Jackpot!

Wayne Thiebaud, known for his whimsical still life prints and paintings, was born on this day in 1920.

Wayne Thiebaud's Jackpot Machine greets us with upraised arm and the promise of fortune. Its form recalls a triumphal arch or perhaps a robotic face with mechanical features. Deriving from the American still-life tradition and contemporaneous with pop art's veneration of everyday objects, this slot machine is both comic and heroic.

Lushly painted in red, white, and blue, and decorated with stars, Jackpot Machine represents a distinctly American dream. In spite of the bright colors and hearty form, there is a peculiar stillness to this painting as we wait for the arm to go down, the fruit to spin, and money to come clanking of of the machine's mouth.

See Jackpot Machine in our traveling exhibition Modernism and Abstraction: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, on view at the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts, through January 6, 2002.

Source: Miranda McClintic. Modernism & Abstraction: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (New York and Washington, D.C.: Watson-Guptill Publications, in cooperation with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2001).

Pictured: Wayne Thiebaud, born 1920, Jackpot Machine, 1962, oil, 38 x 26 7/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase made possible by the American Art Forum and gift of an anonymous donor.