At Fondation Beyeler in Basel, an exhibition to discover Wayne Thiebaud, great American painter

In early 2023, the Fondation Beyeler in Basel is hosting a monographic exhibition that aims to introduce European audiences to the important American painter Wayne Thiebaud (Mesa, 1920 - Sacramento, 2021), hitherto little known in our latitudes. Titled simply Wayne Thiebaud, the exhibition runs in the Swiss foundation’s spaces from January 29 to May 21, 2023, and is curated by Ulf Küster, Senior Curator at Fondation Beyeler. The exhibition stems from close collaboration with the artist’s legacy and his Aquavella Gallery in New York.

In his still lifes depicting everyday objects, Thiebaud evokes the promise of the “American way of life” in seductive pastel hues. At the same time, his stunning portraits, multi-perspective urban views and landscapes highlight the multifaceted nature of this technically brilliant painter. With 65 works drawn from U.S. public collections and private loans, Fondation Beyeler’s retrospective presents the artist’s most important thematic cores, inviting the public to discover his highly original way of painting as well as his use of color to which the adjective “tactile” is well suited. The painter, who became famous in the United States for his still lifes, pushes the expressive potential of the paintbrush to the limits between the visible and imaginary worlds, shaping his own iconographic language that constantly moves between irony, jest, nostalgia and melancholy.

Wayne Thiebaud is one of the leading exponents of American figurative art and thus falls within that tradition to which female painters such as Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe belong. Thiebaud grew up in the 1920s and 1930s in Long Beach, California. He developed an early interest in comic books and cartoons and worked briefly in the animation department of Walt Disney Studios and later switched to commercial graphic design. From 1949 to 1953 he studied art at San Jose State University and California State University, Sacramento. Throughout his life he served as a teacher, eventually training generations of female artists. Thiebaud worked far from the great artistic metropolises, heedless of the dominant art movements of his time. His focus on the objects of popular culture led him to be often associated with pop art, an affiliation in which the artist never recognized himself. At most, because of his particular view of the aesthetics of mass production and his constant focus on painting, Thiebaud can be considered a forerunner of pop art. Thiebaud himself cited Velázquez, Cezanne, Rousseau, and Mondrian among his sources of inspiration, but as a cartoonist, he was also strongly influenced by commercial art and poster painting.

The exhibition catalog, produced by Bonbon (Zurich), is published in German and English by Hatje Cantz Verlag, Berlin. The 160-page volume contains texts by Ulf Küster and Janet Bishop as well as the last interview with Wayne Thiebaud from 2021, conducted by Jason Edward Kaufman.

The exhibition opens daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., on Wednesdays until 8 p.m. Information is available at https://www.fondationbeyeler.ch/.

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At Fondation Beyeler in Basel, an exhibition to discover Wayne Thiebaud, great American painter

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