Thiebaud at 100: Pass the birthday cake (and, pies, pies, pies) for a Sacramento legend
One hundred.
Sunday is a birthday for Sacramento icon Wayne Thiebaud, the renowned painter, beloved teacher and ageless artist who marks his first century.
First century, because his staggering seven-decade career shows no signs of stopping. He’s at work on new projects, still seeing students, his work as relevant and as popular as ever. Just look at the jaw-dropping prices his works have received at auction in the last couple of years; or, for more recent evidence, the of-this-moment August cover of the New Yorker: a signature double-scoop ice cream cone sitting alone in the center of the page.
The celebration was just getting underway at downtown Sacramento’s Crocker Art Museum, home to his first solo show in 1951 and subsequent shows — one a decade — thereafter. The latest, “Wayne Thiebaud 100: Paintings, Prints and Drawings,” his career-spanning compendium and largest in 20 years, debuted in October at a reopened Crocker before the museum along with most other Sacramento businesses was shuttered again Friday by COVID-19 health restrictions.
But the Crocker collected more than 500 cards, poems and stories from the Sacramento community to celebrate Thiebaud’s 100th birthday before the museum’s doors closed again.
For the man who once said of his home, “Sacramento gave me something essential,” the collection of warm wishes is as full of affection for Thiebaud as Thiebaud has shown Sacramento in the art he has created these many decades.
The children naturally took to the sweet treats of Thiebaud’s dessert scenes — cake and ice cream, please. One paid adorable tribute with a smiling ice cream cone take on the master’s “Jolly Cones” (2002); another offered a multi-colored rendering of a frosted slice of birthday cake with, perhaps, a message for our tense times: “Sprinkle a little kindness.”
Robin Knowlton was an animal behavior major at UC Davis in the early 1970s. She took several art classes, she wrote, to “fill a few electives.” Two of her classes were taught by Thiebaud. His influence extends to the present day.
“Your love of art and your elegant presence elevated who artists were in my mind and influenced my life,” Knowlton wrote. She would later own and run her own Lodi gallery and is executive director emeritus of American Women Artists.
“I wonder if you realize the profound way your teaching and your art has touched so many lives,” Knowlton wrote. “I hope so.”
Tom Goff chose the gift of poetry, managing to cover nearly the entirety of the master’s artistic arc in a stanza or two of verse titled simply, “To Wayne Thiebaud.”
From the “whipped frothy rows of Boston Creams,” to “Lombard Street’s chicane of serpentines” and the “roller coaster verticals” of San Francisco’s hilly streets; to the landscape art on the cover of a Sacramento volume of poetry that “dazes and regales,” Goff wrote that we “learned to love the sweetest of extremes...to explore the dizziest of reaches.”
For Thiebaud’s many admirers, that may be the best gift of all.
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