A five minute guide to Wayne Thiebaud — the artist who ‘reinvented still life as a genre and found fame in the process’

Pies, cakes, gumball machines — perhaps it was an early stint working at a café in Long Beach, California, that prompted artist Wayne Thiebaud to begin painting diner food in the 1960s.

It proved an inspired choice: he reinvented still life as a genre and found fame in the process. Now, the Courtauld Institute explores that particularly fertile period of the artist’s life in the first-ever exhibition of his work to be held in a British museum, ‘Wayne Thiebaud. American Still Life’ (until January 18, 2026).

1. Born in Mesa, Arizona, on November 15, 1920, he soon moved to California with his family and it was there that he would later work as an illustrator and a cartoonist, including, for a period, at the Walt Disney Studios. After a 1956 trip to New York, in which he met avant-garde artists, such as William de Kooning, he began developing his own style. By the dawn of the 1960s, this had evolved into still lifes of cafeteria food, lusciously painted, often in assembly line rows, against a minimal background
2. Armed with his portfolio, in 1961, he once again headed to New York to secure a gallery. Many doors were closed in his face, but Allan Stone accepted him and staged his first solo show a year later. Reviewing the exhibition in The New York Times on April 28, 1962, Brian O’Doherty called Thiebaud ‘a sort of Edward Hopper of the dinette tabletop’, whose work could be interpreted as ‘a comment on the comfortable desolation of much American life, as seen through the stomach’
3. In the same year, Thiebaud showed his work in two group exhibitions that launched American Pop Art, which over time would earn him the nickname of ‘the Pop master of the confectionery counter’. Yet, as Donald J. Brewer wrote in Wayne Thiebaud survey 1947–1976, the catalogue to the exhibition of the same name held in 1976 at the Phoenix Art Museum, his approach had earlier roots: ‘Thiebaud was painting “popular” objects years before what was to become labeled the Pop Art Movement’
4. From 1963, the artist began developing an interest in figures and, later, landscapes and cityscapes, particularly those of San Francisco in California, where he had set up a studio. These kinds of views became his primary interest from the 1970s
5. In July 2020, some four months shy of his 100th birthday, his Four Pinball Machines, painted in 1962, was sold for more than $19 million at Christie’s. Thiebaud died a little more than a year later, on December 25, 2021