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<\/p>\nThe American painter Wayne Thiebaud\u2019s (1920-2021) mouthwatering depictions of glossily iced cakes, slices of cherry pie and deli counters arranged just so, present a thoroughly American reimagining of the traditional genre of still-life. The works came to public attention in the early 1960s, just as Pop art hit the US with what the critic Harold Rosenberg described as \u201cthe force of an earthquake\u201d.<\/p>\n
The 21 paintings that form the focus of the artist\u2019s first museum exhibition in the UK, at the Courtauld Gallery, are almost all on loan from public and private collections in the US, including the Wayne Thiebaud Foundation, established by the artist\u2019s family. The Californian artist is celebrated in his home country, but is little known in Europe; the Fondation Beyeler\u2019s 2023 Thiebaud survey was the German-speaking world\u2019s first encounter with the artist. Recently, the Courtauld became the only UK institution to have a Thiebaud drawing in its collection, and Cake Slices (1963) features in an accompanying exhibition, Delights, of works on paper by the artist.<\/p>\n
Seeing his work first hand is a revelation, says Barnaby Wright, the co-curator of Wayne Thiebaud: American Still Life. \u201cThe first thing you realise is just how extraordinarily painterly it is,\u201d Wright says. \u201cReproduced, it\u2019s flat and slick, but in the flesh it\u2019s not like that at all. Although he\u2019s associated with the Pop art of the 1960s, his real lineage, and where he saw himself and his art coming from, is the earlier tradition of still-life painting.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1961 Thiebaud shared his first exhibition with a fellow unknown artist, Andy Warhol. But for Wright, it is Thiebaud\u2019s relationship to artistic heroes such as \u00c9douard Manet, Paul C\u00e9zanne, and their 18th-century antecedent Jean Sim\u00e9on Chardin, that is most germane.<\/p>\n
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\u201cExtraordinarily painterly\u201d: reproductions of Thiebaud\u2019s works, like Candy Counter (1969), can lack the depth and richness of the originals, the exhibition\u2019s curator says \u00a9 Wayne Thiebaud\/VAGA at ARS, New York and DACS, London 2025<\/p>\n
Thiebaud was profoundly influenced by Manet\u2019s A Bar at the Folies-Berg\u00e8re (1882), one of the Courtauld\u2019s most famous paintings. \u201cWe\u2019re really pleased that you could be looking at Manet\u2019s Bar in one room, and then in another room be looking at one of Thiebaud\u2019s candy, or deli counters,\u201d Wright says.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe definitely sees himself as a painter of modern life in the way that Manet was, or to some degree C\u00e9zanne. He felt that these objects\u2014slices of pie, or gumball machines or pinball machines\u2014had something meaningful to say about the era he was living in,\u201d Wright says, \u201cand that that era, and those objects, would disappear before long, just as surely as those that Manet or Chardin painted had disappeared.\u201d<\/p>\n
Paintings with \u2018empty hearts\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n This undercurrent of melancholy echoes the memento mori intrinsic to the tradition of still-life painting, conveyed in areas of deep, slightly jarring shadow, or the softening ice cream in Three Cones (1964). \u201cHis paintings often have these empty hearts to them\u201d, Wright says. \u201cThe counter will appear bare at points, or where you expect to see a figure there is none; or, there\u2019s a single, rather lonely slice of pie.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite their shared language of \u201ccommonplace objects\u201d, Thiebaud\u2019s sincere commitment to his subject, and to painting itself, contrasts with Pop art\u2019s ironising celebrations of mass production and machine-made advertising images.<\/p>\n The artist honed his approach after meeting one of his heroes, Willem de Kooning, in 1956, who urged him to paint what he knew and cared about. For Thiebaud, this meant drawing on his years as a commercial artist developing in-store product displays for a drug company. He had started out as an \u201cin-betweener\u201d illustrator for Walt Disney while still at school, and the strategies he learned throughout his career were put to use in his paintings, in which he combined \u201ccheap tricks\u201d, such as repetition without uniformity to create \u201ctempo\u201d with lessons gleaned from fine art. He was fond of rehearsing C\u00e9zanne\u2019s instruction to \u201ctreat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone\u201d, describing his slices of pie on a saucer as exercises in geometry; his use of complementary colours to outline objects was informed by Josef Albers.<\/p>\n Thiebaud was an untrained artist, who became an inspirational and dedicated teacher, a career path that he chose deliberately as a means to paint full time, beginning in 1953 with his first post at Sacramento City College. For him, the clarity of thought required to teach was its own education.<\/p>\n America\u2019s vision of post-war abundance had already darkened by 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Thiebaud\u2019s optimistic but wistful paintings chart the beginning of a decade of anxiety that challenged and changed American identity in a way that resonates anew today.<\/p>\n