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Indepth Arts News:
"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.
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