Barbecue Beef , Untitled , Cloud City , — Neapolitan Pie , Lougher Contemporary. Nine Candy Apples , Marcel Katz Art. Travelers , Jonathan Novak Contemporary Art. Flat Ridge , White Marina Ridge , It is early in the morning in a leafy Sacramento neighborhood, and Thiebaud is standing in a modest one-story building that has been converted into a private gallery for his works. The earliest work is a portrait of a fisherman in a black rain hat, painted in boldly expressive brushstrokes when he was only He later turned to commercial art, illustrating movie posters for Universal Pictures and working in the advertising department of Rexall Drugs.
He joined the UC Davis faculty in as an art instructor. Without any irony, he told us his work was about scrambling around with the basic issues, like a baseball player who still goes to spring training each year to brush up on the basics. In the s, Thiebaud, like many young artists, went to New York City.
He worked at an ad agency and frequented the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village, where he became friendly with such artists as Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning.
That Americanness, along with his appreciation of commercial art, infuses his work, starting with the pie slices and sandwiches, the pinball machines and drum majorettes that were his early subjects. Thiebaud has outlived many of the painters who were his friends or colleagues—the price of a long life. But the most grievous loss for him and his wife was the death last year of their son, Paul, from cancer, at the age of Paul Thiebaud owned the private gallery in Sacramento and two others that represent his father and other contemporary artists.
That part made it possible to go on. Going on, for Thiebaud, means going to work. Apart from a sabbatical year spent in New York in the late s, Thiebaud has worked in California for his entire career. By the early s, 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 , 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 that established the movement—Thiebaud never embraced the mantle of Pop and preferred to describe himself as a traditional painter of illusionistic forms.
Thiebaud depicts these objects as commodities, their emphasis on appearance as much as taste. He achieved this effect through serial repetition, synthetic colors, and, famously, by painting with a knife, as if he were spreading the "frosting" onto his cakes.
By focusing on sugary foodstuffs, Thiebaud updated the traditional still-life genre for the age of mass production and consumption. Works in the Collection. Nancy Jennings posing for possible portrait.
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