The MuseumVisitor InformationEvents CalendarPress ReleasesKids Sensation StationMissionRelated LinksHome

Brookings, SD – The South Dakota Art Museum is pleased to present the work of American figurative painter and internationally known Californian artist Wayne Thiebaud. Wayne Thiebaud: Works on Paper 1960 - 2000 brings together 40 of the artist’s collection of work. Each decade, as well as a variety of subject matter, is represented in this extraordinary exhibition. Wayne Thiebaud: Works on Paper 1960 – 2000 will be on view until August 14, 2005.

Often associated with the so-called Pop Art movement of the 1960s, Wayne Thiebaud is perhaps best know for his wry yet carefully studied still lifes of commonplace objects, such as cakes, slices of pies, sandwiches, clothing and household goods. In addition to the popular and recognizable images of food and other consumer goods, Thiebaud’s works cover a variety of themes ranging from the human figure to landscape and city views. His daringly geometric depictions of San Francisco, with their plunging hills and burgeoning high-rises, are conveyed in what some call Thiebaud’s “California” style. With his signature use of intense light and vibrant colors, Thiebaud’s works strike a delicate balance between representation and abstraction.

About the Artist
Wayne Thiebaud was born in Arizona in 1920 and has spent most of his life in the Sacramento Valley in California. As a young man, he established himself as a cartoonist, drawing a regular comic strip during his World War II stint in Walt Disney studios. Thiebaud also spent time as a poster designer and commercial artist in both California and New York before eventually deciding to become a painter. His formal art training came under the GI Bill at San Jose State College and the California State College in Sacramento. Thiebaud received a teaching appointment at Sacramento Junior College in 1951 while still in graduate school, and has continued to teach, since 1960, at the University of California at Davis. His work can be found in the permanent collections of many of the country’s finest museums, including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

Artistic Development
In the 1950s, Wayne Thiebaud had developed a regional reputation by working with numerous exhibitions and artistic projects in and around San Francisco and Sacramento, and by the early 1960s his famous deadpan paintings of food and consumer goods began to emerge in their mature form. These depictions of middle-American, "blue collar" subjects such as sandwiches, gumball machines, cafeteria-type foods, toys, and paint cans led to Thiebaud's association, in the mind of the public, with the Pop Art movement.

Unlike much Pop Art, Thiebaud's still lifes do not attempt to satirize modern American consumer society. He approaches his subjects with reverence and nostalgia. The items shown—cakes, pies, neckties, sandwiches, toys, and other objects—were all "fragments of experience" rendered from Thiebaud's memory, and served as emotional links to various periods in his life. Other aspects of the Pop Art movement, like the practice of adopting commercial art styles and techniques, never appealed to Thiebaud. "I had too much respect for commercial artists. I appreciated how skilled they really are."

Wayne Thiebaud is also known for his interpretations of the San Francisco cityscape. Drawings such as Hill Street depict a San Francisco of exaggerated, plunging hills where buildings cling precariously to steeply sloping cliffs. The vertiginous streets and hills of Thiebaud's cityscapes often share space with busy, congested, and labyrinthine freeways. Thiebaud made many of these works, much like his still lifes, from memory, referring not to one single geographic spot but to the concept and feeling of San Francisco as a whole.

Thiebaud's body of work also includes studies of individual and grouped figures, drawn with the same intense lighting and rich colors as the still lifes. Recent drawings focus on the waterways and agricultural fields that define the landscape around the artist's home in the Sacramento Valley, and are all marked by a particularly intense combination of color and pattern.

South Dakota Art Museum is located on Medary Ave. at Harvey Dunn St. on the South Dakota State University campus in Brookings. It is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturdays and noon to 4 p.m. Sundays. For more information, call the museum at 605-688-5423.