Born on 15 November 1920 in Mesa (Arizona), Morton Wayne Thiebaud, Wayne Thiebaud for short, celebrates his 101st birthday today. The US American painter is primarily known for his still lifes, in which he usually depicts everyday objects such as paint pots and lipsticks or foodstuffs such as cakes, desserts, ice cream cones or hot dogs in an illustrative style. In addition, his oeuvre, which was influenced by artists such as Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, also includes landscape and figure paintings. He uses heavy pigment and exuberant colours in his works.
In 1962, Thiebaud's works became part of one of the first Pop Art exhibitions in the USA, along with those of artists such as Andy Warhol, Edward Ruscha, Jim Dine, Robert Dowd and Roy Lichtenstein. Because of his interest in objects of mass culture, Thiebaud is therefore often assigned to Pop Art, even though his early works somewhat precede the classical branch of the style and he never considered himself to belong to this genre.
