Happy birthday to Californian Pop artist Wayne Thiebaud who came to painting from an early career as an animator and commercial artist. By the early 1960s, he began depicting the everyday items that would become his signature works—baked goods, toys, gumball machines, and deli fare—rendered as colorful, lushly painted surfaces. See this delectable painting of cake in our installation “Pop Art: A New Vernacular.“
Wayne Thiebaud, the California-based painter whose lush, dreamy landscapes and luminous pictures of hot dogs, deli counters, marching band majorettes and other charmed relics of midcentury Americana were complex meditations on life and painting, and represented one of the most affecting and individual variations on 20th-century Pop Art, died on Saturday at his home in Sacramento. He was 101.