{"id":484409,"date":"2025-10-09T01:34:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-09T01:34:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/484409\/"},"modified":"2025-10-09T01:34:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-09T01:34:10","slug":"wayne-thiebaud-review-staggering-still-lifes-to-make-your-mouth-water-art-and-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/484409\/","title":{"rendered":"Wayne Thiebaud review \u2013 staggering still lifes to make your mouth water | Art and design"},"content":{"rendered":"

You\u2019re not allowed to lick paintings in museums, which is cruel when you\u2019re faced with something as mouthwateringly tempting as Wayne Thiebaud\u2019s art. The American pop pioneer dedicated his long career to cakes, sweets and gumball machines, a visual world of treats and candies laid out in American diners and on deli counters, tempting viewers to commit the ultimate crime and take a big, juicy bite.<\/p>\n

But he didn\u2019t just paint for the sake of getting you salivating. His work (here at the Courtauld in his first ever UK museum show) is both an ultraserious take on the material history of painting, a sort of update on the long legacy of the still life, and a deep dive into burgeoning consumerism and the capitalistic euphoria of the mass-produced, mid-century American dream.<\/p>\n

His background offers the biggest clue to how he created his kitschy universe of pastel pastries and gloopy cherry pies. He came to art via illustration and animation, becoming an apprentice at Walt Disney Studios before going on to work as a cartoonist and motion picture animator. When you paint for a huge, mainstream audience, you get a firm grasp on directness and legibility, on how to get your ideas across immediately, like a cream pie to the face.<\/p>\n

Delicious \u2026 Thiebaud\u2019s Cakes, 1963. Illustration: National Gallery of Art, Washington\/Wayne Thiebaud VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS<\/p>\n

Then in the 1950s he met Elaine and Willem de Kooning<\/a> and a bunch of other abstract expressionists and hey presto, you\u2019ve got a flavour combination that works: a background in art for a big audience, and a knowledge of modern, conceptual experimentation. Delicious.<\/p>\n

The earliest works here, from 1956, are of a butcher\u2019s counter and a pinball machine \u2013 quintessential Thiebaud themes \u2013 but the marks are thick and grubby. It\u2019s all dark, filthy, almost pushing towards abstraction. They\u2019re not quite there, too muddy to get their ideas across properly.<\/p>\n

But within five years, it all clicked. By 1961, it looks like Thiebaud. A bowl of cereal, some candied apples, a row of oozing cakes, five hotdogs, a cup of coffee \u2013 all captured in cold whites, steely greys, and the luminous yellows and pinks of lemon meringues and berry coulis. They are staggering still lifes, beautifully and thickly painted. They\u2019re also exercises in painterly precision, in exploring the geometry of consumable goods. Pies are just triangles, cakes are cylinders. It\u2019s very, very art historically aware, a series of riffs on C\u00e9zanne and Chardin. Look at those gumball machines, spheres within spheres, uncountable, precise, beautiful. It\u2019s still life painting at its modern best.<\/p>\n

A slice of American life \u2026 Four Pinball Machines, 1962. Illustration: Acquavella Galleries\/Wayne Thiebaud VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS<\/p>\n

It is also hugely conceptual. This is a slice of American life, it\u2019s the economic boom of a world power, it\u2019s all of the consumerism and postwar capitalism of the US expressed in lush images of delis and diners and the goods they were flogging. He is elevating the mundane side of American life to an unprecedented level of historical, aesthetic importance.<\/p>\n

That is why pop artists loved him, and why he was included in so many pop exhibitions: it\u2019s consumerism as subject and medium. But it\u2019s not slick and detached like Warhol, it\u2019s not tossed off and reproducible, it\u2019s something more serious than that.<\/p>\n

A visual world of treats \u2026 Delicatessen Counter, 1963. Illustration: Julia Featheringill\/Wayne Thiebaud VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS<\/p>\n

And that mixture, that conflict, is a blank slate into which you can read endless ideas. These paintings are so easy to interpret, but so beautifully done that they can be about almost anything. Want them to be about consumerism and commercialism? You got it. Want them to be about America? Easy. Geometricism, art history, the physical nature of paint? Go for it, it\u2019s all of these things and none of them.<\/p>\n

The show only goes up to 1969, which means you\u2019re somehow left hungry for more of his sickly sweet and waist-bulgingly calorific painting. That\u2019s what Thiebaud does, he makes gluttons of us all.<\/p>\n

Wayne Thiebaud: American Still Life is at the Courtauld Gallery, London<\/a>, from 10 October to 18 January<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You\u2019re not allowed to lick paintings in museums, which is cruel when you\u2019re faced with something as mouthwateringly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":484410,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3939],"tags":[4021,4020,4022,77,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-484409","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-design","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=484409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484409\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/484410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=484409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=484409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=484409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}