Palm | Spencer Museum of Art

Wayne Thiebaud, artist

1920–2021

Palm, 1966

Where object was made: United States

Material/technique: paper; pastel

Dimensions:
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 50.5 x 35.6 cm
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 19 7/8 x 14 in
Frame Dimensions (Height x Width x Depth): 26 x 20 x 1 in
Weight (Weight): 8 lbs

Credit line: Museum purchase: Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Vernon Branson

Accession number: 1967.0053

Not on display

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Wayne Thiebaud rocketed to fame with his New York show in 1962,
featuring still-lifes of cakes and pies, candy displays, luncheon counter meats, and similar deliciously painted foods, pictures on which his reputation is still largely based. (See example in the adjacent 20/21 Gallery.) Roughly coincident with the debuts of New York’s celebrated Pop artists with their representations of commonplace objects, the Californian was initially grouped with his East Coast contemporaries, Thiebaud’s painted edibles being a universal subject not narrowly defined by geography.
Yet within the Westerner and still-life painter lurked a traditionalist who honored the long histories of his place and of art, which included landscape subjects as well. By the mid-1960s he was exhibiting landscapes and images of flora and fauna—flowers, trees, pet animals—subjects well beyond the commercial products often associated with Pop imagery. Not limiting himself to oil pigments, Thiebaud rendered some of these works in pastels or watercolors, or as etchings, suggesting his comfort and finesse with multiple media and motifs.
The artist fondly recalled his upbringing in Long Beach and subsequent time in Laguna Beach. The palm trees that began to appear in the mid-1960s, posed in orderly rows, or, as seen here, in single arboreal portraits, might be appreciated as an emblem or memory of those happy southern California years. A decade later, landscapes of a different sort began appearing with more frequency in his work, both the steep inclines of urban San Francisco and the precipitous slopes of the Sierras. More recently he turned attention to overhead views of the broad agricultural acreage in the Sacramento valley, not far from the University of California, Davis, where Thiebaud enjoyed a long and influential teaching career. CCE