Wayne Thiebaud
American
(Mesa, Arizona, 1920 – 2021, Sacramento, California)
American artist Wayne Thiebaud made his reputation as a painter; however, he also produced scores of drawings, prints, and other works on paper. His earliest exhibitions focused on his graphic art, and his prints and drawings are often counted alongside his paintings in his retrospectives. He worked with various fine art presses throughout his career, including Crown Point Press, Gemini G.E.L Press, Parasol Press Ltd., (1) and The Arion Press, which published "The Physiology of Taste". (2)
Wayne Thiebaud was born Morton Wayne Thiebaud on November 15, 1920 in Mesa, Arizona to Alice and Morton Thiebaud. Within the year, he and his family moved further west, to Long Beach, California. It was in California that Thiebaud’s earliest memories were formed. He vividly recalled being on his grandfather’s farm in Wintersburg, California and of his mother’s attempts to distract him with activities on rainy days. He also remembers visiting with his uncle, who was an amateur cartoonist. These experiences as a boy on the farm helped Thiebaud in his early teen years when his father moved the family from Long Beach to Utah. There, he spent two years helping his family on their farm before it failed during the Great Depression. Shortly after, the family returned to Long Beach, where his father found a job with the city. (3)
Thiebaud’s high school years were full of performances and cartooning. His interest in the latter, and other graphic pursuits, yielded occasional jobs painting signs and designing movie lobby posters. By the summer of 1936, Thiebaud had completed an internship in the production animation department at Walt Disney Studios. While only employed for seven weeks, he was given the opportunity to draw the frames between those that show major character action. In this capacity, he was able to illustrate Goofy, Pinocchio, and Jiminy Cricket. After graduating from high school, Thiebaud continued to receive work as a freelance sign-painter, movie poster designer, and cartoonist. This continued through his first years at Long Beach Junior College until his studies were interrupted by the Second World War. (4)
From 1942 through 1945, Thiebaud served with the United States Air Force. He was assigned to the Special Services Department where he worked as a newspaper cartoonist publishing a comic strip called “Aleck”, arranging the set for publicity photographs, and working on murals. In the final months of his service, he is transferred to the First Air Force Motion Picture Unit, where he served under Ronald Reagan. He married his first wife shortly after the war ended and, before his discharge from the military in 1945, Thiebaud had become a father and had exhibited in his first gallery show. (5)
After working design and illustration jobs with Universal-International Studios and Rexall Drug Company, both in Los Angeles, Thiebaud chose to go back to college. With the intention of acquiring teaching credentials, he first attended San Jose State University, then California State University. By 1953, Thiebaud had his Batchelor of Arts and Master of Arts, with training in art, art history and art education. He had also managed to secure his first position as instructor of art at Sacramento Junior College. (6) It was during these years that he began to explore his now-recognizable style of painting objects frontally, and in rows. His work, "Cigar Counter" (1955), shows four rows of open boxes of cigars expressively painted and nearly impossible to distinguish from one another.
In 1956, Thiebaud took a hiatus from teaching to experience New York City and its art scene. While there, he met a number of artists central to the Abstract Expressionist movement, including Willem deKooning and Franz Kline. He also met hard-edge Realist painter Phillip Pearlstein, whose straight-forward, skillfully-rendered figures certainly influenced Thiebaud’s figural series nearly a decade later. After his return to California, he focused almost entirely on teaching. He did continue to produce artwork, mostly prints, and was featured in a number of group exhibitions. (7) His paintings from this time period such as "Beach Boys" (1959) tend to utilize the extremely loose, gestural brushwork common to Abstract Expressionist artists.
The late 1950s encompassed a significant number of changes in Wayne Thiebaud’s personal life, which would also significantly impact his career. In 1959 he divorced his first wife, Patricia, and married Betty Jean Carr. Betty Jean became his model and was featured in a number of early portraits, including "Girl with Ice Cream Cone" (1963), "Bikini "(1964), and "Woman in Tub" (1965). He also received two teaching appointments, first to the California School of Fine Arts in 1958, and finally to the University of California, Davis in 1960, where he served as professor emeritus. (8)
Thiebaud’s major artistic successes would begin in the 1960s and coincided with the transformation of his painting style. (9) His first one-person exhibition at the Allen Stone Gallery would lead to his first one-artist museum exhibition in San Francisco at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum. (10) By 1961, he had begun to paint the pastries and pies that exemplify his signature themes. Paintings such as "Five Hot Dogs" (1961)," Pies, Pies, Pies" (1961), and "Salad, Sandwiches, and Dessert" (1962) cemented his career as the “Painter of Pies” (11) and helped him to develop a reputation for being the sensitive San Francisco Pop/Realist. (12)
The food paintings, along with other work of the early 60s, present the object in an unsympathetic, straightforward, almost decorative way. They are not devoid of feeling, however, and critics, as well as Thiebaud himself, have recognized this. In her Wayne Thiebaud exhibition catalogue essay, Karen Tsujimoto points to the lingering emotional component of reflective nostalgia. Thiebaud’s subjects are a mix of old and new, but more often are manifested from the artist’s childhood recollections.
After his 1965 publication of seventeen etchings, "Delights", was released by Crown Point Press, Thiebaud exhibited at another San Francisco museum: the San Francisco Museum of Art. (13) His style remained straightforward, but abstracted, as his subjects moved away from the common foodstuffs to portraits of emotionally disconnected figures and remarkable and impossible translations of landscapes. In fact, his work of the late 60s and early 70s included paintings and etchings of singular, gender charged, metonymic objects such as "Tie Rack" (1969) and "Yellow Dress" (1974). He also undertook a unique exploration of the San Francisco streetscape in works such as "Street Arrow" (1975-76), "24th Street Intersection" (1977), and "Curved Intersection" (1979) where he combines impossible hills with precarious high-rises perched on top. His etchings from this time period echo the same subjects of the city, inanimate objects, and food. With his formalist, yet emotionally evocative, approach to objects and landscapes he provided a foil to the hard-edged skepticism and satirical wit of his Los Angeles contemporary, Edward Ruscha. (14)
The work of the 80s and 90s alternated between images of the streets of San Francisco and pastoral images of the tributaries of the San Diego River. Both exploit the unachievable views that Thiebaud’s landscapes had come to embody, however, only the riverscapes exhibited Thiebaud’s trademarks developed from his days of food and portrait painting: multi-colored halos around objects, shadows comprised of cool-tones, and an imaginary quality of light. The geometric vistas in paintings such as "Farm Channel" (1996) and "Green River Lands" (1998) were also reminiscent of the style of another California artist, Richard Diebenkorn, who was also a Thiebaud friend. (15)
Thiebaud has had a number of major retrospectives, including the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1971 "Wayne Thiebaud: Graphics: 1964-1971", which was organized by New York’s Parasol Press, Ltd., the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s "Wayne Thiebaud "of 1985, and the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco’s 2000 "Wayne Thiebaud; A Paintings Retrospective". All of these exhibitions traveled to multiple venues nationally. (16)
Thiebaud passed away in 2021.
(1) Wayne Thiebaud Graphics 1964-1971. New York: Parasol Press, Ltd., 1971.
(2) “Wayne Thiebaud “, http://www.arionpress.com/grabhorn/Taste%20Images.htm (accessed July 27, 2009).
(3) Steven Nash. “Chronology” in Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective. San Francisco: The Museum of Fine Arts San Francisco, 2000. pp. 191-192.
(4) Nash, 192-193.
(5) Nash, 194.
(6) Nash, 195.
(7) Nash, 196.
(8) Nash, 198.
(9) Adam Gopnik, “An American Painter” in Wayne Thiebaud: A Painting Retrospective, San Francisco: The Museum of Fine Arts San Francisco, 2000. p.50.
(10) Nash, 199.
(11) Regina Schrambling, “Wayne Thiebaud; The Painter of Pies Knows the Real Thing, Too” in The New York Times, June 27, 2001, section F, 1. in nytimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/27/dining/the-painter-of-pies-knows-the-real-thing-too.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss (accessed July 24, 2009).
(12) Peter Plagens, “Two Pops” in Artforum, (Summer 2000), p. 157-160.
(13) Nash, 200.
(14) Plagens,157-159.
(15) Gopnik, 59.
(16) Wayne Thiebaud”, http://www.joniweyl.com/v2/WT67-162A.htm (accessed July 27, 2009).
Shannon Masterson, September, 2009
American
(Mesa, Arizona, 1920 – 2021, Sacramento, California)
American artist Wayne Thiebaud made his reputation as a painter; however, he also produced scores of drawings, prints, and other works on paper. His earliest exhibitions focused on his graphic art, and his prints and drawings are often counted alongside his paintings in his retrospectives. He worked with various fine art presses throughout his career, including Crown Point Press, Gemini G.E.L Press, Parasol Press Ltd., (1) and The Arion Press, which published "The Physiology of Taste". (2)
Wayne Thiebaud was born Morton Wayne Thiebaud on November 15, 1920 in Mesa, Arizona to Alice and Morton Thiebaud. Within the year, he and his family moved further west, to Long Beach, California. It was in California that Thiebaud’s earliest memories were formed. He vividly recalled being on his grandfather’s farm in Wintersburg, California and of his mother’s attempts to distract him with activities on rainy days. He also remembers visiting with his uncle, who was an amateur cartoonist. These experiences as a boy on the farm helped Thiebaud in his early teen years when his father moved the family from Long Beach to Utah. There, he spent two years helping his family on their farm before it failed during the Great Depression. Shortly after, the family returned to Long Beach, where his father found a job with the city. (3)
Thiebaud’s high school years were full of performances and cartooning. His interest in the latter, and other graphic pursuits, yielded occasional jobs painting signs and designing movie lobby posters. By the summer of 1936, Thiebaud had completed an internship in the production animation department at Walt Disney Studios. While only employed for seven weeks, he was given the opportunity to draw the frames between those that show major character action. In this capacity, he was able to illustrate Goofy, Pinocchio, and Jiminy Cricket. After graduating from high school, Thiebaud continued to receive work as a freelance sign-painter, movie poster designer, and cartoonist. This continued through his first years at Long Beach Junior College until his studies were interrupted by the Second World War. (4)
From 1942 through 1945, Thiebaud served with the United States Air Force. He was assigned to the Special Services Department where he worked as a newspaper cartoonist publishing a comic strip called “Aleck”, arranging the set for publicity photographs, and working on murals. In the final months of his service, he is transferred to the First Air Force Motion Picture Unit, where he served under Ronald Reagan. He married his first wife shortly after the war ended and, before his discharge from the military in 1945, Thiebaud had become a father and had exhibited in his first gallery show. (5)
After working design and illustration jobs with Universal-International Studios and Rexall Drug Company, both in Los Angeles, Thiebaud chose to go back to college. With the intention of acquiring teaching credentials, he first attended San Jose State University, then California State University. By 1953, Thiebaud had his Batchelor of Arts and Master of Arts, with training in art, art history and art education. He had also managed to secure his first position as instructor of art at Sacramento Junior College. (6) It was during these years that he began to explore his now-recognizable style of painting objects frontally, and in rows. His work, "Cigar Counter" (1955), shows four rows of open boxes of cigars expressively painted and nearly impossible to distinguish from one another.
In 1956, Thiebaud took a hiatus from teaching to experience New York City and its art scene. While there, he met a number of artists central to the Abstract Expressionist movement, including Willem deKooning and Franz Kline. He also met hard-edge Realist painter Phillip Pearlstein, whose straight-forward, skillfully-rendered figures certainly influenced Thiebaud’s figural series nearly a decade later. After his return to California, he focused almost entirely on teaching. He did continue to produce artwork, mostly prints, and was featured in a number of group exhibitions. (7) His paintings from this time period such as "Beach Boys" (1959) tend to utilize the extremely loose, gestural brushwork common to Abstract Expressionist artists.
The late 1950s encompassed a significant number of changes in Wayne Thiebaud’s personal life, which would also significantly impact his career. In 1959 he divorced his first wife, Patricia, and married Betty Jean Carr. Betty Jean became his model and was featured in a number of early portraits, including "Girl with Ice Cream Cone" (1963), "Bikini "(1964), and "Woman in Tub" (1965). He also received two teaching appointments, first to the California School of Fine Arts in 1958, and finally to the University of California, Davis in 1960, where he served as professor emeritus. (8)
Thiebaud’s major artistic successes would begin in the 1960s and coincided with the transformation of his painting style. (9) His first one-person exhibition at the Allen Stone Gallery would lead to his first one-artist museum exhibition in San Francisco at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum. (10) By 1961, he had begun to paint the pastries and pies that exemplify his signature themes. Paintings such as "Five Hot Dogs" (1961)," Pies, Pies, Pies" (1961), and "Salad, Sandwiches, and Dessert" (1962) cemented his career as the “Painter of Pies” (11) and helped him to develop a reputation for being the sensitive San Francisco Pop/Realist. (12)
The food paintings, along with other work of the early 60s, present the object in an unsympathetic, straightforward, almost decorative way. They are not devoid of feeling, however, and critics, as well as Thiebaud himself, have recognized this. In her Wayne Thiebaud exhibition catalogue essay, Karen Tsujimoto points to the lingering emotional component of reflective nostalgia. Thiebaud’s subjects are a mix of old and new, but more often are manifested from the artist’s childhood recollections.
After his 1965 publication of seventeen etchings, "Delights", was released by Crown Point Press, Thiebaud exhibited at another San Francisco museum: the San Francisco Museum of Art. (13) His style remained straightforward, but abstracted, as his subjects moved away from the common foodstuffs to portraits of emotionally disconnected figures and remarkable and impossible translations of landscapes. In fact, his work of the late 60s and early 70s included paintings and etchings of singular, gender charged, metonymic objects such as "Tie Rack" (1969) and "Yellow Dress" (1974). He also undertook a unique exploration of the San Francisco streetscape in works such as "Street Arrow" (1975-76), "24th Street Intersection" (1977), and "Curved Intersection" (1979) where he combines impossible hills with precarious high-rises perched on top. His etchings from this time period echo the same subjects of the city, inanimate objects, and food. With his formalist, yet emotionally evocative, approach to objects and landscapes he provided a foil to the hard-edged skepticism and satirical wit of his Los Angeles contemporary, Edward Ruscha. (14)
The work of the 80s and 90s alternated between images of the streets of San Francisco and pastoral images of the tributaries of the San Diego River. Both exploit the unachievable views that Thiebaud’s landscapes had come to embody, however, only the riverscapes exhibited Thiebaud’s trademarks developed from his days of food and portrait painting: multi-colored halos around objects, shadows comprised of cool-tones, and an imaginary quality of light. The geometric vistas in paintings such as "Farm Channel" (1996) and "Green River Lands" (1998) were also reminiscent of the style of another California artist, Richard Diebenkorn, who was also a Thiebaud friend. (15)
Thiebaud has had a number of major retrospectives, including the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1971 "Wayne Thiebaud: Graphics: 1964-1971", which was organized by New York’s Parasol Press, Ltd., the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s "Wayne Thiebaud "of 1985, and the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco’s 2000 "Wayne Thiebaud; A Paintings Retrospective". All of these exhibitions traveled to multiple venues nationally. (16)
Thiebaud passed away in 2021.
(1) Wayne Thiebaud Graphics 1964-1971. New York: Parasol Press, Ltd., 1971.
(2) “Wayne Thiebaud “, http://www.arionpress.com/grabhorn/Taste%20Images.htm (accessed July 27, 2009).
(3) Steven Nash. “Chronology” in Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective. San Francisco: The Museum of Fine Arts San Francisco, 2000. pp. 191-192.
(4) Nash, 192-193.
(5) Nash, 194.
(6) Nash, 195.
(7) Nash, 196.
(8) Nash, 198.
(9) Adam Gopnik, “An American Painter” in Wayne Thiebaud: A Painting Retrospective, San Francisco: The Museum of Fine Arts San Francisco, 2000. p.50.
(10) Nash, 199.
(11) Regina Schrambling, “Wayne Thiebaud; The Painter of Pies Knows the Real Thing, Too” in The New York Times, June 27, 2001, section F, 1. in nytimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/27/dining/the-painter-of-pies-knows-the-real-thing-too.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss (accessed July 24, 2009).
(12) Peter Plagens, “Two Pops” in Artforum, (Summer 2000), p. 157-160.
(13) Nash, 200.
(14) Plagens,157-159.
(15) Gopnik, 59.
(16) Wayne Thiebaud”, http://www.joniweyl.com/v2/WT67-162A.htm (accessed July 27, 2009).
Shannon Masterson, September, 2009
Artist Objects
