Wayne Thiebaud: Fifty Years of Painting
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City
June 6 – August 31, 2003
For more than fifty years, California artist Wayne Thiebaud has enjoyed a prodigious career. Highlighting the work of this profoundly influential and inventive painter of landscapes, cityscapes, still lifes, and portraits, the exhibition Wayne Thiebaud: Fifty Years of Painting presents more than forty works from the past five decades. It also demonstrates Wayne Thiebaud’s contributions to American popular culture and art history
The exhibition has been drawn mainly from Thiebaud’s family collection along with works from Midwestern public and private collections. “This exhibition gives rare insight into what an artist decides to keep in his collection,” said exhibition curator Dana Self, curator of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition’s forty canvases include Thiebaud’s signature still lifes, portraits, cityscapes, and landscapes from the early 1950s to today.
Wayne Thiebaud has painted bountiful arrangements since the 1960s. Renowned for his images of cakes, pies, gumballs, and other confections, Wayne Thiebaud also explores color, lighting, and arrangement of mass-produced, commercial objects, including shoes, toys, flowers, and cosmetics. His still-life paintings celebrate the shapes and colors of what most of us perceive as ordinary, like the playful stack of bow ties in "Bow Tie Tree" (1969) or the culinary delights in "Cakes & Pies" (1994–95). Wayne Thiebaud experiments with his arrangements. Sometimes he makes one object monumental, and at other times, he places dozens of items in orderly rows.
Since the early 1970s, the rolling streets of San Francisco and its surrounding communities have captured Wayne Thiebaud’s attention. He has translated them into dynamic cityscapes, including "Intersection" (1973), one of his first cityscapes, and his recent "Valley Streets" (2003). Wayne Thiebaud exaggerates the steep hills and skyscrapers by featuring extreme perspectives of the city. This same exaggerated view is reiterated in Wayne Thiebaud’s fertile California landscapes. Visitors may study the plunging cliffs and sweeping landscapes of northern California in works such as "Heart Ridge" (1969) and "Green River Lands" (1998).
Wayne Thiebaud also works with portraits like his contemporaries Alex Katz and Philip Pearlstein. He paints monumental portraits of family members and friends in settings where there no backgrounds and other forms of context. While the portraits are seemingly spare, viewers still find his dynamic palette of blues, yellows, reds, and pinks.
Wayne Thiebaud first began his career as a cartoonist and layout designer for Rexall Drug Company in the late 1940s. He began teaching in 1951 at Sacramento Junior College (now Sacramento City College). For nearly three decades, Thiebaud taught at the University of California, Davis, along with well-known California artists William Wiley, Manuel Neri, and Robert Arneson. Like his students, Wayne Thiebaud experiments. As a teacher and artist, Wayne Thiebaud draws influence from art history, including Dutch painter Jan Vermeer, French painters Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin and Edgar Degas, and American painter Edward Hopper. With more than fifty years of creativity, Thiebaud inspires future generations of artists.
A catalogue for the exhibition Wayne Thiebaud: Fifty Years of Painting features color plates of works in the exhibition as well as an interview with Wayne Thiebaud.
KEMPER MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART
4420 Warwick Boulevard, Kansas City, MO 64111
