Back To Wayne Thiebaud Artwork For Sale Wayne Thiebaud (November 15, 1920) began his career working as a sign painter, illustrator, & cartoonist in New York & Hollywood. Associated with Pop Art & as a predecessor of photorealism, Thiebaud found his signature style with brightly colored still-life paintings of desserts. His most famous works are of cakes & pies, but his colorful landscape paintings are striking although visually unconventional.

Biography Wayne Thiebaud (1920 - ) Born in 1920 in Mesa, Arizona, Wayne Thiebaud worked as a sign painter, cartoonist, commercial artist and publicity manager before serving in the Army air force in the mid-1940’s. After the Army, Thiebaud studied at Cal State University, Sacramento and the California School of Arts and Crafts. From 1950 until 1959, he served as and exhibit designer for the annual art exhibitions at the California State Fair and Exposition, Sacramento and also taught studio art and art history at Sacramento City College. In 1951, his first one-man show, Influences on a Young Painter, was presented at the Crocker Art Gallery in Sacramento. Thiebaud began painting the still lifes of pies, cakes and other objects, which would become the defining images of his career in the early 1960’s. His work has since been exhibited at major museums and galleries throughout the world. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1985. To follow is an excerpt from the essay “Wayne Thiebaud: Observations and Memories” by George W. Neubert, Director, Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Nebraska. The essay was published in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition “The Prints of Wayne Thiebaud”, 1992, at the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery. “Printmaking as a medium has occupied an important part of Thiebaud’s artistic expression throughout his career. His early experience as an illustrator and set designer provided a knowledge and understanding of commercial techniques of graphic communication. However, it was his work with the master printer Kathan Brown at Crown Point Press that produced the impressive portfolio Delights. The processes used in this portfolio were primarily limited to drypoint, with some use of aquatint; nonetheless, Thiebaud created a tour de force that early on reflected his extraordinary abilities as a draughtsman and printmaker. The small-scaled prints in the Delights portfolio are dominated by the still-life images of food stuff and delicatessen displays, with sharp shadows often viewed from elevated angles. As a result, conters and table tops seem to become stages. The formal Quality; the simplification of form and shapes; and the dramatic linear quality of etched lines and tones with the rich blacks and highkeyed light and shadows are remiscent of the authenticity and mastery of the etchings of the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi.” Back To Wayne Thiebaud Artwork For Sale Curriculum Vitae Wayne Thiebaud 1920 Born, Mesa, Arizona 1950-51 Bachelor of Arts, California State University 1951-53 Master of Arts, California State University 1972 Honorary Doctorate, California College of Art and Crafts, San Francisco, CA 1983 Honorary Doctorate, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA 1988 Honorary Doctorate, San Francisco Art Institute, CA 1994 National Medal for Arts Presidential Award, from President Clinton Selected Exhibitions 2000-01 Wayne Thiebaud, Prints, Nohra Haime Gallery, New York, NY 1999 The American Century: Art and Culture, 1900-2000, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY 1997 Thirty-Five Years at Crown Point Press: Making Prints, Doing Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 1992 Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition 1955-62, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA 1986 Wayne Thiebaud: 25th Anniversary Exhibition, Allan Stone Gallery, New York, NY 1978 Wayne Thiebaud: Recent Work, San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, CA 1968 Wayne Thiebaud Graphics: 1964-1971, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY 1967 United States Representative, Sao Paulo Bienal, Brazil 1962 Wayne Thiebaud: Recent Paintings, Allan Stone Gallery, New York, NY 1961 1961 Northern California Painters’ Annual, Oakland Art Museum, Oakland, CA 1951 Influences on a Young Painter, E.B. Crocker Art Gallery, CA 1949 Artists under Thirty-three, E.B. Crocker Art Gallery, CA 1948 Artists of Los Angeles and Vicinity, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA Public Collections Poses Institute of Art, Brandies University, Waltham, MA Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA Myra Morgan Gallery, Shawnee Mission, KS The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS Douglas Drake Gallery, Kansas City, KS University of Southern Illinois, Carbondale, IL Aldrick Museum of Contemporary Art, Richfield, CT Standford University, Stanford, CA Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT Shasta College, Shasta, CA San Jose State University, San Jose, CA William Rockhill Nelson Gallery and Atkins Museum of Fine Art, Kansas City, MO Albrecht Museum, St. Joseph, MO Nebraska Art Association, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE St. Louis Museum of Art, St. Louis, MO Newark Museum of Art, Newark, NJ The New Milwaukee Art Center Museum, Milwaukee, WI Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Miwaukee Institute of Art, Miwaukee, WI Gallery of Modern Art, Washington, D.C. Library of Congress, Prints and Photography Division, Washington, D.C. Museum of Modern Art, Washington, D.C. Utah Museum of Fine Art, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT Texas Institute of Contemporary Art, Dallas, TX Fort Worth Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX Albright-Knox Museum, The Buffalo Academy of Fine Arts, Buffalo, NY American Broadcasting Company, New York, NY Art Investments Ltd., Houston, TX Collectors' Cooperative, Houston, TX Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA Contemporary Arts Association, Houston, TX Menil Foundation, Houston, TX Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY University of St. Thomas, Houston, TX Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH New York Studio School, New York, NY Hanford Yang Foundation, New York, NY Press Release The New York Times Life Is Sweet By SARAH BOXER Published: February 17, 2008 “Delicious: The Life and Art of Wayne Thiebaud,” is the story of a happy man known for his happy paintings of cakes and pies. It turns out he also has many happy things to say about painting. For example: “I love art history” and “I was a spoiled child. I had a great life, so about the only thing I can do is to paint happy pictures.” The writing in “Delicious” is untroubled and straightforward, which is, apparently, like the man and the life it describes. There is no struggle in it at all. The story goes steadily from subject to verb, rung to rung, up the ladder of life and good fortune. “Wayne grew up in the American West,” we learn. “His mother, Alice, was a wonderful cook and baker.” His Uncle Jess was a cartoonist. When he was a kid, he wanted to be a cartoonist too, and he did become one for a while. Events that other people might have found trying turn out to be nothing more than fine challenges: “Wayne broke his back playing football in his junior year of high school,” and “kept himself busy by drawing.” While still in school he got a job in the animation department at Walt Disney Studios, where he drew Goofy, Pinocchio and Jiminy Cricket. During World War II, Thiebaud wanted to be a pilot, but instead became an Army artist, creating a comic strip called “Aleck.” After the war, when his career as a cartoonist didn’t pan out, he became an art director for the Rexall Drug Company and studied Michelangelo and Rubens. He kept drawing: “The more I drew, the more I improved.” In the 1950s Thiebaud showed his early paintings at a drive-in theater in Sacramento, but he aimed for New York and, after a while, made it there. Thiebaud hung out with painters and became friends with Willem de Kooning. He painted pictures of pinball machines and gumball machines and topped them off with a layer of what he calls “arty strokes.” By the 1960s Thiebaud got rid of the abstract expressionist glaze and replaced it with frosting — thick, slick strokes. He also found his subject: pies, candy and cakes. “Cakes, they are glorious, they are like toys.” His first painting of a row of pies made him laugh. But those paintings did not sell. A critic called him “the hungriest artist in California.” So Thiebaud looked for a gallery in New York. “His last stop” — isn’t it always the last stop? — “late one afternoon was the Allan Stone Gallery.” He and Stone became friends, and in April 1962 Thiebaud got a one-man show. Everything sold. And the rest is art history. Landscapes followed lollipops and portraits followed popsicles. The story of Wayne Thiebaud’s steady march to art stardom is not, however, all icing. The author of “Delicious,” Susan Goldman Rubin, who has also written books for young readers on Andy Warhol, Margaret Bourke-White and Edgar Degas, dives under the surface to examine Thiebaud’s pictures and his thoughts. She discusses his love of creating a “spatial tension” between repeated forms (not all drum majorettes or candy apples look alike); his feelings about pop art (he does “not want to be lumped with Warhol,” whose work he finds “flat” and “mechanical”); his trouble conveying in a realistic mode “the scary feeling” of San Francisco’s plunging intersections; his penchant for outlining cupcakes in blue and green; his obsession with lighting (which he learned in the theater in high school) and shadow. (“He usually tries six or eight different shadow shapes to find the one that is just right.”) Still, the general impression of “Delicious” — a cheerful monograph that includes an index and a bibliography and is punctuated with many large-print quotes from Thiebaud and colorful reproductions of his paintings — is of a flat, smooth road. He married, twice, and raised four kids, and all of them now do something or other with art. One son, Paul, who runs a gallery in Sacramento, is his art dealer. Now, at age 87, the artist is happily painting every day and playing tennis twice a week. It’s enviable, but will it play with struggling child artists? It’s hard to know. Just as it’s hard to know whether the happy prose of the story is meant to match the artist’s voice and sentiment or not. The fact that Thiebaud is fond of signing his name with a heart (an upside down “W,” he says) is probably a clue, as are his earnest statements: “I think an artist’s capacity to handle the figure is a great test of his abilities.” That’s true. And an artist’s capacity to paint row upon row of cakes and pies is a great test of his sanity. This man must be crazy sane. THE BOOK: DELICIOUS The Life and Art of Wayne Thiebaud. By Susan Goldman Rubin. 108 pp. Chronicle Books. $15.95. (Ages 9 to 14) Multimedia Links Wayne Thiebaud -Everyday Enchantment- NY Sun Wayne Thiebaud @ SFMOMA Wayne Thiebaud -Unconventional Confections- Daily Press