“You’re not allowed to lick paintings in museums, which is cruel when you’re faced with something as mouthwateringly tempting as Wayne Thiebaud’s art,” said Eddy Frankel in The Guardian.
The American artist dedicated his decades-long career to painting cakes and sweets carefully laid out on counters, tempting viewers to “take a big, juicy bite”. But he didn’t just paint to make you drool.
On display at the Courtauld Gallery in central London for his first UK museum show, Thiebaud’s work is both an “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”.
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Thiebaud’s background as a cartoonist and motion picture animator gives the “biggest clue” to where his “kitschy universe” of doughnuts and ice cream sundaes came from. Painting for a mainstream audience gave him the skills to get his ideas across directly and powerfully, “like a cream pie to the face”. Then he met a group of abstract impressionists in the 1950s, and within just a few years everything “clicked”.
His works on display at the Courtauld are “beautifully and thickly painted”. From “oozing cakes” to mustard-drizzled hot dogs, they are “exercises in painterly precision” with a keen awareness of art history, continuing, in his own way, the radical legacy of Cézanne and Chardin. “It’s still life painting at its modern best.”
Thiebaud’s “luscious yet unsettling” still lifes make for an “excellent” exhibition, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. His depictions of ordinary snacks are both “irresistible and brilliantly peculiar”. Below the sweetness – “which is meant to cloy – there’s a tang of melancholy and a dash of Cold War anxiety”.
Sorrow “creeps into unexpected places”, said Florence Hallett in The i Paper, from a solitary slice of leftover pie that “pulls at the heartstrings” to a “sausage having an existential crisis” in “Delicatessen Counter” (1963).
But the “visible brushmarks keep every surface alive”, said Laura Cumming in The Observer, and there’s a “benign delight” in Thiebaud’s celebration of everyday items and his “harmoniously balanced compositions”. Unlike Andy Warhol – whom he first exhibited alongside in New York – he renders each cake or ice cream cone in a row as different from its neighbour, highlighting every item as entirely unique.
“No artist has ever more brilliantly captured the idea that such a trivial object can be beautiful, that it can be – and of course would become a thousand times over in his paintings – the stuff of art.”
Until 18 January at the Courtauld Gallery, London; courtauld.ac.uk
