Wayne Thiebaud, internationally known as the dean of West Coast figurative painters who also was credited with originating Pop art, died Saturday, Dec. 25, in Sacramento, his principal residence since the 1950s. He was 101.
His death was confirmed by his gallery, Acquavella.
Critics credited Thiebaud (pronounced “Tee-bo”), among others, with originating Pop art and extending the lineage of Bay Area Figuration, the region’s emblematic style. His high-keyed paintings of food stuffs, deli and bakery display cases and ordinary objects such as shoes and lipsticks became icons of the late 20th century American mass cravings for pleasure and optimism. He saw himself as a sort of chronicler of everyday stuff.
Thiebaud saw himself as belonging to longer and more cosmopolitan art traditions that put little stock in stylistic labels or divisions between fine and functional art. Trained as an illustrator and animator, he took an artisanal view of picture-making, and liked to reserve the term “art” for only the most felicitous performances of a basically task-oriented practice: make a portrait, describe an object, set a scene, real or imaginary.
“I want to be able to paint any damn thing I want at any time, in any way that I want to do it,” he told The Chronicle in 2018. “I don’t want to develop a product or an image.”
Thiebaud’s most widely seen work included cover illustrations for the New Yorker and a 1994 design for a California license plate that implicitly identifies a car’s owner as a cultural insider.
But the fantastic landscapes from his mid to late career, inspired by San Francisco’s most hilly streets or by the Central Valley’s patchwork of furrowed fields and river meanders, toy with perspective and allusive surface designs in ways fully appreciated only by viewers conversant with modern art’s history.
Wayne Thiebaud saw the streets of San Francisco like no one else
“The streetscapes are among the most abstract work that Thiebaud makes,” said retired Chronicle visual art critic Charles Desmarais. “By looking at them, we get a better sense of how his brain works and his understanding of form. That helps us understand his more popular works like the cakes and pies.”
In 2001, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco organized “Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective,” which traveled to museums in Texas, New York City and Washington. D. C. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art had staged a career survey in 1985, and the Palm Springs Art Museum and San Jose Museum of Art collaborated on another in 2009 and ’10.
Also in 2010, the Museo Morandi in Bologna, Italy, organized an exhibition, which traveled later to Vienna, that set Thiebaud’s still life paintings alongside those of one of his artistic heroes, painter and printmaker Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), whom he never met, but several of whose works he owned.
For his 100th birthday last year, the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento and the Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco marked the milestone with major exhibitions displaying his work.
Of course Wayne Thiebaud is planning to paint on his 100th birthday
Getting to know Wayne Thiebaud as the painter turns 100
In the past decade, prices for major paintings by Thiebaud, at auction and even in gallery shows, passed the seven figure mark. A prolific printmaker who worked frequently with San Francisco’s Crown Point Press, Thiebaud also produced for decades comparatively affordable works in editions.
Born Morton Wayne Thiebaud in Mesa, Ariz., on Nov. 15, 1920, Thiebaud grew up in Long Beach, Calif., and in Utah, where his father, an engineer and inventor, had moved the family during the Great Depression to take up farming.
Thiebaud began drawing as a teenager while recovering from an incapacitating sports injury. While still attending high school in Long Beach, he took classes in commercial art and worked summers as an apprentice animator at Walt Disney Studios.
Military service during World War II interrupted the formal education that Thiebaud had begun at Long Beach Junior College (now Long Beach City College). Between 1941 and 1945, he served in Northern and Southern California on military projects that used his skills in graphic arts.
“I became an airplane mechanic while waiting for pilot training. In the interim, I found some guys working in cartoons and poster making. I was amazed that such a thing existed in the service,” he told The Chronicle in 2018.
In 1943, he married Patricia Patterson, his first wife. They had two daughters, Twinka and Mallary Ann.
After a divorce in 1959, Thiebaud married Betty Jean Carr and helped to raise her sons Matthew and Mark Bult. The couple’s own son Paul Thiebaud, who died of cancer at 49 in 2010, established galleries in his own name in San Francisco and New York that represented his father’s work. The family continues to operate the San Francisco venue.
After periods of study at San Jose State College (now University) and California State College (now University) in Sacramento, Thiebaud began his own long and distinguished teaching career at Sacramento Junior (now City) College, while completing there his master of fine arts degree there.
Following a leave of absence spent in Manhattan, which brought him into contact with the great painters and critics of the so-called New York School, Thiebaud got his big career break in 1962, with a New York solo show at the Allan Stone Gallery, a fruitful association that would continue until Stone’s death in 2006.
Thiebaud garnered many awards in recognition of his work as artist and educator. These included election to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, The Governor’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts, and the National Medal of Arts. He received honorary doctorates from Dickinson College, the San Francisco Art Institute, the Art Institute of Southern California and California State University, Sacramento.
Thiebaud is survived by his two daughters, Twinka Thiebaud and Mallary Ann Thiebaud, from his first marriage; his son Matt Bult, from his second marriage; and six grandchildren.
Chronicle staff writer Sam Whiting contributed to this report.
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