Wayne Thiebaud (1920–2021)
1962
Oil on canvas
Wayne Thiebaud’s life-size depiction of a jackpot machine confronts us head-on. He had long been fascinated by their strangely human-like form. Rather than a specific model, Thiebaud imagined his own ‘one-armed bandit’, with its rounded coin-slot eye, money-shoot mouth
and lever-arm raised up and ready to take on its players. The reels on his machine record an incomplete line, with a win tantalisingly out of reach. Thiebaud accentuates the Americanness of this icon of popular entertainment by painting it the red, white and blue of the American flag, complete with stars and stripes. It seems to embody the much-debated characterisation of this period in the United States as a golden age of economic optimism.