2010.7
Gumball Machine
Artist
Wayne Thiebaud (Morton Wayne Thiebaud)
(Mesa, Arizona, 11/15/1920 – 2021, Sacramento, California)
Title
Gumball Machine
Creation Date
1971
Century
late 20th century
Dimensions
30 1/4 in. x 22 1/4 in. (76.84 cm x 56.52 cm)
Object Type
print
Creation Place
North America, United States
Medium and Support
five-color linocut on paper
Credit Line
Museum Purchase, Barbara Cooney Porter Fund
Copyright
This artwork may be under copyright. For further information, please consult the Museum’s
Copyright Terms and Conditions.
Accession Number
2010.7
This color linocut of a gum ball machine, a recurring motif in Thiebaud’s work, exemplifies his interest in quotidian objects evocative of personal memories. In a 1969 interview, he described such a dispenser as “both a most elementary mechanism and a gadget for stimulating the grandest sort of associations and references.” Thiebaud imbues the mundane with a sense of intangible nostalgia and magical realism through bold colors, dark contours, crisp shadows, and graphic compositional balance—devices characteristic of his early training as an animator and commercial advertiser. The heightened sense of perfection achieved through simplification of form and pristine linearity paradoxically conveys a dreamlike quality of the familiarly generic yet personally specific, and allows the “psychological implications,” as Thiebaud described, to radiate through his work.