But people did take the paintings seriously enough to spend big money for them when they were first shown at the Alan Stone Gallery in New York in 1962, and their value kept rising. I spoke to Wayne Thiebaud in his studio in Sacramento. Well, it's silly, you know. It's fun and humorous and that's dangerous in the art world, I think. It's a world that takes itself very seriously, and of course, it is a serious enterprise, but I think also there's room for wit and humor because humor gives us, I think, a sense of perspective.
Some people see sadness in the toys and in the pies and even in the cityscapes, a kind of longing.
Someone said that toys represent something special. A child's toys are the grandfather's dreams. And the sort of elegance of that in terms of our history and the way we see our evolutionary procedures. But it's also very sensuous, I think, and it offers wonderful opportunities for painting something like, almost like a bouquet of flowers. Maybe it's a little too early or he's not the one to decide that.