Wayne Thiebaud, pop art pioneer died on Xmas day.

Famous for his still lifes of everyday American objects, the painter died on December 25 at the age of 101. Pop art has lost one of its precursors. Born in 1920 in Arizona into a Mormon family of French origin, Wayne Thiebaud became known for his paintings of pastries, boots, tubes of lipstick, and other objects that symbolize mass consumption and are inspired by advertising. Beginning as an apprentice at Disney Studios, he later became a cartoonist from 1938 to 1949 before being hired as an artist in the Air Force. He then worked as a professor at the University of Sacramento in 1952, and at the University of California (Davis) until his retirement in 1991. He befriended the artists Willem De Kooning and Franz Kline during a trip to New York. Then he meets the works of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and like them, wants to free himself from the dominant abstract expressionism. His works invite us to meditate on everyday American objects without a certain irony. He uses heavy pigments and vivid colors; his objects are shaded with the precision of the advertising of his time. He also works on texture, light, and composition, repeatedly tackling the same subject, as evidenced by the succession of portions of pies in the painting Pie Counter (1963). The artist is also a portrait and landscape painter, depicting American nature in Levee Farms (1998), like the streets of San Francisco in Sunset Streets (1985). His work is very important in the United States, but it remains relatively unknown in France. His first solo exhibition was held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1960, followed in 1962 by the exhibition "New Painting of Common Objects" at the Pasadena Art Museum, a historic site of pop art. Several major retrospectives have been devoted to him in San Francisco (1985, 2000), at the Whitney Museum in New York (2001), and recently at the Pierpont Morgan Library in 2018. Seen in Le Journal des Arts, Julie Goy.
Video : The painted world, The Elson Lesson by Wayne Thiebaud -48 minutes