Skip to content

Biography

Wayne Thiebaud was born in Mesa, Arizona, in 1920, and was raised in southern California. He admired cartoons and comic strips from a young age and began his career as a commercial artist in his teens. He worked as a sign painter and apprenticed as an animator for The Walt Disney Studios before serving in the United States Army Air Force during World War II. After his service, he continued to work as a commercial artist—designing movie posters, making cartoons, and working in advertising—before pursuing the study of fine art in the late 1940s. Studying under the G.I. Bill, Thiebaud earned his bachelor’s and master’s degree from the California State University in Sacramento. While still in graduate school he began his teaching career, working as an art professor for eight years at Sacramento Junior College before joining the faculty of the University of California Davis. Thiebaud has enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a teacher, and after retiring at age seventy, he continued to give popular classes as professor emeritus. Apart from a sabbatical year spent in New York in the late 1950s, Thiebaud has worked in California for his entire career.

By the early 1960s, Thiebaud had begun painting the works for which he is best known, depicting quintessentially American, everyday objects in bright colors—such as cakes and pies, hot dogs and hamburgers, gumballs and lollipops, and jackpot machines. Rather than painting from life, Thiebaud represented these objects from memory, drawing from nostalgic recollections of bakeries and diners from his youth and contemporary commercial imagery. Working with thickly applied paint, Thiebaud often spotlights his objects against pale backgrounds with the well-defined shadows characteristic of advertisements. In order to heighten their chromatic intensity, he outlines his forms in radiant colors to achieve a halo-like effect. In addition to his still lifes, Thiebaud also painted portraits in the same style, depicting solemn figures set against light, empty backgrounds.

In 1962, Thiebaud achieved critical and commercial success with his breakthrough show at the Allan Stone Gallery in New York, followed by his first solo museum show at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Although he is often classified as an American Pop painter—and he was included in the two historic and groundbreaking shows of 1962 that established the movement—Thiebaud never embraced the mantle of Pop and preferred to describe himself as a traditional painter of illusionistic forms. He has created still lifes, landscapes, and portraits that are familiar and quotidian, but also deeply indebted to the history of art, from the masters of European and American painting to traditional Chinese landscapes and Japanese woodcuts.

After settling in San Francisco in the early 1970s, Thiebaud embarked on a series of landscapes and cityscapes, painting the steep hills and vertiginous inclines of the city in colorful, dramatic canvases. With his characteristic vibrant palette and meticulous technique, he represented dizzying, upended views of San Francisco’s streets and buildings. In the late 1990s he began a series of landscapes of the Sacramento River Delta, painting the watery landscape and surrounding fields in pools of unexpected, vibrant hues. Rejecting traditional perspective, he largely disregarded the sky or horizon line in favor of flat, aerial views. Since the early 2000s, Thiebaud has focused on his series of mountains, depicting dramatic close-up and cross-section views of fantastic, towering summits with luminous colors and rich textures. These works merge fiction and reality, drawing from the artist’s memories of mountains he had seen in childhood. Conveying a sense of the sublime, they are also influenced by the history of landscape painting of the American West.

Alongside his landscapes and portraits, Thiebaud continues to paint his signature still lifes of everyday items. Experimenting with color, texture, light, and composition, he has repeatedly tackled the same subjects to challenge and explore the formal possibilities of painting. He continues to live and work in Sacramento today.

Since 2012, Acquavella Galleries has held four exhibitions of Thiebaud's work. Most recently, Acquavella exhbited Wayne Thiebaud Mountains: 1965-2019 in November-December of 2019.

Photo by Betty Jean Thiebaud, 1961.

New Criterion
New Criterion
Summer Lights June 2024

By James Panero

The advent of summer can be particularly sweet when it comes with a helping of Wayne Thiebaud (1920–2021). The late grand-manner painter of American Century marginalia remains on view at Acquavella Galleries through mid-June with an exhibition that focuses on his warmest creations. “Wayne Thiebaud: Summer Days” gathers works from over six decades of the artist’s career, ranging from his bathers, beaches, and balls to his cola, confections, and cones.

The Brooklyn Rail
The Brooklyn Rail
Wayne Thiebaud: Summer Days June 2024

By Ekin Erkan

New York Sun
New York Sun
A New Show of Summer Brings the Beach and Hot Dogs to the Upper East Side June 2024

By AR Hoffman

The artist, Wayne Thiebaud, is a perpetual boy of summer, alert to America’s fling with the season’s sweet irresponsibility.

Luxury Magazine cover with Wayne Thiebaud Mountain Ridge
Luxury Magazine
As American as Pie: Pastel-colored paintings of pies and cakes launched his career, but there is more to the American Master WAYNE THIEBAUD than just desserts. Spring / Summer 2021
Portrait of Wayne Thiebaud
Artnet News
‘Enjoy It When You Have It, But Don’t Have Too Much’: Artist Wayne Thiebaud on How to Savor Cake While Staying Healthy at 100 Years Old November 13, 2020
Photograph of Wayne Thiebaud
The Wall Street Journal
Wayne Thiebaud's Vision of American Beauty November 6, 2020

As he turns 100, the California artist's paintings of cakes, pies and other ordinary diner fare have become iconic.

 

By Emily Bobrow 

Alta
Alta
Having His Cake and Eating It, Too October 12, 2020

Wayne Thiebaud shook up the art world in 1962 with paintings that were joyous, confectionary, and uniquely Californian. Since then, he’s worked steadily, producing sought-after pieces noted for their originality and impact on American art. On the eve of his 100th birthday, the artist says he’s “trying to learn to paint” and put a smile on people’s faces.

 

Thiebaud, Green Dress, 1966
The Telegraph
Lasting Taste: Why Life is Still Sweet for Wayne Thiebaud at 96 May 29, 2017

Over the course of a frustrating afternoon in 1961, Wayne Thiebaud visited every single gallery on Madison Avenue, New York, to try to sell his paintings. By then, he was in his early 40s, had recently become a professor of art at the University of California and counted such giants as Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning among his friends. But he had not yet made his own name as an artist.

Thiebaud, Bakery Case, 1966
T Magazine
At Tea with the Legendary Painter Wayne Thiebaud May 24, 2017

The artist Wayne Thiebaud renders everyday delights strange and vibrant. Long celebrated for his peppy still life paintings and fantastical landscapes, the 96-year-old California native is currently in London for a survey show at the city’s White Cube gallery.