Wayne
Thiebaud

Memories
and
Delights

Archives' New York Regional Center

October 24, 2001-
January 4, 2002

Acknowledgements

Wayne Thiebaud, Cafe Flowers, Caged Condiments, Cream Pie, Java and Sinkers, and Other Food, c. 1995. Drawing, ink on paper. Wayne Thiebaud Papers. Gift of Wayne Thiebaud, 2001.

We celebrate the art and the career of Wayne Thiebaud as we delight in in his engaging and thoughtful work. Thiebaud's strongly illuminated forms possess a dignity that transcends their familiar origins. His memorable paintings of cakes and pies, display counters, shoes and ties, Sacramento Delta marshes and vertiginous San Francisco streets offer an open-minded and egalitarian view of American life.

Thiebaud is a man of purpose blessed with a gentle, generous spirit. His recent gifts to the Archives of American Art will enhance our understanding of his work and the complex processes of his creativity. In his letters to fellow artists we see that he can be kind and funny, concerned and interested, the friend or teacher we would love to have known in our own lives.

Thiebaud's art came to national attention in 1962 with his one- person show at the Allan Stone Gallery in New York City and his participation in the "New Realists" exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery during the same New York season. In that memorable year, when Pop Art burst upon the American cultural scene, Thiebaud's more painterly images of food and other familiar objects found and audience that has grown with each passing decade.

Wayne Thiebaud has looked with wonder and fondness at the incongruities of contemporary life while maintaining a remarkable optimism, a sense of humor and a generous idealism. His recent retrospective exhibition organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, traveled the nation to critical acclaim and great interest from the general public. Thiebaud's achievement as an artist and as a citizen affirms the value and possibility of one of the oldest and most basic of American adventures, the "pursuit of happiness."