Wayne Thiebaud, American portrait painter of everyday life, dies at 101

Wayne Thiebaud, the painter who elevated donuts, lollipops, ice cream cone and birthday cakes to the category of art and in passing captured America's postwar euphoria, has died the past weekend in Sacramento at the age of 101, reported his New York gallery, Acquavella, which defined him in a communication on his social networks as “an American icon” who “lived with passion and determination, inspired by his love for teaching, the tennis and, above all, painting ”. The cause of death has not transcended.

Generationally associated with the current of pop art, Thiebaud, who, like his contemporaries, was inspired by the mass culture of post-war America, chose for an approach to the models from which he started less cynical than, say, Andy Warhol's. If any feeling reigns in his clean, colorful compositions, it is nostalgia.

Born in Mesa (Arizona) in 1920 and raised in a Mormon family in southern California, he lived through the years of the Great Depression. And from those deprivations he was left with that taste for approaching the abundant hour of American dessert like a Venetian vedutista of the settecento. The contemplation of the counter of a pastry shop was for Thiebaud his particular Grand Canal. That part of his work, essential in the collections of American museums, overshadowed the rest of his production, despite the fact that he also worked as a portrait painter and as an original landscape painter.

Without prior academic training, He began to paint professionally for Disney in the late 1930s; drew intertitles for the Pinocchio or Goofy stories. In World War II he worked as an illustrator for a newspaper of the Air Force. On his return home he enrolled in the University. He briefly met Willem De Kooning in New York, whom he used to cite as one of his influences. It is also easy to trace in his art, based on detail and perfectionism, references to the still lifes of Giorgio Morandi or to the chromatic optimism of Sorolla, who enjoyed great fame in the United States.

And in In the sixties, Thiebaut threw himself into cakes. It was then that they took him for a member of pop art. “That misunderstanding was also the source of his fame,” wrote the influential Australian critic Robert Hughes. At first, he confessed in 1985 in an interview on the San Jose Mercury News , thought that going straight to dessert was not a “good idea for a respectable painter”. But he was carried away by the beauty of those sweet portions. “I just couldn't stop painting them,” he said in that interview. Inspiration, explained to John Arthur in the book Realists at Work (Realists in action, New York, 1983), came from his past as a restaurant clerk. “I can remember the rows of cakes. Those little fragmented views have always been poetic to me. ”

In the catalog of his most recent exhibition at Acquavella, Thiebaud wrote: “ it is a wonderful combination of memory, imagination, and direct observation. It has a lot to do with longing. Mainly, what interests me and has always interested me is the wonderful search for the possibilities of painting, as well as being willing to take risks and try things that may not seem logical. Also check how my feelings and experiences of growing up as a child in the United States are reflected on the canvas. ”

Dedicated professor, he left his mark on several generations of students at the Californian University of Davis, near Sacramento, where he served between 1960 and 1991. The rest of his life he maintained his relationship as a teacher emeritus.

The market always treated Thiebaud well, although his work enjoyed growing interest in his later years, in which he also maintained an active presence in the US media. In November 2019, one of his paintings, inspired by a bakery, set a personal record: Encased Cakes