Wayne Thiebaud: Food For Thought
Biography
Wayne Thiebaud, pronounced [Tea-Bo], is an artist who was a large influence on and in the Pop Art movement. Unlike the pop artist’s preoccupation with conveying a wry, satirical look at mass media, mass production, and mass consumerism by depicting every day objects, Thiebaud took pleasure in creating the delectable items found in any diner menu or pie case which reminded him of his own America and boyhood past.
Wayne Thiebaud was born in 1920 in Mesa Arizona, than moved to Long Beach, California at six months. He spent ten years working in New York and Hollywood as an advertisement designer and cartoonist, and served in the United States Army Air Force between 1942-1946. He began his formal art education, funded by the GI Bill, at San Jose State College, then at California State University Sacramento after his stint in the military. While in graduate school he was offered and accepted a teaching position at Sacramento Junior College in 1951. After eight years he became an art professor at the University of California, Davis. He still works there as of 2006.
Much of Thiebaud’s recent work are realistic renderings of local landscapes, city scapes, and figures. In the 1960’s he gravitated toward “blue-collar” subjects which he encountered in everyday life. Around this time he began to paint the cake and pie paintings which have made him famous. He professes to merely want to render average objects, concentrating on their geometric shape and pattern. He states that these pictures are not indicative of any deeper meaning than what they appear to be. To this end Thiebaud places his cakes, hamburgers, and canapés in shallow spaces consisting of a solid background and a “countertop”.
He attributes his food choices to his boyhood pleasures and was even employed at a Long Branch restaurant named Mile High and Red hot. These names stand for ice cream and hot dogs. Wayne has admitted to creating his baked goods from remembered images in his head, rather than an actual pastry. He lavishes the canvas with buttery strokes of oil paint, which take one the creamy consistency of whipped cream and frosting. Much of Thiebaud’s work, especially his later pieces, have strong patterns in their compositions created by the placement and position of the food subjects. Strong shadows, and crisp, clearly defined shapes showcase Thiebaud’s advertising background in which he would illustrate simple layouts of solitary drugstore products set in a shallow, stark background.
It was the American lunch stand style of food, such as hotdogs, ice cream, hamburgers, and club sandwiches which brought attention to Thiebaud’s work. In 1960, his first one-man shows in the San Francisco Museum of Art in Sacramento and the Staempfli and Tanager galleries of New York, where not met with much acclaim. It wasn’t until 1962, during a show at the New York Sidney Janis Gallery, which launched the first official Pop Art show, that Thiebaud was noticed on a national level.
For his part, Wayne does not consider himself a Pop artist, but a painter of “illusionist form”.
He was friends with Willem De Kooning and Franskline who both influenced him through their abstractions, as well as Pop artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. He co-founded the Artists Contemporary Gallery and the Pond Farm Cooperative. He resides in Sacramento and is happy to remain out of the New York art scene, allowing his art dealer, Allan Stone of the Allan Stone Gallery in New York, to handle the east coast end of business.
Discussion Activities
Ÿ* Look at Wayne Thiebaud’s work compared to actual photos and advertisements of cakes and food.
Ÿ* Compare the food he has rendered to food today/food from other countries.
Ÿ* Compare the paintings. How has Thiebaud used pattern, positioning?
Ÿ *Does the food appeal to you? Why or why not?
Ÿ *Does the simple background add to or detract from the food’s appeal?
Ÿ *Knowing that Thiebaud painted these images from his memories, did he make the subjects more sentimental? Even though he said that he was a painter of illusionist form and the subject matter had no deeper meaning.
Some Thiebaud Work
Activity
Have students go online and find more work by Wayne Thiebaud. Ask them to pick a country, other than the U.S., and research that countries popular “junk food”. After they have done their research, they can go back to the classroom, and using various media, create Thiebaud-esque artwork utilizing their various country’s food.
References
http://www.wikipedia.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Thiebaud
http://www.artchive.com/T/thiebaud.html
Wayne Thiebaud: A paintings retrospective, by Steven A. Nash
