"Published on the occasion of the artist's eightieth birthday and accompanying a major retrospective exhibition, this book brings together 120 of Thiebaud's most important paintings, watercolors, and pastels. Essays by Steven A. Nash and Adam Gopnik trace the course of his career from the 1950s, when he first began to emerge as a significant national artist. They assess Thiebaud's role in the history of American modernism and his place in the tradition of realism, and examine the surprisingly wide variety of art historical sources to which his paintings refer, including Chardin, Sargent, Hopper, Mondrian, Morandi, and Diebenkorn."--BOOK JACKET.