Hardcover. New York, Rizzoli, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover with illustrated dust jacket. 358 pages. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. The most comprehensive and deluxe monograph on Wayne Thiebaud, a celebrated and active American artist, spanning the length of his career, from the mid-1950s to the present. Wayne Thiebaud is one of the world's most popular and respected painters. Born in 1920, he has lived for most of his life in Sacramento, with much of his youth spent in Long Beach; Southern California, in particular Laguna Beach, remains an area of great sentimentality. For this book he has selected the works himself, an act of autobiography in a sense. At age 94, he looked back over his life and his work, rich with breakthroughs in painting and masterful individuality. This deluxe volume, with more than 200 illustrations, covers Thiebaud's career as a painter and draftsman from 1959 to 2014. It features many of the still lifes of pies, cakes, desserts, candies, and other objects--lusciously painted, brightly colored, perfectly composed, and gently comic--for which he is best known. Such works brought national recognition in 1962 with a seminal exhibition at the Allan Stone Gallery in New York, attracting rave reviews and, to the discomfort of the artist himself, leading critics to see him as part of the Pop Art movement. The other artistic genres that he cultivated most avidly since then are landscape and cityscape, with special interests in the Sacramento River valley and San Francisco. New essays by a wide range of writers give a fresh perspective on his life and work.
