Roast Beef Dinner (Trucker's Supper)

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Roast Beef Dinner (Trucker's Supper)

Artist Wayne Thiebaud (American, 1920-2021)

Date1963

DimensionsPainting: 20 × 24 in. (50.8 × 61 cm)
Frame: 24 1/2 × 28 1/2 × 1 1/2 in. (62.2 × 72.4 × 3.8 cm)

MediumOil on canvas

ClassificationPaintings

Credit LinePurchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey

Object number

2009.65

Not on View

Label TextCommon objects become strangely uncommon when removed from their context and ordinary ways of being seen. —Wayne Thiebaud The quintessential truck stop meal of an open-faced roast beef sandwich and French fries (plus bread and butter on the side!) is here laid out as a still life of simplified formal elements—circular plates, cylindrical glass, rectangular sandwich, square slices of bread—to present a complex and seductive painted surface. The viewpoint is such that we could almost pull up a chair and sit down to this hearty fare. Wayne Thiebaud's paintings of food and consumer goods (cakes and pies, gumball machines and lipsticks) first emerged in mature form in 1961–62 and have become a familiar part of our visual landscape. His inclination towards depictions of commonplace objects from middle-class America—decidedly "blue collar" subjects—manifested itself in the mid-1950s, before the romance with similar consumer subjects that characterized the Pop Art movement of the 1960s. Unlike most other Pop artists, he treated the everyday trappings of ordinary America, particularly diner culture, with affection rather than cynicism.Published ReferencesCoplans, John, Wayne Thiebaud, Pasadena: Pasadena Art Museum, 1968, exhibition catalog, p. 56, no. 29.

Phoenix Art Museum, Wayne Thiebaud: Survey 1947-1976, Phoenix: Phoenix Art Museum, 1976, exhibition catalog, pl. 31, p. 92.

Teagle, Rachel, Margaretta Lovell et. al, Wayne Thiebaud, 1958-1968, Davis: Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, 2018, Oakland: University of California Press, 2018, p. 92, pl. 21 (col.).

“Sweeping Retrospective of Thiebaud’s Career Planned,” Sentinel-Tribune, November 9, 2020, p. 5.

Exhibition HistoryPasadena Art Museum; Minneapolis, Walker Art Center; Cincinnati, The Contemporary Arts Center; San Francisco, Museum of Modern Art; Salt Lake City, Museum of Fine Arts of the University of Utah, Wayne Thiebaud, Feb.-Oct. 1968, no. 29.

Phoenix Art Museum; Oakland Museum; Los Angeles, University of Southern California Art Galleries; Des Moines Art Center, Wayne Thiebaud: Survey 1947-1976, 1976, no. 31, repr. pl. 31.

Toledo, Toledo Museum of Art, Speaking Visual: Learning the Language of Art, Oct. 31, 2014-Jan. 25, 2015.

Davis, Manetti Shrem Museum at the University of California, Davis, Wayne Thiebaud 1958-1968, January 16, 2018-May 14, 2018.