Wayne Thiebaud was an American painter, born in Mesa, Arizona, in 1920, who died in Sacramento on Christmas Day 2021, aged 101.
He is famous for paintings of pies, cakes, gumball machines and lipsticks, laid on in paint as thick as frosting, and later for San Francisco streets that tilt like cliffs. Critics filed him under Pop art in 1962, and he spent the next sixty years saying he did not belong there.
His first pie painting looked ridiculous to him. He kept painting pies, and they made him famous.
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In the summer of 1961 Thiebaud drove across the country to New York with the painter Mel Ramos, hoping to find a dealer who would show his pictures of pies and cakes. Madison Avenue turned him down.
Then, on 82nd Street, he ran into Allan Stone, who owned a gallery there, and warned him off. “You wouldn’t be interested in these,” Thiebaud said. “Nobody else is.” Stone offered him a solo show the following spring. Every painting sold.
The doubt was real. Of his very first pie, Thiebaud said, “That’s the end of me as a serious painter.” Later in 1962 a museum in Pasadena hung his work in a group show that history would call the first of Pop art, beside Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. The label followed him for the rest of his life.
What You'll Discover
What he did before painting.
Who told him to paint pies.
Why Pop never fit him.
What the paint is doing.
Why his streets lean.
What he painted at 100.