Some people can stroll through a city for hours just gazing into shop windows. American artist Wayne Thiebaud was one of those people. It’s no wonder he became famous for painting cakes and pies that look like they’re on display in a mid-century bakery.
Thiebaud wielded a palette knife as if he were spreading frosting. Clearly, he loved the physicality of paint.
Painting is more important than art. We don’t know what the hell art is, though we think we do. Whenever one of my students says he’s off to do his art, I say, “Not so fast.”
Wayne Thiebold, “Wayne Thiebold: A Paintings Retrospective,” 2000
Inspired by the impasto technique of Titian, Thiebaud liked to explore what happens when the relationship between paint and subject matter comes as close together as possible. If oil paint looks glossy and gooey, does it visually “become” chocolate frosting?
In Cakes, he also rimmed each dessert with multiple colors of equal intensity. These thin lines appear to quiver because bold colors are competing for your attention.
Wayne Thiebaud, the Museum of Modern Art interview, 1962Today we are self-conscious about our still life pictures. It’s easier to celebrate the 18th-century copper pots of Chardin. We are hesitant to make our own life special….to applaud or criticize what is especially us.
My interest in painting still lifes is traditional and modest in its aim: I hope that it allows us to see ourselves looking at ourselves.
The sweet rise of a modern master
Wayne Thiebaud began his career as a cartoonist and cites Krazy Kat as an influence. It almost goes without saying that he interned in Walt Disney’s animation department while still in high school.
Following college, he spent many happy years working as an advertising art director before serving as an illustrator in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II.
After the war, Thiebaud returned to school to pursue a master’s degree. His “serious painting,” though brashly modern, is rooted in tradition. Like Chardin, he favors beautifully textured still lifes. Like Picasso, he loves circles, cones, and cubes. And like Matisse, he believes a little joy goes a long way.
Depicting sweet treats is risky, though, because the art world takes itself very seriously. “I think there’s room for wit and humor,” he said. “Humor gives us a sense of perspective.”
Is this Pop Art?
Not to my eye. Thiebaud doesn’t convey the tongue-in-cheek irony that characterizes Pop Art. Moreover, he works from life, not media images. “Of course, you’re thankful when anyone calls you anything,” he once said. “But I never really felt a part of Pop.”
There’s a nostalgic element in his work. And you see it in those beautiful blue halos and the kind of light that his work always is filled with—this really lush light.
There’s a sense almost of memory. It’s not something that you perceive as Pop, which is very much about the here and now.
Art critic Michael Kimmelman, SF-MOMA audio stories
In 1972, Thiebaud relocated his studio to San Francisco’s Potrero Hill. There, he did for the city’s steep boulevards what he had done for pastries: he made them look even more mesmerizing than they are.
In his cityscapes, the built environment stands in staggering contrast to San Francisco Bay. Streets plunge like roller coasters, leaving me half-convinced that pedestrians are hanging on for dear life.
At first, I painted right on the streets, trying to get some of the drama I felt about the city and its vertiginous character. But that didn’t seem to work. The reality was one thing, but the fantasy and the exploration of it was another.
Wayne Thiebaud, the PBS NewsHour, 2016
In Circle Street, the boulevard recedes into the distance before snapping back to the surface of the canvas. It feels like an American take on a Chinese landscape painting: you see nearby trees and distant vistas simultaneously.
Every element in the picture is touched by sunshine. I’d swear the gloomiest day Thiebaud ever painted was only partly cloudy.
The surreal commute
While Thiebaud was presenting slides of his cityscapes during a university lecture, an audience member called out, “Streets aren’t that steep!”
The artist shot back, “Have you ever been to San Francisco?”
Thiebaud captures the city’s quirks with playful absurdity. In Uphill Streets, the vehicles look like toys compared to the towering buildings. Still, wouldn’t it be fun to be a kid again, riding in that yellow school bus?
In Freeway Curve, he tips the picture plane so we aren’t just watching traffic, we are in traffic. If the goal was to evoke the dizzying experience of driving on an eight-lane California freeway, this white-knuckle perspective nails it.
Wayne Thiebaud has a genius for finding things so familiar, we often overlook them and certainly don’t think of them as subjects for art.
His gritty paintings of cars inching along at rush hour or speeding on dizzying cloverleaf interchanges veer from a kind of slapstick comedy to menacing parables of monotonous modern life, inviting us to reconsider an environment in which we spend much of our lives.
Art critic Victoria Dalkey, “Thiebaud: Delicious Metropolis,” 2019
There’s something about diners
Despite its brightly-colored conviviality, Thiebaud’s Cold Case has a melancholy vibe. Long, blue shadows are beginning to form. It’s closing time and these dressed-up desserts have nowhere to go. “Choose me” they seem to be saying.
Painting a row of cakes the way they are displayed on a lunch counter suggests some rather obvious notions about conformism, mechanized living, and mass-produced culture.
But some surprising things are also present….how alone these endless rows can be….a kind of lonely togetherness. Each piece of cake has a heightened loneliness of its very own, giving it a specialness in spite of its regimentation.
Wayne Thiebaud, 2019
Thiebaud’s still life paintings capture modern life with such exquisite artistry, it’s easy to “see ourselves looking at ourselves.” I think of him whenever I’m in a coffee shop full of people, alone together, fixated on their screens. In those moments, I buy a few slices of cake to take home with me.
