Still
The best painters, I am convinced, can change the way we see the world around us. If, for example, we look attentively at enough still lifes by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin or Paul Cézanne or Giorgio Morandi, to name three obvious masters of the genre, we begin to measure our own experience against their vision, testing our observations of actuality against their inventions. Often, the banal things that populate these painters canvases—kitchen bowls, bruised apples, rustic pottery, and bottles—seem more significant when we encounter them in works of art than when we see them on the kitchen table, so that when we return our focus to real groupings and real objects, we find them wanting, in comparison to the artists inspired fictions. Yet these objects can also resonate in new ways when we come across them in reality because we have encountered them in paintings. Our eyes have been trained by the painted embodiments of the artists perceptions to notice what we might otherwise have ignored.
In our own day, the paintings with which Wayne Thiebaud first established his reputation—his forthright “portraits” of candies, pastries, diner meals, toys, soda fountain treats, and the like—have irrevocably altered our responses to these undistinguished emblems of ordinary America. Knowing that Thiebaud has spent most of his
long life in California allows us to read these paintings as casual, modern-day, West Coast versions of Chardin’s investigations of domestic objects and Morandi’s meditations on oil pitchers and bottles. Just as the former’s kitchen still lifes and the latter’s tightly packed gatherings of what he called “my usual things” force us to consider the formal, Euclidean elegance of copper pots and caffè latte bowls, Thiebaud’s rowdy images compel us to look with fresh eyes at a whole range of uniquely American vernacular phenomena, from gum-ball machines to donuts. Once we have encountered his deadpan celebrations of displays of pie slices, candycounter arrangements, and tidy presentations of small, geometric playthings, we must judge actual pie displays and candy counters against the artist’s declarative images, not vice versa. Thiebaud’s works have not only directed our attention to things we might otherwise have taken for granted or overlooked, but they also have made our vision so much more acute that we find that the real objects his paintings have taught us to see are—paradoxically—less interesting than their painted equivalents.
The crucial factor in this shift of values is neither the artist’s choice of subject matter nor the degree of idealization or illusionism achieved;
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Four Pinball Machines 1962 Oil on Canvas, 67 1/2 x 72 in.
it is the pictorial liberties that the painter takes with his chosen motifs that make us examine actuality with newly sharpened eyes. When we pit our knowledge of real kitchen bowls and slices of pie against the illusory image before us, we become increasingly aware of the differences between the real and the invented. Particularly when the invented image is the same size as the real object (as it often is, in the most compelling still life paintings, including Cubist works), we first concentrate on the artist’s formal manipulations of his chosen subject matter, evaluating the disparity—or the likeness— between the fictive painted object and what we know of its prototype in the real world. The metaphorical
space between the two, like the tension between a convincing illusion and the obvious fiction of painting itself, becomes part of the meaning of the work. Painters such as Chardin, Cézanne, Morandi, and Thiebaud make us aware of the importance of the fragments of the real world that originally triggered their improvisations, but at the same time they also insist that we acknowledge the importance of the language of paint, independently of the subject matter the pigment embodies. Denis Diderot famously described his friend Chardin’s style by saying, “one can’t make things out from close up, while as one moves away the object coalesces and finally resembles nature,”
adding—remarkably, given that he is writing in 1765— ”and sometimes it affords as much pleasure from close up as from a distance.” That is, Diderot reminds us that Chardin, far from simply imitating appearances, celebrated the seduction of paint itself in order to cultivate the resemblance to nature that eighteenth-century audiences demanded of works of art. It’s worth noting that, like just about everyone who has attempted to account for the uncanny power of Chardin’s work, from his own day to the present, Diderot ended up by calling the painter a “magician”; there seems to have been no other adequate word, then, now, or at any time, to sum up Chardin’s ability
Three Machines 1963
Oil on Canvas, 30 x 36 1/2 in.
5
to compel our belief in the truth of his perceptions, even though he never resorted to conventional ways of achieving verisimilitude and always made his audience revel in the material pleasures of pigment and hue.
Thiebaud’s paintings of the 1960s, with their neatly presented catalogues of desserts and soda fountain specials, their gorgeous touch, and delectable palette of colors, achieve their “magic” through a similar conflation of pure pictorial willfulness and apparent accuracy. Like Chardin, Thiebaud makes us believe in the accuracy of his observations while presenting us with a kind of alchemical transubstantiation of generously applied oil paint; unctuous pigment becomes something at once visually alluring and seemingly edible. Thiebaud’s apparently inevitable placement of individual objects, his rigorous deployment of shadows, and his minimal suggestions of settings, along with his subtly intensified color, played against expanses of neutral background, all function abstractly. We can, with only a small shift in our attention, ignore the appealing, often witty subiect matter. We can read these good-humored paintings without identifying the familiar things that Thiebaud has brought to our notice, concentrating, instead, solely on the pictures faultless sense of structure and their supercharged, frequently pastel hues. (California
coastal light illuminates these paintings, whatever their nominal subiects may be.) If we spend enough time with Thiebaud’s early work, we begin to see connections with geometric abstraction in general, and with Hans Hofmann’s robust Slab paintings in particular; with the suave shapes, radiant hues, and joyous mood of Henri Matisse’s Cut-Outs; possibly with the rock-solid, broadly handled paintings of Albert Marquet. And more. Yet no matter how much we turn our thoughts to abstractness and to serious art historical connections, our attention quickly moves to something more earthy and physical. We are almost immediately seduced by the frank voluptuousness of the paint in these otherwise (deceptively) unassuming pictures. It has become something of a cliché, but nonetheless true, to say that Thiebaud makes thick, sensually manipulated oil paint into a perfect equivalent for the icing, pie filling, and ice cream referred to in his early works; more than one commentator has confessed to wanting to lick his surfaces. (A dazzling recent painting of two oversize cheese cubes that pulsed between allusion and pure geometry—a Mondrian-like orchestration of squares against near squares and delicately varied yellows— could be interpreted as a savory, lower-calorie version of the effect.) Yet delicious— in every sense of the word— as Thiebaud’s surfaces are, we soon begin to think about
Two Paint Cans 1987
Oil on Paper Mounted on Board, 14 x 19 7/8 in.
things other than the lush physicality of his paintings. It may, however, be because of the Pavlovian prompts and gastronomic associations triggered by the character of Thiebaud’s paint that the identity of his generating images asserts itself so strongly. We are forced to abandon our high-minded formal interrogation of his paintings in order to move into a world of vernacular pleasures—pleasures that nevertheless seem to be charged with significance because of the severity of the paintings’ compositions, which returns us to our formal considerations. We soon notice that, in his early works, Thiebaud presents most of his subjects in fairly extreme close-up, a compositional decision that, coupled with the economy of his pictures, begins to provoke associations with the conventions of classic American comic strips, with their dramatically focused frames. Thiebaud himself says he always aspired to be a cartoonist—yet another vernacular association that competes with all of the obvious “high art” qualities of his enigmatic paintings, functioning rather like the jazz rhythms and quirky harmonies early twentieth-century composers incorporated into even their most serious works.
“Enigmatic” is the operative word here. Thiebaud has always kept us off balance. Just when we think we have excavated his sources, some new association comes to mind. The frontality of his compositions and the eloquence of the placement of objects within the rectangle make us think about Edgar Degas, while the plainspoken, unembellished quality of his images, along with his down-market subject matter, place us in the terrain explored by such American realists as Thomas Eakins. But where does Thiebaud fit into his own era? Obviously, like many of the most thoughtful, ambitious painters of his generation, he rejected Abstract Expressionism’s angst-driven, contingent, unstable idea of what a picture might be, along with the movement’s belief in the necessity (if not the inherent superiority) of abstraction, in relation to
the inherited tradition of figuration. Yet unlike his older colleagues, similarly defiant Bay Area painters such as Richard Diebenkorn, David Park, and Elmer Bischoff, Thiebaud never seems to have striven to adapt the urgent, sketchy gestures and inflected paint handling of Abstract Expressionism to recognizable imagery. At the same time, the intense physicality of his paintings and their easily identifiable, mass-culture imagery signal his distance, both conceptually and technically, from his near contemporaries, the Color Field painters, despite their shared indifference to Abstract Expressionism’s influence. Like Thiebaud, artists such as Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski, along with the slightly younger, precocious Helen Frankenthaler, sought alternatives to the loaded, emotionally charged paintings of their predecessors, but, unlike Thiebaud, they did so through a new kind of abstraction, turning vast expanses of nearly disembodied glowing chroma into the chief carrier of emotion in their work, all but detached from the material realities of pigment on a surface. Thiebaud’s canvases not only deal with familiar subiect matter and substantial paint handling, but they are also relatively modest in size, in contrast to the often vast dimensions of Color Field paintings.
Because of his choice of subject matter, Thiebaud was linked early on with the Pop artists. In 1962, for example, he was included, along with Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol, in New Painting of Common Objects, organized by Walter Hopps for the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum, in Pasadena, California). This pioneering exhibition, one of the first to concentrate on artists who challenged the prevailing emphasis on abstraction, was an early announcement of what came to be labeled Pop art. Yet, apart from the easily identified, vernacular imagery of his early works, Thiebaud’s approach has little to do with the tenets of Pop. In contrast to the great majority of the painters
associated with the movement, he never seems to have taken as his point of departure the imagery and technical conventions of advertising art; the opulent surfaces of Thiebaud’s early paintings, with their clear memory of both the hand and the tool that laid them down, are at the opposite pole, in terms of their material presence, from the sleek, near anonymity of the Pop artists’ efforts—works that, with some exceptions, often seem to aspire to the condition of the commercially produced and the machine made, and, in Warhol’s interpretation, did not even require the direct participation of the artist.
Yet if it is difficult to categorize Thiebaud in relation to his peers and near contemporaries, it is just as difficult to categorize his own evolution since he first attracted attention for his Americana “still lifes.” He has made searching portraits and complex full-length figure paintings. Though they are less aggressively loaded with paint, which should (but fails to) suggest a sense of greater airiness and mobility, the figure paintings are notably stiff. Individual men and women sit at strange angles to each other and the surface of the canvas. The stiffness is evidently both a choice—think of Egyptian statues and tomb decorations—and a reflection of the intensity Thiebaud brings to painting human subjects, a task he describes today as “incredibly hard,” even after roughly half a century of doing so. The sense of a relentless gaze that generates what we see on the canvas seems to be the equivalent of the close-up viewpoint and dense paint surfaces of the still life paintings. In addition, at intervals, including in recent years, Thiebaud has made vertiginous cityscapes and landscapes, fiercely angular compositions, almost like rationalized accumulations of Cubist planes, held parallel to the surface of the canvas and often painted with broad swipes of relatively thin color. These disorienting images evoke dizzyingly steep streets and looming bluffs and cliffs, as confrontational and as present as the close-up pastries and gum-ball machines, despite the great differences in scale and, sometimes, of surface inflection, in the two series.
Thiebaud has borne witness for six decades to seemingly unremarkable aspects of sun-drenched West Coast America, from pies and lollipops to unbridled canine joy, that might otherwise have been overlooked. His combination of vernacular subject matter and the rigorous formal concerns of what used to be called “high art” has produced a highly individual body of work, as notable for the beauty of its paint as it is for its exuberant, lighthearted imagery. If Thiebaud’s work is difficult to define, it’s simply because there’s no one quite like him.
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Lipstick Row 1964, Oil on Canvas
Jackpot 2005 Oil on Canvas, 48 1/4 x 36 in.
Thiebaud’s desserts are so memorable because these realist images are based on fundamental abstract shapes. He once explained:
“When I painted food products it is interesting to note that they were painted from memory. I did not have the objects in front of me. I made it a point to paint the pies, the gumball machines, the cakes, etc., as I remembered them. And this is perhaps what makes them seem like icons, in a sense. They’re greatly conventionalized.”
Because he used basic geometric forms as the heart of his food, they transcend traditional realism. They possess a graphic force and an abstract quality that make them riveting and unforgettable. Thiebaud learned these techniques while working as a designer and commercial artist in the late 1940s. They became the principles behind his mature, signature style and helped his work bridge the gap between traditional realism and the dominant abstract styles of the 1960s.
Cakes 1963 Oil on Canvas, 60 x 72 in.
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Boston Cremes 1962 Oil on Canvas, 14 x 18 in.
Candy Counter 1969 Oil on Canvas, 47 1/2 x 36 1/8 in.
When I first discovered Wayne Thiebaud’s paintings, it was evident he was a master of singular depth. Due to the draftsman’s unique style and my own biased naiveté, the extent of those depths didn’t crystalize until many years later. Suddenly, an epiphany of vision! The unending myriad of Thiebaud’s paint manipulations unfurled themselves in unapologetic glory. A sight genesis of visual vocabulary emerged.
In a vast ocean, we painters are merely skimming the surface. Wayne Thiebaud swims in very deep waters. Regardless of subject matter, this master chef is alone in vision and execution. His are the brushstrokes of rarified air. Thiebaud is uniquely Thiebaud.
Although a lone wolf on the precipice of creation, the telltale signs of his predecessors remain. Thiebaud is a thief . . . a for in the hen house. I mean this with the utmost respect. Indeed, he readily admits the larceny. Thiefdom exists, yet this painter morphs history into modern singular beauty. Thiebaud’s visual repertoire is Jurassic in the universe of paint. What Thiebaud sees, he owns. All of vision is absorbed... this is a painter who accumulates, synthesizes, and transforms.
Within the sacred walls of historical brethren, Thiebaud transcends the painting medium. Simple beginnings finish at the nth degree. Modestly,the painter is an aptitude composite of universal ingredients. But Thiebaud’s talent consumes predecessors. Like Seabiscuit, he separates himself with the sparkle, flair, and euphoria of a photo finish.
Oh to cook so masterfully! Thiebaud’s endgame is an unbridled visionary treat: Cream rises. His creation is akin to an exquisite Michelin-starred delicacy. We all have the recipe, but we can’t cook with the panache
worthy of a James Beard Award. Thiebaud does ... and so deceptively, he makes it look ever so easy.
A smattering of Thiebaud ingredients are as follows:
Mix the sweet lines of Matisse with the sautéed compositions of Morandi and Degas; add a sprinkle of Fantin-Latour’s flowery precision with a pinch of Picasso; dash a splash of Bonnard’s palette; and whisk with equal parts Rodin gravitas and Ingres empathy.
Voila... the tasty Thiebaud!
Bakery Counter 1962 Oil on Canvas, 54 7/8 x 71 7/8 in.
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Next Page: Pies, Pies, Pies 1961 Oil on Canvas, 20 x 30 in.
Wayne has a genius for finding things so familiar, we often overlook them and certainly don’t think of them as subjects for art. His first paintings of pies and cakes befuddled viewers and critics alike. Even Allan Stone, who introduced them to a national audience, at first thought Wayne was “nutso.”
But his images of sugary treats, often arrayed in rows under bright, artificial light in spare, air-conditioned environments on surfaces suggestive of cafeteria counters or bakery cases, were a hit with New York collectors, curators, and critics in the 1960s, who saw them as examples of Pop Art. Today these formally inventive, lushly painted, architectural “pleasure domes” continue to be a mainstay of his practice.
Similarly, Wayne’s images of freeways begun in the 1980s focus on phenomena we experience every day but wouldn’t at first think appropriate subjects for the kind of intense looking involved in making art. His gritty paintings of cars backed up and 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.
Arising from both memory and observation, these iconic images, falling somewhere on a spectrum between representation, realism, naturalism and what Woyne once described as “actualism,” explore not only the essential nature of things but also the process of seeing itself.
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Heavy Traffic 1988 Oil on
on Wood, 14
16 5/8 in.
Paper Mounted
x
Travelers 1997 Oil on Canvas, 22 x 48 in.
Ripley Ridge 1977 Oil on Canvas, 47 7/8 x 35 7/8 in.
“When Thiebaud wants to stretch for a big effect, he has no trouble with drama, expansiveness, or even a kind of sublimity...Steep precipices that overwhelm human presence and excite a sense of terribilita, danger, or fear are common...Integral with the grandeur of nature, or nature transformed by man, is the power of natural light to illuminate, even dazzle and inspire... The light is more than a matter of energy and science. It is an embodiment of emotion. For Thiebaud it surely is not religious or symbolic in a conventional sense, but is nevertheless celebratory and life affirming.”
In Ripley Street Ridge, executed in 1976, Wayne Thiebaud’s brilliant palette and luscious handling
of rich oil paint create a layered dialogue between realism and abstraction, in which the intensity of light, the play of shadow, and the conversation between architecture, street, and sky capture the true essence of Thiebaud’s beloved San Francisco. Thiebaud has long been recognized as one of America’s most prominent and celebrated artists for his paintings of pies and cakes, delicatessen counters, figure studies, and cityscapes that restructure space and perspective. The improbable geometry of Thiebaud’s San Francisco streetscapes, with their steep hills and dramatic horizon lines, demonstrates the complexities of form and structure inherent in Thiebaud’s practice. The thick impasto and candy-colored accents of paint lend the
work a kaleidoscopic luminosity that brings to mind the iconic compositions of edible goods painted throughout his impressive and storied career. In Ripley Street Ridge, Thiebaud’s acute sensibility for color and texture packs a powerful visual punch, inviting viewers to return, again and again, to examine the sensuous surface. The Whitney Museum of American Art’s recent acquisition of Ripley Ridge (1977), a slightly larger canvas painted the following year— which depicts the very same scene as the present work— further affirms the position of this painting among the most iconic and significant examples of the artist’s oeuvre from this period.
City Views 2004
Triptych, Oil on Canvas
Left panel: 71 3/4 x 48 in.
Center panel: 71 7/8 x 53 7/8 in.
Right panel: 71 3/4 x 48 in.
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“The very first time I ever talked to him, I was looking at a painting of his that had a big date span—like 10 years or something. So I asked him about it. ‘I’m still learning,’ he said. As long as he had a painting in his possession, if he wanted to go back and work on that, he’d do so.
[Thiebaud’s wife and frequent muse]
Betty Jean was often his best critic, I think. I only know this because he would sometimes say at receptions that Betty Jean would tell him that he needed to do a little more work on a painting because it wasn’t quite up to his standards.
He relied on her eyes a lot, and also relied on her as a model. When he started to do figures, he initially did them from memory. A lot of his desserts and food were from memory because he thought it
gave him a distance from reality. But he learned he couldn’t do that with figures because people know the human face so well that they’d know if it’s wrong. So he started to work from models, and because he didn’t have a lot of money at the time, he’d often use family and friends.
He also said, ‘In the past, people were always painted doing something. I wanted to paint them doing nothing, or about to do something, or just having done something, and see what I could get out of that.’ You’d initially think that would to make things boring for the viewer, but it actually engages the viewer more, because you bring your own experience to bear on that person and try to figure out, ‘Did they just have a fight? Or maybe they just don’t like each other? Maybe they’re bored.’ ”
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1959
23 7/8
30
Beach Boys
Oil on Canvas,
x
in.
Wayne Thiebaud was a painter of everyday objects and midcentury Americana. His prolific practice spans over 70 years and has captured the changing time through captivating representations of objects that make our daily lives. Perhaps one of his most recognizable motifs is that of cake, which he elevated to a symbol of joy. Living and working for most of his life in California, Thiebaud was one of the country’s most beloved and recognizable artists.
While Wayne Thiebaud’s practice was most readily associated with Pop art, he was not a typical pop art artist. While the topics he chose, such as bubblegum machines, deli counters, cakes, and hot dogs, among others, may remind the viewer of the Pop art representations critical of consumerism, Thiebaud’s approach was different.
While the topics he picked for his paintings come from the domains of everyday commercial production and consumption, his style, approach to the subject, and symbolism, surpass the recognized tropes of the art movement. His paintings are carefully crafted reminiscences on the old times, with occasional hints of nostalgia and sadness that come through the joyful subjects. The bygone era of his art presents itself in a subtle
approach excluding of harsh critical beat of Pop art. The paintings are filled with objects he remembered from his youth and commercial imagery. He usually presented them in thick radiant colors against pale and empty backgrounds, achieving a halo-like effect.
The quickness of production and seriality typical of the movement is also lacking. Thiebaud was a careful craftsman, similar in approach to the past painters such as Jean-Siméon Chardin or Thomas Eakins. Although carefully crafted, the paintings look nothing like mechanical reproductions. He applied luxurious layers of paint, creating a tactile treat as well as the visual one. Sometimes, he even carved his signature in paint instead of writing it with a brush. A curator of his retrospective in the Museum of American Art in 2001, Marla Prather, said that his oil paint created a great sense of texture in cakes and frostings, that you want to step closer and lick them.
Besides the images of everyday objects, Thiebaud was also a painter of landscapes and people, preserving a delicacy of approach in this subject matter as well. His process of painting people was singular and similar to subdued figurations of painters that emerged around the same time, such as Alex Katz. The effect he was going after, in these lovely detailed but emotionally understated portraits, was the one of meeting strangersyou notice their clothes and posture but have no feelings about them.
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Swimsuit Figures 1966 Oil on Canvas, 72 x 30 1/2 in.
Girl with Ice Cream Cone 1963 Oil on Canvas, 48 1/8 x 36 1/4 in.
Mountains
As much as for their subject matter and color, Wayne Thiebaud’s paintings are truly set apart by their brushwork. His strokes are applied with sensitivity—and precision— and they artfully detail whatever he decides to paint. These are not short, choppy swatches, but long, carefully laid swathes, which the viewer can follow up, down, and sideways. They overtly fill the forms and trace the outlines of desserts, buildings, landscapes, and people, contouring to the object or person to best connote texture and mass. Sometimes this brushwork builds up into expressive areas of impasto. Other times it subtly animates large, flat expanses, with every hair raked into the pigment like the carefully manicured sands of a Zen garden.
At their core, therefore, these are paintings about painting, and while Thiebaud’s subject matter and bright colors may be described as Pop, his brushwork most certainly cannot. This affinity for brushwork and an abiding respect for the artist’s craft sets Thiebaud’s work apart, along with that of other artists of his circle, place, and time. His is a Northern
California sensibility, one distinct from that of Now York artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, who pursued a mechanical—and more cynical—means of paint application. Warhol silkscreened his Campbell’s Soup cans, CocaCola bottles, and celebrities, effacing his own role in the process. Roy Lichtenstein’s comic-book, Ben-Day dots accomplished a similar result, sacrificing painting in favor of a “mass produced” style that linked the artist and the machine. Thiebaud’s paintings, by contrast, are deeply personal and unabashedly handmade, which makes them inherently more optimistic, because they are so obviously labored over and loved. While Warhol seems not to have liked soup, Thiebaud certainly enjoys his pie. This should not imply that Thiebaud’s paintings do not comment on consumerism and the isolation that one can feel even in an oversaturated world. They do. And yet, in their care and undeniable reverence for painting, they are also celebratory, validating art, the role of the artist, and the delicious idiosyncrasies of contemporary life.
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Sandy Cliff (detail) 2013/2018-2019 Oil on Canvas, 48 x
in.
28
So what else do we know about the Mountains series? The labels tell us that many have been painted over a long period, often with a gap of a quarter-century or more between beginning and notional completion. This can be misleading; some of the Mountains have starting dates decades back but have been most intensely worked on quite recently. There’s ample precedent for this. Turner often worked on his paintings right up to the moment the doors of the Royal Academy opened to visitors; Thiebaud’s the same, occasionally exhibiting works that are still drying.
Thiebaud hasn’t identified the Mountains paintings as his favorites of all his work, but for whatever reason it seems clear he’s had a hard time letting go of them. Some have stayed in his studio for decades. I suspect that this may explain the relative paucity of Mountains paintings in the 2000— 01 retrospective. Even the doorstopping Thiebaud monograph published by Rizzoli in 2012 only shows a dozen or so Mountains— roughly five percent—out of a total of some 240 illustrations.
Another thing that struck me about the Mountains series was the general lack of human presence. These mountainscapes are as close to pure abstraction as anything in the Thiebaud catalogue; they present us with a world—to quote Reginald Heber’s famous hymn—“Though every prospect pleases and only man is vile.” It is perhaps significant that after his son Paul’s death in 2010, the human element—the tiny houses, the paved roads—seems totally expunged from Thiebaud’s peaks and ridges. Many artists establish the height and mass of mountains by positioning tiny figures in the foreground; not Thiebaud. This is the artist alone with Nature and his own feelings. In these Memory Mountains, it’s as if Thiebaud has taken a hard look at his up-and-down cityscapes like Ripley Ridge (1977), and detonated a kind of reverse artistic neutron bomb that empties Nature of all human presence and interference— whether highways or dwellings or ploughed farmlands—leaving a still and silent mountainscape in which the only motion is a drifting cloud. The stillness seems appropriate. The artist’s son Paul had a cabin in the Sierras that Thiebaud liked to visit but ceased to after his son died. As I’ve said, there’s an intimation of mourning here, of paternal love and sad recollection of times shared that I find moving.
Left: Passing Cloud 2014/2019 Oil on Canvas, 30 x 24 in.
Right: Blue Ridge Mountain 2010 Oil on Canvas, 48 1/8 x 35 7/8 in.
Winter Ridge (detail) 2010 Oil on Board, 23 3/4 x 23 3/4 in.
“A Farewell to Wayne Thiebaud,” 25
Artist’s Statement, 1-2
“Angel Foods,” 14
"An American Master," 3-7
B Boston Cremes, 11-12
Bakery Counter, 14
“Bakery Counter,” 28
Beach Boys, 23-24
Blue Ridge Mountain, 30
C Cakes, 9-10
Candy Counter, 13
City Views, 22
Canyon Pass, Bibliography
G
Girl with Ice Cream Cone, 26
H
Heavy Traffic, 17-18
“Heavy Traffic,” 17
J Jackpot, 8
P Passing Cloud, 29 Pies, Pies, Pies, 15-16
R Road Through, Contents Ripley Ridge, 21
T Tulip Sundaes, Cover Three Machines, 5 Two Paint Cans, 6 Travelers, 19-20
“Thiebaud: A Celebration,” 23 "Two and One-Half Cakes," 10
W Winter Ridge, Index
“Wayne Thiebaud’s Mountains: An Appreciation,” 29
“Wayne Thiebaud: Ripley
Street Ridge,” 22
Self-Portrait with Suspenders, 1-2 Swinsuit Figures, 25 Sandy Cliff, 27
A
S
F
L
Four Pinball Machines, 3-4
Lipstick Row, 7
Canyon Pass (detail) 2019 Oil on Canvas, 60 x 60 in.
Anapur, Eli. “A Farewell to Wayne Thiebaud - A Painter of the Everyday.” Widewalls, 29 Dec. 2021, www.widewalls.ch/ magazine/wayne-thiebaud-obituary.
Dalkey, Victoria. “Heavy Traffic.” Delicious Metropolis: The Desserts and Urban Scenes of Wayne Thiebaud, by Wayne Thiebaud, Chronicle Books, 2019, p. 99.
Johnson, Hillary Louise. “Thiebaud: A Celebration.” Sactown Magazine, Sactown Magazine, 2022, www.sactownmag.com/ thiebaud-a-celebration/.
Shields, Scott A. “Bakery Counter.” Delicious Metropolis: The Desserts and Urban Scenes of Wayne Thiebaud, by Wayne Thiebaud, Chronicle Books, 2019, p. 57.
Thiebaud, Wayne. “Artist’s Statement.” Delicious Metropolis: The Desserts and Urban Scenes of Wayne Thiebaud, by Wayne Thiebaud, Chronicle Books, 2019, pp. 8–9.
Thomas, Michael M. “Wayne Thiebaud’s Mountains: An Appreciation.” Mountains: 1965-2019, by Wayne Thiebaud, Acquavella/Rizzoli, 2019, p. 18.
Vorhes, Clay. “Angel Foods.” Delicious Metropolis: The Desserts and Urban Scenes of Wayne Thiebaud, by Wayne Thiebaud, Chronicle Books, 2019, p. 53.
“Wayne Thiebaud: Ripley Street Ridge.” Sothebys.com, Allan Stone Gallery, www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ ecatalogue/2019/contemporary-art-day-n10150/lot.109.html.
Wilkin, Karen. “An American Master.” Wayne Thiebaud, by Wayne Thiebaud et al., Rizzoli, 2015, pp. 10–17.
Zakian, Michael. “Two and One-Half Cakes.” Delicious Metropolis: The Desserts and Urban Scenes of Wayne Thiebaud, by Wayne Thiebaud, Chronicle Books, 2019, p. 59.
