Wayne Thiebaud valuation
Painted cakes, pies and gumball machines in paint as thick as icing, and refused to be called a Pop artist.
Wayne Thiebaud was born in Mesa, Arizona in 1920, worked as a cartoonist at Disney and as a commercial artist before teaching, and painted the display counters he remembered from working in cafes — rows of cakes, pies, hot dogs, lipsticks and gumball machines, isolated on white grounds under hard light.
What a work by Wayne Thiebaud is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Bio
Wayne Thiebaud was born in Mesa, Arizona in 1920, worked as a cartoonist at Disney and as a commercial artist before teaching, and painted the display counters he remembered from working in cafes — rows of cakes, pies, hot dogs, lipsticks and gumball machines, isolated on white grounds under hard light. Because they appeared in 1962 they were grouped with Pop, which he rejected: the interest was in paint and in light, not in consumer culture, and the pigment is laid on like the frosting it depicts. He also painted the vertiginous San Francisco streets and the Sacramento delta. He died in 2021.
The food paintings lead the market by a wide margin, and within them the multiple-object compositions sit above single items. The impasto is thick, heavily loaded and physically vulnerable — ridges catch and crush, and losses are difficult to disguise — so condition assessment must be done in raking light. Thiebaud was also an excellent printmaker in etching, linocut and woodcut over five decades, in editions of around thirty to two hundred, which are the accessible part of the output. Drawings and pastels are numerous.
At a glance
- Born
- 15 November 1920, Mesa
- Died
- 25 December 2021, Sacramento
- Movements
- Pop art, Expressionism, Bay Area Figurative Movement
More on Wikipedia.
Prints from Crown Point Press
Most of Thiebaud's prints were made with Kathan Brown at Crown Point Press in California, a relationship that began in 1964 with Delights, seventeen small etchings of cakes, pies and other food, issued half as bound books and half as loose portfolios. He went on making prints with the press for more than fifty years, and its records are the best guide to editions, states and dates.
Single sheets taken from copies of Delights circulate and should be described as such; the later editions are signed and numbered in pencil. Because the food images are so widely reproduced, posters and book plates are often framed as prints. An original etching shows the plate mark pressed into the paper around the image, which a reproduction does not.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
