Mouthwatering & socially-engaged! Wayne THIEBAUD’s skateboard art collection is a bittersweet nostalgia for Americana culture.

Wayne Thiebaud: Pop or not?

At the age of 14, artist-to-be Wayne Thiebaud was working at a food stand serving hot-dogs, hamburgers and ice-cream to customers. He can’t have known he was already collecting images for his future as a painter, but this sort of confectionery would become the primary focus of much of the artist’s most recognizable work.

His paintings, many of them returning again and again to the same subject-matter, have been associated with Pop-Art and New Realism respectively, placing Thiebaud somewhere between artists of that style. Perhaps it was his time as a cartoonist—a brief stint at Disney Studios, or the advertising art-department. role he held— which prompted such associations.

Thiebaud’s repeated exploration of Americana imagery, and particularly the mouth-watering, pastelized cakes and pastries of bakeries in the US, clearly had more loyalty to traditional painting and Modernists like Edward Hopper, than the iconoclasm and irony of Pop Artists. Thiebaud played with light and shade, as well as detail and vagueness; often rendering the subjects of his paintings in more color than his backgrounds, or giving his confectioneries a third-dimension often applying so much oil paint that it began to take on the texture of cake frosting and ice cream.

“Wayne Thiebaud always said that painting has something to do with the body, and the body has to be balanced. For him, this balance was tennis. He would play tennis every day, into his nineties. He’d have appreciated the balance of art and skateboarding that this collection celebrates.”

– Ulf Küster, Senior Curator – Fondation Beyeler