"Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective"
2000-06-10 until 2000-09-03
California Palace of the Legion of Honor
San Francsco, CA, USA United States of America

The Legion of Honor celebrates the 80th birthday of American figurative painter and quintessential California artist Wayne Thiebaud with his first major retrospective in nearly two decades. Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective brings together 100 of the artists major oil paintings, watercolors, and pastels, drawn from numerous public and private collections. This exhibition forms the most comprehensive overview of Thiebauds lengthy career ever presented, tracing his work as a painter from the 1950s, when he first began to emerge as a nationally-known artist, to the present day, as he continues his painting with great vigor and inventiveness. Included on display are works from the private collections of the Thiebaud family, and thematic groups that have rarely, if ever, been publicly exhibited. After its run in San Francisco, Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective will travel to Fort Worth, Washington, D.C., and New York City.

Often associated with the so-called Pop Art movement of the 1960s, Thiebaud is perhaps best known for his wry yet carefully studied still-lifes of commonplace objects, such as cakes, slices of pie, sandwiches, clothing, and household goods. Thiebaud is also well-known for his stylized, plunging San Francisco cityscapes, and his more recent landscapes inspired by the San Francisco Bay Area, the Sacramento Valley, and the Sierra foothills. Approaching his subjects with his signature, Californian style, featuring an intensity of light and color and rich paint handling, Thiebaud strikes a delicate balance between realism and abstraction that gives his works a strongly personal character.

Wayne Thiebaud was born in Mesa, Arizona in 1920, and has spent most of his life in California. His artistic leanings were originally inspired by cartoons such as George Herrimans Krazy Kat. Thiebaud worked as cartoonist, poster designer, commercial artist and even, for a brief time, as a Disney animator before eventually deciding to become a painter.

Thiebauds formal art training was undertaken under the GI Bill at San Jose State College and the California State College in Sacramento. He received a teaching appointment at Sacramento Junior College in 1951 while still in graduate school, and since then has continued to teach, since 1960, at the University of California in Davis.

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for the State of California

Other Important Exhibitions in United States