Wayne Thiebaud
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. 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.
If you own a work by Wayne Thiebaud
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