Wayne Thiebaud

Wayne Thiebaud was born in Mesa, Arizona, in 1920 and raised in Long Beach, California.  Early in life he pursued a career as a cartoonist, an illustrator and a muralist and held a position at the Walt Disney Pictures Studio for a year until he decided to become a painter in 1949.  He enrolled at California State College, receiving a B.A. in 1951 and an M.A. in 1953.  In 1951 he had his first exhibition of paintings at the Crocker Art Gallery, Sacramento, California.  Thiebaud’s big break came in 1956 to 1957, when he lived in New York and met the de Koonings, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, and Philip Pearlstein.  Allan Stone gave him the first New York show in 1962, and Thiebaud went on to gain notoriety in the 1960s for his painting of pies and other all-American foodstuffs.  Beginning with an exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum, California, in 1968, his work has been part of touring shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California.  Although often associated with Pop art and the work of the Bay Area artists Richard Diebenkorn and David Park, Thiebaud’s distinctive still lifes, as well as his figure compositions and landscapes, are more akin to Impressionism filtered through the paintings of Edward Hopper.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: the Hechinger Collection, published by International Arts & Artists