Concerned, like his contemporaries Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, emancipate the “action painting”, the American painter liked to represent the banal world of consumption.
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The American painter Wayne Thiebaud died on Saturday, December 25 in Sacramento (California) at 101 years old. After being one of the precursors of pop art, he crossed the story.
On November 15, 1920 in Mesa (Arizona) in a family of French origin and Mormon religion. His father, while exercising various trades of real estate mechanics, is a pastor of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints. The year following his birth, his parents are established in California and their son is schoolboy and high school student in Long Beach. An uncle, amateur cartoonist, initiates him to his art with such a success that after a passage by the Disney studios and another by a school of Los Angeles, Wayne Thiebaud becomes, from 1938, a professional drawing, working for the Press, advertising, fashion and theater.
The war does not interrupt its activity: it is mobilized, but within the FIRST MOTION PICTURE UNIT OF THE US Army, which produces entertainment for the troops. After the war, beneficiary of the GI Bill as a former fighter, he may stop working on demand to follow, from 1949, the artistic teachings of the State University of San Jose, then from the University from California to Sacramento. He graduated in 1952 and there is immediately engaged as a teacher. In 1960, he left this establishment for the University of California in Davis, where he will teach up to his retirement in 1991.
This is not California, but in New York, that it comes into contact with the world of contemporary art, then dominated by abstract expressionism. Staying regularly in the city, he binds from friendship with the couple Elaine and Willem de Kooning, meeting Franz Kline and learns the existence of young artists of his age, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Like them, Thiebaud wants to emancipate action painting, its large formats and its great colorful gestures.
Standardized objects
A subject attracts his attention to the street, the baked windows. He told him in 2020: “When I painted pies for the first time, I thought no one would be interested: it seemed silly. But when I did it, I thought I could not not staying there. I looked at all that seemed neglected. “Cakes so, but also ice, fruit, candy distributors, hamburgers, tie displays … the banal world of consumption. He undertakes to paint in New York in 1956 and which he develops the inventory in his workshop of Sacramento. Some principles are fixed from the beginnings: to make sensitive the geometric structure in the form, take advantage of the repeat of standardized objects to compose the image, multiply the studies on the pattern.
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