Lot 16B|Private Collection, United States
WAYNE THIEBAUD (1920-2021)
Star Pinball
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USD 10,000,000–15,000,000
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WAYNE THIEBAUD (1920-2021)
Star Pinball
signed and dated 'Thiebaud '62' (lower right)
oil on canvas
60 x 36 ¼ in. (152.4 x 92.1 cm.)
Painted in 1962.
Star Pinball
signed and dated 'Thiebaud '62' (lower right)
oil on canvas
60 x 36 ¼ in. (152.4 x 92.1 cm.)
Painted in 1962.
WAYNE THIEBAUD (1920-2021)
Star Pinball
signed and dated 'Thiebaud '62' (lower right)
oil on canvas
60 x 36 ¼ in. (152.4 x 92.1 cm.)
Painted in 1962.
Star Pinball
signed and dated 'Thiebaud '62' (lower right)
oil on canvas
60 x 36 ¼ in. (152.4 x 92.1 cm.)
Painted in 1962.
Allan Stone, New York, acquired directly from the artist, 1963
Acquired from the above by the present owner, 1996
Acquired from the above by the present owner, 1996
“Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective, Now through 3 September 2000,” San Francisco Examiner, 23 June 2000, p. C-5 (illustrated).
CBS Sunday Morning: Wayne Thiebaud, 2001 (video; featured).
A. Marton, “Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 15-21 September 2000, p. 23 (illustrated).
J. M. Bonet, “Gran Bodegonista y Cantor de California,” ABC (Nacional), 3 January 2022, p. 56.
CBS Sunday Morning: Wayne Thiebaud, 2001 (video; featured).
A. Marton, “Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 15-21 September 2000, p. 23 (illustrated).
J. M. Bonet, “Gran Bodegonista y Cantor de California,” ABC (Nacional), 3 January 2022, p. 56.
San Francisco, M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, An Exhibition of Paintings by Wayne Thiebaud, July-August 1962.
IX Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, Environment USA: 1957-1967, September-December 1967, n.p., no. 34.
Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Washington, D.C., Phillips Collection and New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Wayne Thiebaud: Retrospective, June 2000-September 2001, pp. 18 and 89, no. 19 (illustrated).
Davis, University of California, Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, Wayne Thiebaud: 1958-1968, January-May 2018, pp. 6, 118 and 159, pl. 44, fig. 50 (illustrated).
IX Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, Environment USA: 1957-1967, September-December 1967, n.p., no. 34.
Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Washington, D.C., Phillips Collection and New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Wayne Thiebaud: Retrospective, June 2000-September 2001, pp. 18 and 89, no. 19 (illustrated).
Davis, University of California, Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, Wayne Thiebaud: 1958-1968, January-May 2018, pp. 6, 118 and 159, pl. 44, fig. 50 (illustrated).
A painterly tour-de-force and a masterpiece of postwar art, Wayne Thiebaud’s Star Pinball is one of the most important paintings of the artist’s career. Executed in the pivotal year of 1962, Star Pinball embodies the enduring appeal of Thiebaud’s iconic paintings, presenting a masterful, large-scale depiction of the nostalgic arcade game, which he captures in rich impasto, expressive brushwork and his iconic candy-colored hues. An impressive work of unmistakable poignancy, it speaks to the artist’s own childhood selling ice cream and hot dogs on the boardwalk in Long Beach, California, and belongs to a series of pinball machines that formed a core part of Thiebaud’s early body of work. With its dazzling colors and patterns, the pinball machine proved to be an enjoyable and challenging painterly exercise, but in Thiebaud’s command it is transformed into visual poetry, touching on aspects of desire and longing, and pleasure and its release, that are fundamental to the very experience of being human.
Alongside Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup paintings and Roy Lichtenstein’s comic-book heroines, Wayne Thiebaud’s paintings of pinball machines, penny arcades, cakes and pies are the iconic image-bearers of an abundant, postwar America. These classic Pop Art paintings are synonymous with the age in which they were created, during the two-decade economic boom of the 1950s and ‘60s. They speak to the ease and abundance of readily-available consumer products, notable for their standardization and affordability, which could be found in diners, coffee shops and fast-food restaurants coast to coast. Like his Pop Art contemporaries, Thiebaud worked in series, and his many paintings of cakes, pies, penny slots and pinball machines seemed to echo the amazing proliferation of standardized consumer products that brought ease and enjoyment to every American. Despite their seemingly matter-of-fact presentation, however, Thiebaud’s paintings never embraced the machine-made aesthetic of Warhol’s silkscreens. Instead, his paintings celebrate the sensuous act of painting itself.
Star Pinball is one of Thiebaud’s most ambitious early paintings, where the brightly-colored pinball machine is silhouetted against a luminous background, and rendered on a large scale spanning five feet tall. Thiebaud clearly delights in its jazzy design – a colorful and joyous blend of five-pointed stars, circles, triangles, colors and numbers. The machine stands at attention, poised on its four slender legs, ready to accept the player’s nickel and spring into action with a whirlwind of flashing colors and sounds. Thiebaud’s sensitivity in capturing the effects of light as it illuminates the machine’s gleaming surface is exquisite, while his nuance in rendering the effects of shadow – which he paints bright blue– is remarkable. While Thiebaud's best work is often technically impeccable, it is also steeped in humor. In Star Pinball, the series of repeating vertical elements seen in the machine’s legs convey perspectival depth but also mimic the rectangular format of the canvas itself, whilst further riffing off a whole host of art historical precedents that range from Frank Stella’s Concentric Squares to Morris Louis’s Stripe paintings to Charles Demuth’s Figure Five in Gold.
Many of Thiebaud’s paintings offer up a glimpse into his own childhood memories. He spent many days and nights working in movie theaters, at the California State Fair, and at Walt Disney and Universal-International Pictures. These early life experiences, along with his job as layout designer and illustrator at the Rexall Drug Company – fundamentally informed the subject matter he painted, and the way in which he did so, for the duration of his artistic career. The very heart of his paintings reflect his abiding affection for and nostalgia of the little rituals and enjoyable moments of American life.
The pinball machine was central to Thiebaud’s earliest body of work, as he first depicted its appearance as early as 1955, with a small series of lithographs that he made, and sold, while working at the California State Fair. These early works zoomed in on the colorful flashing lights, and he used a sort of wavering, colorful Abstract Expressionist technique to convey the lights and patterns. He then made a finished painting of the motif, simply titled Pinball Machine, in 1956. By the early 1960s, however, Thiebaud had discovered his mature style, and in paintings like Star Pinball and Four Pinball Machines (1962; Private Collection), he depicted the colorful machines in a more realistic manner. Furthermore, he made another subtle twist: rather than trying to capture the machine’s flashing colors, he decided to present the mere promise of its colorful lights and sounds, depicting the pinball machine as one would encounter it in the arcade with the lights and sounds not yet activated. Like his cakes and pies, Star Pinball exists in a pristine, immaculate state; always unsullied and never tainted, these iconic paintings are forever waiting for their promise of pleasure to be fulfilled.
Star Pinball was painted in 1962, in what is known to be the greatest year of his early career. In April, Thibaud’s paintings debuted to critical and commercial success at the Allan Stone Gallery, on New York’s Upper East Side. That exhibit was completely sold out, with many of his paintings selling to major collectors like the architect Philip Johnson and the art critic Max Kozloff. It was there that Thiebaud’s Cut Meringues was purchased by Alfred H. Barr for the Museum of Modern Art. Later that year Sidney Janis included Thiebaud’s work in the groundbreaking Pop Art exhibit called The New Realists, which the art critic Harold Rosenberg said “hit the New York art world with the force of an earthquake” (H. Rosenberg, “The Game of Illusion,” in The New Yorker, November 24, 1962, p. 166).
Curators recognized the importance of Star Pinball almost as quickly as it was painted. In the summer of 1963, the curator at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, Ninfa Valvo, approached Thiebaud about a solo exhibition of his work on the West Coast, selecting Star Pinball as one of the paintings to be included there. A few years later, Star Pinball was chosen as one of three iconic Thiebaud paintings for the American exhibition at the influential S o Paulo Biennale of 1967, which was curated by the important MoMA curator William S. Seitz. Entitled “Environment U.S.A.,” Seitz designed the exhibit as a celebration of Pop Art in Latin America. In what reads like a ‘who’s-who’ of the most important Pop Artists of the twentieth century, the exhibition included Thiebaud’s Star Pinball alongside Warhol’s Orange Disaster paintings, Jasper Johns’ Three Flags (1958; The Whitney), Robert Rauschenberg’s Barge (1962-3; Guggenheim) and Buffalo II (1963-4; Private Collection), Ed Ruscha’s Standard Station, Amarillo, TX, (1963; Hood Museum, Dartmouth) and other important Pop Art masterworks by Robert Indiana, James Rosenquist and Roy Lichtenstein.
Star Pinball offers up a visual feast – a showcase for all the color contrasts in Thiebaud’s tool box, and an enjoyable technical exercise featuring the very fundamentals of artmaking (triangles, circles, stars, rectangles and squares). As the chief curator of the Crocker Art Museum, Scott Shields, has recently written: “The pinball machine is the perfect vehicle because it shows the essential Thiebaud aesthetic: highly simplified geometric forms, squares and cylinders and rectangles and cubes, taken from the most unpretentious vernacular form and painted with a dense, textured, dancing richness” (S. Shields, Wayne Thiebaud 100: Paintings, Prints, and Drawings, exh. cat., Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, 2020, p. 33).
Star Pinball is also a painting that is both stilled and quiet. It is unusually noisy, painted in bright colors and evoking the musical and raucous sensations of playing the game, but also stilled in its inactivity. Rather than depict the pinball machine ablaze in flashing lights and changing colors, Thiebaud has presented us with a tantalizing glimpse of the lone pinball machine as it waits for its next player. Star Pinball conjures up the rush of finding a free machine and the feeling of slotting the coin into its slot. Like his cakes and pies, Thiebaud’s Star Pinball exists in a pristine, immaculate state; always unsullied and never tainted – forever waiting for its promise of pleasure to be fulfilled.
Alongside Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup paintings and Roy Lichtenstein’s comic-book heroines, Wayne Thiebaud’s paintings of pinball machines, penny arcades, cakes and pies are the iconic image-bearers of an abundant, postwar America. These classic Pop Art paintings are synonymous with the age in which they were created, during the two-decade economic boom of the 1950s and ‘60s. They speak to the ease and abundance of readily-available consumer products, notable for their standardization and affordability, which could be found in diners, coffee shops and fast-food restaurants coast to coast. Like his Pop Art contemporaries, Thiebaud worked in series, and his many paintings of cakes, pies, penny slots and pinball machines seemed to echo the amazing proliferation of standardized consumer products that brought ease and enjoyment to every American. Despite their seemingly matter-of-fact presentation, however, Thiebaud’s paintings never embraced the machine-made aesthetic of Warhol’s silkscreens. Instead, his paintings celebrate the sensuous act of painting itself.
Star Pinball is one of Thiebaud’s most ambitious early paintings, where the brightly-colored pinball machine is silhouetted against a luminous background, and rendered on a large scale spanning five feet tall. Thiebaud clearly delights in its jazzy design – a colorful and joyous blend of five-pointed stars, circles, triangles, colors and numbers. The machine stands at attention, poised on its four slender legs, ready to accept the player’s nickel and spring into action with a whirlwind of flashing colors and sounds. Thiebaud’s sensitivity in capturing the effects of light as it illuminates the machine’s gleaming surface is exquisite, while his nuance in rendering the effects of shadow – which he paints bright blue– is remarkable. While Thiebaud's best work is often technically impeccable, it is also steeped in humor. In Star Pinball, the series of repeating vertical elements seen in the machine’s legs convey perspectival depth but also mimic the rectangular format of the canvas itself, whilst further riffing off a whole host of art historical precedents that range from Frank Stella’s Concentric Squares to Morris Louis’s Stripe paintings to Charles Demuth’s Figure Five in Gold.
Many of Thiebaud’s paintings offer up a glimpse into his own childhood memories. He spent many days and nights working in movie theaters, at the California State Fair, and at Walt Disney and Universal-International Pictures. These early life experiences, along with his job as layout designer and illustrator at the Rexall Drug Company – fundamentally informed the subject matter he painted, and the way in which he did so, for the duration of his artistic career. The very heart of his paintings reflect his abiding affection for and nostalgia of the little rituals and enjoyable moments of American life.
The pinball machine was central to Thiebaud’s earliest body of work, as he first depicted its appearance as early as 1955, with a small series of lithographs that he made, and sold, while working at the California State Fair. These early works zoomed in on the colorful flashing lights, and he used a sort of wavering, colorful Abstract Expressionist technique to convey the lights and patterns. He then made a finished painting of the motif, simply titled Pinball Machine, in 1956. By the early 1960s, however, Thiebaud had discovered his mature style, and in paintings like Star Pinball and Four Pinball Machines (1962; Private Collection), he depicted the colorful machines in a more realistic manner. Furthermore, he made another subtle twist: rather than trying to capture the machine’s flashing colors, he decided to present the mere promise of its colorful lights and sounds, depicting the pinball machine as one would encounter it in the arcade with the lights and sounds not yet activated. Like his cakes and pies, Star Pinball exists in a pristine, immaculate state; always unsullied and never tainted, these iconic paintings are forever waiting for their promise of pleasure to be fulfilled.
Star Pinball was painted in 1962, in what is known to be the greatest year of his early career. In April, Thibaud’s paintings debuted to critical and commercial success at the Allan Stone Gallery, on New York’s Upper East Side. That exhibit was completely sold out, with many of his paintings selling to major collectors like the architect Philip Johnson and the art critic Max Kozloff. It was there that Thiebaud’s Cut Meringues was purchased by Alfred H. Barr for the Museum of Modern Art. Later that year Sidney Janis included Thiebaud’s work in the groundbreaking Pop Art exhibit called The New Realists, which the art critic Harold Rosenberg said “hit the New York art world with the force of an earthquake” (H. Rosenberg, “The Game of Illusion,” in The New Yorker, November 24, 1962, p. 166).
Curators recognized the importance of Star Pinball almost as quickly as it was painted. In the summer of 1963, the curator at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, Ninfa Valvo, approached Thiebaud about a solo exhibition of his work on the West Coast, selecting Star Pinball as one of the paintings to be included there. A few years later, Star Pinball was chosen as one of three iconic Thiebaud paintings for the American exhibition at the influential S o Paulo Biennale of 1967, which was curated by the important MoMA curator William S. Seitz. Entitled “Environment U.S.A.,” Seitz designed the exhibit as a celebration of Pop Art in Latin America. In what reads like a ‘who’s-who’ of the most important Pop Artists of the twentieth century, the exhibition included Thiebaud’s Star Pinball alongside Warhol’s Orange Disaster paintings, Jasper Johns’ Three Flags (1958; The Whitney), Robert Rauschenberg’s Barge (1962-3; Guggenheim) and Buffalo II (1963-4; Private Collection), Ed Ruscha’s Standard Station, Amarillo, TX, (1963; Hood Museum, Dartmouth) and other important Pop Art masterworks by Robert Indiana, James Rosenquist and Roy Lichtenstein.
Star Pinball offers up a visual feast – a showcase for all the color contrasts in Thiebaud’s tool box, and an enjoyable technical exercise featuring the very fundamentals of artmaking (triangles, circles, stars, rectangles and squares). As the chief curator of the Crocker Art Museum, Scott Shields, has recently written: “The pinball machine is the perfect vehicle because it shows the essential Thiebaud aesthetic: highly simplified geometric forms, squares and cylinders and rectangles and cubes, taken from the most unpretentious vernacular form and painted with a dense, textured, dancing richness” (S. Shields, Wayne Thiebaud 100: Paintings, Prints, and Drawings, exh. cat., Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, 2020, p. 33).
Star Pinball is also a painting that is both stilled and quiet. It is unusually noisy, painted in bright colors and evoking the musical and raucous sensations of playing the game, but also stilled in its inactivity. Rather than depict the pinball machine ablaze in flashing lights and changing colors, Thiebaud has presented us with a tantalizing glimpse of the lone pinball machine as it waits for its next player. Star Pinball conjures up the rush of finding a free machine and the feeling of slotting the coin into its slot. Like his cakes and pies, Thiebaud’s Star Pinball exists in a pristine, immaculate state; always unsullied and never tainted – forever waiting for its promise of pleasure to be fulfilled.