UC Santa Barbara

"Painting in Place: Wayne Thiebaud in Postwar American Art" examines the early work of Wayne Thiebaud (1920-2021), a crucial figure for understanding the rise of postwar modernism as a regional and diverse phenomenon. Conducting new interviews with Thiebaud (2017-2021) and undertaking the first extensive analysis of ephemera preserved at the Wayne Thiebaud Foundation, the dissertation offers the first thorough study of Thiebaud’s work and accomplishments in cities in Southern and Northern California from the late 1930s to the late 1950s, prior to his arrival at fame in New York City in 1962. As such, it challenges the tendency to read Thiebaud solely through New York-centered narratives about postwar American art. Instead, the dissertation traces how specific kinds of California-based educational experiences came to bear on what art historians and critics have called his idiosyncratic approach to painting American foodways, objects of play, people, and landscapes. These include the pragmatic and aesthetic lessons of his vocational coursework in Los Angeles in the 1930s, his commercial artwork in the 1940s, and lessons from diverse teachers on either side of the “modernism” and “conservative” art divide in 1950s California. Demonstrating also how Thiebaud cuts across genres, the dissertation uses his 1940s advertisements and 1950s experiments in public art education initiatives to trouble apolitical readings of his work. Recovering his labor movement roots and antifascist pedagogy, the dissertation foregrounds his teaching practice and the local origins of his distinctive style. Decentering his place in the postwar canon, the dissertation also offers the local as an analytic framework for understanding Thiebaud’s national reputation and introduces the term “artist-educator” to Thiebaud literature as a way of capturing the fuller breadth of his 1950s work as a teacher and his ambitions as a painter.