Wayne Thiebaud 1920-2021

Wayne Thiebaud is an American artist best-known for his paintings of commonplace objects as pies, cakes, lipsticks, paint cans, ice cream cones, pastries and hot dogs, as well as figures and landscapes. Thiebaud's family moved to California following his birth in 1920. When he was in high school, he briefly worked at the Walt Disney Studios making "in-betweeners" of Goofy, Pinocchio and Jiminy Cricket. He went on to study at the California State University in Sacramento, where he earned both his B.F.A and M.F.A. In 1956, he spent a year in New York and became friends with Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline.  He was greatly influenced by Pop artists as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Thiebaud taught at the University of California, Davis and mentored artists as Mel Ramos and Fritz Scholder. He continued to produce his own work on the side and exhibited in numerous galleries. Thiebaud composed prints and paintings that remained true to his hyper-realist style and everyday imagery, once stating: "If you stare at an object, as you do when you paint, there is no point at which you stop learning things from it." The artist's highest auction record was in 2013 with the sale of Two Jackpots (2005) for $5.5 million.

 Thiebaud's work is featured in numerous permanent collections worldwide, including the LACMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, the San Francisco MoMA, the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento and the Phoenix Art Museum.

Related Categories: Bay Area Figurative Art, Pop Art, Art of the 1960s, Post-War American Art, Representation of Everyday Objects, California Art, Popular Culture, Americana, Shadows, Nostalgia.