Wayne Thiebaud, painter of cakes and San Francisco cityscapes, dies at 101

The American artist Wayne Thiebaud, whose luscious, colorful paintings of cakes and San Francisco cityscapes combined sensuousness, nostalgia and a hint of melancholy, has died. He was 101.

His death was confirmed in a statement on Sunday by his gallery, Acquavella, which did not say where or when he died.

Thiebaud was born in Mesa, Arizona, in 1920 and grew up in Sacramento, California. He started out as an animator for Walt Disney and worked as a poster designer and commercial artist in California and New York before becoming a painter. He also was a longtime professor at the University of California, Davis. He retired in 1991 but continued teaching one class a year.

While some took his hot dogs, bakery counters, gum ball machines and candy apples to be examples of pop art, Thiebaud never considered himself to be in the mold of Andy Warhol and did not treat his subjects with the irony pop championed.

The real subject, many critics said, was paint and the act of painting itself: the shimmering color and sensuous texture of thickly applied paint. He laid on paint so heavily that he often carved his signature instead of putting it on with the brush.

In landscape, his most famous subject was San Francisco, whose steep hills he portrayed in a fantasy like way, with spectacular angles and stark shadows.