Awards
2004 Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
Wayne Thiebaud
Wayne Thiebaud (photograph provided by the University of California, Davis)
This award celebrates the career of an artist who, among other distinctions, has demonstrated particular commitment to his or her work throughout a long career and has had an important impact nationally and internationally on the field. This year, the award committee honors Wayne Thiebaud, an artist who has made a major contribution to the integrity and vitality of twentieth-century art through a lifetime of achievement as a painter and printmaker.
Thiebaud’s distinguished career spans more than fifty years. In 1948 he participated in his first major museum group exhibition at what is now the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and in 1951 had his first solo show at the Crocker Art Gallery (now the Crocker Art Museum) in Sacramento, California. Since then, he has shown his work widely at important national and international venues, including numerous one-person exhibitions at the Alan Stone Gallery in New York. He has also had solo shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Pasadena Art Museum; the Walker Art Center; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Corcoran Gallery of Art; the Wallraf-Ritchartz Museum in Cologne; and Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol. In 1967, Thiebaud represented the United States in the Bienal de São Paulo in Brazil. He is an associate of the National Academy of Design and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The artist has also been the subject of more than twenty books and catalogues and countless articles and reviews.
Wayne Theibaud, Street and Shadow, 1982–83/1996, oil on canvas, 40 x 28 in. (artwork © Wayne Thiebaud)
Thiebaud has created an extraordinary body of work, a true national treasure. Beneath the exquisitely articulated surfaces of his seemingly straightforward paintings is an intricate web of references and connections, ranging from the modular structures of Donald Judd to the light of the Sacramento River Valley, from the enigmatic still-life paintings of Giorgio Morandi to the glittery fluorescence of the cafeteria line, and from Abstract Expressionist impasto to the graphic effects of cartoons and advertising.
A visit to a good bakery is both a delightful and democratic experience. Unlike art galleries, bakeries offer only delicious things (it’s hard to hate a cruller or fail to understand a carrot cake). Bakeries are pleasure machines for the masses. Thiebaud, in a completely American way, has succeeded in making paintings as enchanting and egalitarian as pies, cakes, and ice cream cones. His canvases are revered by serious artists and critics, but are also delectable to those outside the art world.
Thiebaud is also a talented and influential teacher, beginning his career in 1951 at Sacramento Junior College and concluding it as emeritus professor of painting at the University of California, Davis. In 1981 he was awarded CAA’s Distinguished Teaching of Art Award. Only two other artists, Hans Haacke and Robert Blackburn, have received both of these special awards.
Thiebaud’s distinguished career continues to inspire, and his paintings have become, like their subject matter, American icons. We are grateful for his bold insight and his lifetime devotion to the unfolding mysteries of painting and printmaking.
Committee: Richard Roth, Virginia Commonwealth University, chair; Hearne Pardee, University of California, Davis; Buzz Spector, Cornell University; and Georgia Strange, Indiana University, Bloomington.
