Wayne Thiebaud 100: Paintings, Prints, and Drawings

Best known for his tantalizing paintings of desserts, Wayne Thiebaud has long been affiliated with Pop Art. His bright palette, consumerist imagery, and graphic presentation perfectly suited to the Pop Art moment, though his body of work is far more expansive, continuing to grow as the artist approaches his milestone birthday.

Born in Mesa, Arizona, Thiebaud grew up in Southern California and Utah. He spent much of his working career in Sacramento, teaching at Sacramento Junior College in the 1950s and then, beginning in 1960, at the University of California, Davis. After achieving widespread recognition for his nontraditional food still lifes in a 1962 exhibition at New York's Allan Stone Gallery, he began depicting people, doing so in beautifully realized figure studies and portraits on canvas. Across the decades, Thiebaud has explored various details of American life through his art, from urban views and rural landscapes to clowns and household items, all the time continuing to explore the food subjects that made him famous.

Wayne Thiebaud 100 accompanies an exhibition of the same name, continuing a Crocker Art Museum tradition of hosting a Thiebaud exhibition each decade since according the artist his first solo show in 1951. In addition to the 100 paintings, prints, and drawings featured in the exhibition, this publication includes numerous other contextual paintings by Thiebaud, art by the masters who inspired him, and photographs of the artist with family and friends, taken over the course of his extraordinary career.