Wayne thiebaud information biography of albert
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Wayne Thiebaud, painter of lush colors and textures, dies
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Artist Wayne Thiebaud, whose luscious, colorful paintings of cakes and San Francisco cityscapes combined sensuousness, nostalgia and a hint of melancholy, has died. He was 101.
His death was confirmed in a statement Sunday by his gallery, Acquavella.
Thiebaud died at his home in Sacramento on Christmas, Eleanor Acquavella, one of the gallery's co-owners, told The Associated Press on Monday. The cause of death was not immediately known.
“Even at 101 years old, he still spent most days in the studio, driven by, as he described with his characteristic humility, ‘this almost neurotic fixation of ansträngande to learn to paint,’” the gallery's statement said.
The dean of California painters, Thiebaud (pronounced tee-bow) drew upon his earlier career as a Disney animator, sign painter and commercial artist.
While some took his hot dogs, bakery counters, gum ball machines and candy apples to be examples of pop a
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Wayne Thiebaud became an American icon as the artist who dragged thick layers of paint across canvases, depicting still-life cakes and desserts. He also painted large-scale portraits, Northern California landscapes, and San Francisco cityscapes, where streets become vertiginous exercises in geometric abstraction.
While living briefly in New York in the late 1950s, Thiebaud became friends with Abstract Expressionist painters including Elaine and Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. The artist spent much of his childhood in Long Beach, California, the subject of a series of paintings that he populated with bathers. This theme permeates art history, from Paul Cezanne to David Hockney.
Thiebaud’s paintings capture a distinctly coastal experience, with a Utopian sensibility and idyllic landscapes in which figures play and relax on the soft sand, mitt i crashing waves on the dreamy coastline. In 2007, a survey exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum emphasized the artist’s life on the Californ
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Wayne Thiebaud, 1920–2021
Photo: Robert Alexander/Getty Images
Wayne Thiebaud’s paintings of cakes, bathers, landscapes, paint cans, pastries, and cityscapes represent a luscious American sublime.
Calling him a “California painter,” as many do, would be like calling Albert Pinkham Ryder a “New York painter.” Thiebaud’s work is universal. His hallucinatory surfaces, uncanny perceptual intelligence, thick buildups of rich color, hard light, luminosity, tonal control, and Hopperesque remove create eye-worms that make you meld with the paintings, participate in how they were made. Following brushstrokes, lulled from surface to surface, you experience a release of internal rapture from form.
Thiebaud was born in Arizona and lived for a time in New York, where he tried to shop his illustrations and commercial art; knew de Kooning, Kline, Guston, and Barnett Newman; and was taken by the new energies in artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. That both were younger than him