Wayne Thiebaud Original Prints

About Wayne Thiebaud

Wayne Thiebaud was born in 1920 in Mesa, Arizona, and raised in Southern California. Early in his career, Thiebaud worked as a commercial artist in Los Angeles and New York City. Throughout the 1950s, he taught at Sacramento State College and the University of California, Davis, where he held the title of Professor Emeritus until his death in 2021.

During a stay in New York, Thiebaud developed friendships with Willem and Elaine de Kooning and was influenced by abstract expressionism as well as the early pop art of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. It was during this time that he became enamored with painting rows of cakes and candies displayed in shop windows, a motif that defined his seven-decade career.

In the early 1960s, Thiebaud partnered with dealer Allan Stone and rose to prominence as a pop artist, alongside figures such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jim Dine, and Ed Ruscha. Although Thiebaud maintained that his artworks were primarily representational, his bright, sunny depictions of everyday objects, with a focus on seriality and repetition, came to define West Coast pop art.

In 1964, Thiebaud began a prolific printmaking career with San Francisco-based publisher Crown Point Press, a collaboration that continued throughout his lifetime. He explored a wide array of labor-intensive printmaking techniques, including etching, aquatint, woodcut, lithography, and screen printing, to capture the rich colors and three-dimensionality of his paintings.

Thiebaud’s work is included in the collections of major museums worldwide, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He received numerous accolades, including the National Medal of Arts from President Bill Clinton in 1994 and the Lifetime Achievement Award for Art from the American Academy of Design in New York in 2001.