?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 30,000 - $ 50,000
WAYNE THIEBAUD Blighted Area
Oil on paper board, circa 1955. 508x761 mm; 20x30 inches. Signed in oil, lower right recto.
The earliest work of Wayne Theibaud (b. 1920) is a portrait of a fisherman painted in a freely expressive style, when he was only 16 years old. At the time, Thiebaud, who grew up mostly in Long Beach, but would spend most of his life in Sacramento, did not think he was headed for a career in the fine arts. Rather he envisioned himself as an advertising art director. He admired commercial art so much that his experience in the field essentially began there. He worked briefly from 1936-37 in the Walt Disney Studios in Los Angeles, where he drew the in-between frames (drawings positioned between key changes in movement in order to make animation play smooth) for such cartoons as Goofy and Pinocchio. He later turned to illustrating movie posters for Universal Pictures and worked in the advertising department of Rexall Drugs. After serving in World War II, as a cartoonist and poster designer, Thiebaud attended San Jose State College (1949-50) and California State College at Sacramento (1950-53), majoring in art.
From 1951-60 Thiebaud worked as an art instructor at the Sacramento Junior College, where he was simultaneously able to pursue his own career as an artist. During this time his interests in subject and style wavered and developed greatly, the period in which the current painting falls, until finally formulating into the sweet confectionaries, for which is more famously known, beginning in the early 1960s. Like many serious artists in the 1950s Thiebaud moved to New York for a brief stint. There he worked at an advertisting agency and frequented the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village, where he befriended Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. While somewhat turned off by the Abstract Expressionists credo and "churchy feeling of a lot of New York painting", as Thiebaud once put it, he learned their sensibilities through the brushstroke, especially early in his career. His fellow California artist Richard Dieberkorn, who was making representational paintings in the late 1950s, was also quite influential.
Thiebaud's experience in advertising design and the layout of simple objects for drugstore adverts informs his early work, as well as much of his later work. In fact, the present painting could very well be an exercise, likely for a class he was teaching, in formal qualities, compositional design and structural coherence and the use of opaque and translucent media. This certainly presages his mature work that presses his subjects forward against the picture plane, simplifying objects into basic formal units and aligning his compositions in an architectonic manner. And not to be a mere afterthought, the ordering principles of Blighted Area recalls one of Thiebaud's first interests, that of cartoons, as he still often cites the inspirational "Krazy Kat" strip by George Herriman.
