Sacramento artist Wayne Thiebaud at 99: Major auction and celebrations of his work ahead

It’s a celebratory time for Wayne Thiebaud.

Sacramento’s most renowned artist will turn 99 on Friday. His longtime academic home – University of California, Davis – opened a retrospective of his works this month at the city’s Natsoulas Gallery to mark the occasion, and next year the university will offer a program that examines Thiebaud’s influence on a new generation of artists.

Across the river, the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento is already deep into its plans to mark the contemporary art legend’s centenary next year with its own sprawling, career-spanning exhibition beginning in October 2020 and culminating in a national tour.

And on Thursday at Sotheby’s, the New York auction house, Thiebaud’s large-format “Encased Cakes” could fetch a record multi-million-dollar price for the painter. Bought directly from Thiebaud in 2011, “Encased Cakes” is estimated at $6 million to $8 million. Thiebaud’s current auction record is $6.3 million, including fees, The Financial Times reports.

It’s one of two major auctions of the Pop art master’s works in New York this week: His depiction “Mickey Mouse” (1988) goes on the block at Christie’s on Wednesday.

Thiebaud’s paintings of pies, cakes and assorted sweets, with their swirls of buttercream whites and bright yellows, cotton candy pinks, rich ganache and berried fruit basket hues — think “Bakery Counter” (1962), “Boston Cremes (1962) and perennial Crocker favorite, “Pies, Pies, Pies” (1961) — vaulted him into the vanguard of contemporary art.

Indeed, the upcoming auction shines new light on Thiebaud’s signature confection-inspired creations and are a reminder of why his work continues to resonate today, said Scott A. Shields, chief curator and associate director of Crocker Art Museum.

“Thiebaud’s work is a combination of the real and the imagined, the nostalgic and the modern. These dichotomies are part of what give his work its lasting appeal,” Shields said Monday via email. A Thiebaud authority, Shields is leading the museum’s 2020 exhibition: “Wayne Thiebaud 100: Paintings, Prints, and Drawings,” set to run from October 2021 to January 2021, and penned the essay for the exhibition catalog of the same name.

“The way the subjects are handled, for instance, is distinctly modern,” Shields wrote. “At the same time, they are familiar and comforting. His foods are middle-class and American, things most people know and have eaten, which makes them broadly likable.”

“Encased Cakes” — five cakes set in orderly rows of three, then two, and bathed in light behind a baker’s glass display, the sixth perched atop the case on a glass-covered stand — carry the Thiebaud signatures with its vivid colors, nostalgic tug and modern sensibility.

In its catalog notes, Sotheby’s calls “Encased Cakes” a “captivating example of Wayne Thiebaud’s singular painterly exploration of the American psyche;” the work carrying a “profound aura of shared nostalgia.”

The pies and cakes arranged meticulously, colorfully behind glass in “Encased Cakes” and other works are “beautiful. But there’s a strong undercurrent of melancholy. It makes them complicated living objects. He’s holding those ideas in tension. One thing I find meaningful is how much it holds contradictions together,” said Rachel Teagle, founding director of the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis, and an authority on Thiebaud.

Teagle curated 2018’s “Wayne Thiebaud: 1958-1968,” at the Manetti-Shrem, an exhibition of more than 60 of the painter’s early works, and authored the accompanying essay that explores his place in contemporary art history.

It is also emblematic of the work that would point a new direction at a time when a generation of artists had begun to reject abstract expressionism as stylized — painting as an art form itself was in crisis, Teagle said.

Teagle and Shields note Thiebaud’s work with paint; his “masterful ability to transform paint into the substance it depicts,” Teagle wrote, to create a striking realism that is “at once surprisingly real and clearly not realistic at all.”

“One of the reasons why he is so important is that he found his voice in a very volatile time in the art world. Painting as a medium and practice was dead. Wayne found a new path forward,” Teagle said. He did so, Teagle said, by looking back to the earliest expressions of modernism — Pierre Bonnard, Paul Cezanne — to propel his art forward, work that would and continue to influence later generations of artists.

A new show planned for January at Manetti-Shrem will explore Thiebaud’s influence on a new, diverse wave of artists, Teagle said, inspired by the waves of young artists who traveled to Davis to seek out the Sacramento master’s work.

“A lot of different artists are influenced by Thiebaud,” Teagle said. “They saw Thiebaud as a modern old master. He is one of the best technical practitioners in art today. They thrill to see an artist who is a master of his craft and is still doing it today.”