So I'd go back and do it again, do it again, do it again."

Notwithstanding this unique vision, a number of comparisons have been made between Thiebaud and his near contemporaries. His landscapes, streetscapes, and cityscapes are said to have been influenced by Richard Diebenkorn, while Sunset Streets (1985) and Flatland River (1997) are often compared to the work of Edward Hopper, who was also interested in scenes of everyday life in America. Sacramento painter and friend Fred Dalkey is drawn to the melancholic side of Thiebaud's paintings. As a teacher, Thiebaud mentored many artists over the years, most notably Pop artist Mel Ramos, feminist figurative painter Faith Bromberg, and Native American artist Fritz Scholder.

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Wayne Thiebaud

The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing of this page. These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet.

Similar Art

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Thiebaud's compositions spring from his imagination and have a poetic, sometimes melancholic, quality displaying his own vision of American culture.

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Artist Wayne Thiebaud: 'I Knew This Was Not a Good Career Choice' | Christie's