Wayne Thiebaud

Thiebaud is a celebrated painter and printmaker, best known for his still life creations featuring confections and cosmetics, as well as striking cityscapes. Often associated with the Pop art movement, he transcended the flat surfaces of many of his contemporaries with highly expressive brushwork.  

Thiebaud was raised in California and studied commercial art while also apprenticing in the animation department at Walt Disney Studios.  From 1939 to 1949, Thiebaud worked as a cartoonist, a sign painter, and an illustrator. After coming under the influence of the Abstract Expressionists and the Bay Area figurative movement, he fully emerged himself in painting.  His subject matter in the 1950s was inspired by everyday life and rendered with rich coloring and dramatic lighting.  In the following decade, Thiebaud turned to landscapes, which by the 1980s and ‘90s evolved into vertiginous cityscapes in which San Francisco acted the part of his muse.  

Thiebaud’s impact on American art has increased steadily through the years, with significant recognition along the way.  In 1967 he represented the United States at the São Paulo Biennial in Brazil, and in 1985 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art organized a major retrospective of his work. In 1994 Thiebaud received the National Medal of Arts, the highest award given to an artist by the U.S. government. His art has been shown frequently in group and solo exhibitions throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, and retrospectives of his work were held at the Whitney Museum of Art in 2001 and in 2010 at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento.

Museum collections include: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Smithsonian, Washington; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Nelson-Atkins Art Museum, Kansas City; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York.