The Cake Window Painting at National Gallery of Art
The American artist Wayne Thiebaud, whose luscious, colorful paintings of cakes and San Francisco cityscapes combined sensuousness, nostalgia and a hint of melancholy, has died. He was 101.
His death was confirmed in a statement on Sunday by his gallery, Acquavella, which did not say where or when he died.
"Even at 101 years old, he still spent most days in the studio, driven past, equally he described with his feature humility, 'this almost neurotic fixation of trying to learn to paint'," the statement said.
Thiebaud was born in Mesa, Arizona, in 1920 and grew upwardly in Sacramento, California. He started out as an animator for Walt Disney and worked as a affiche designer and commercial artist in California and New York before becoming a painter. He as well was a longtime professor at the Academy of California, Davis. He retired in 1991 but continued didactics one class a year.
While some took his hot dogs, bakery counters, glue ball machines and processed apples to be examples of popular art, Thiebaud never considered himself to be in the mold of Andy Warhol and did not care for his subjects with the irony pop championed.
"Of form, you're thankful when anyone ever calls you anything," he said. "But I never felt much a function of information technology. I must say I never really liked pop art very much."
The real subject, many critics said, was paint and the act of painting itself: the shimmering color and sensuous texture of thickly applied paint. He laid on pigment and so heavily that he oft carved his signature instead of putting it on with the castor.
"The oil paint is fabricated to look similar meringue," said Marla Prather, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York who helped organize a 2001 retrospective. "And with the cakes, yous get this great sense of texture with the frosting. You just want to step close and lick it."
Many of Thiebaud'south images were outlined in neon pinks and dejection that fabricated the objects appear to glow. Shadows were frequently a rich blue.
"Information technology's joyful, while a lot of modernistic fine art is angst-ridden," Prather said in 2001.
Thiebaud told PBS' NewsHour with Jim Lehrer in 2000 the bailiwick of nutrient was "fun and humorous, and that's dangerous in the art world, I call back.
"Information technology's a world that takes itself very seriously, and of course, it is a serious enterprise, but I recollect too at that place's room for wit and humor because humor gives us, I think, a sense of perspective."
Glue ball machines were a favorite theme, he said, because "a large round globe is so beautiful, and it'due south really a kind of orchestration of circles of all kinds. Just information technology's also very sensuous, I think, and information technology offers wonderful opportunities for painting something like, almost like a bouquet of flowers."
In 2004, a New York Times writer praised Thiebaud'south "wry vision of mod consumerism" and said: "No ane did more than to reanimate the tired former genre of still life painting in the last half century than did Mr Thiebaud with his paintings of industrially regimented food products."
Thiebaud told PBS he preferred calling himself a painter, rather than an creative person, because "it'south like a priest referring to himself as a saint. Mayhap it'due south a little too early or he's non the one to decide that … Being an artist I think is a very rare thing."
Forth with the sensuousness, there was sometimes an emptiness and melancholy reminiscent of Edward Hopper. He likened the feeling to the "bright pathos" of a circus clown.
In mural, his most famous subject area was San Francisco, whose steep hills he portrayed in a fantasy-like mode, with spectacular angles and stark shadows.
"Originally, I painted right on the streets, trying to get some of the kind of drama I felt about the urban center and its vertiginous (dizzying) character," he told PBS.
"Merely that didn't seem to work … The reality was ane thing but the fantasy or the exploration of information technology was another."
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/dec/26/wayne-thiebaud-painter-of-cakes-and-san-francisco-cityscapes-dies-at-101
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