In painting as in baking, wet ingredients mix with dry, and you have to know when the thing is done. When he paints in oils, Wayne Thiebaud’s impasto becomes filling and frosting, holding firm against the bright light.
Just a few of Thiebaud’s innumerable paintings of countless sweets are on show at the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen/Basel until 21 May. We are told that these are scenes of longing and delight, of peering into a display counter “not with craving or with hope or even desire, but just a kind of wonder that such things could be.”1 Wayne Thiebaud (1920–2021) is said to have painted his sweets from memory, years after his childhood moving in and out of ‘20s and ‘30s California, and his time doing assorted jobs from set designer to window dresser and dishwasher.
After 1945, he began to work in advertising. But when food is actually being consumed in Thiebaud’s paintings, no one looks terribly happy about it, the couple in Eating Figures (Quick Snack) struggling with their share of ease and plenty.
As his paintings travelled from coast to coast in 2000, Thiebaud complained: “It’s not so much fun to be known as the pieman.” Still, paintings of sweets were his métier (and his bread and butter) right on up to Two Wedding Cakes (2015) and Cupcake Window (2018/2020), shown in Basel together with the early pies.
Unlike Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe, two American painters exhibited at the Beyeler in recent years, Thiebaud, “the Chardin of the cake shops,” is little known here. His paintings seem to fit with stale notions of I-am-a-jelly-doughnut postwar America, though less well into the Easy Rider Americana counterculture that Yann Gross has photographed as it runs through western Switzerland’s Rhône valley.
Thiebaud doesn’t seem to have thought of his work as criticism. Belonging to a rich tradition of confectionary paintings, his food still lifes are not meant to warn us of anything – not death or even mere overindulgence. In Thiebaud’s view, they are history paintings: “I am like Chardin tattling on what we were.”
Of course history also tells us of sugar’s inhumane past, examined by Kara Walker in her 2014 installation “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby,” as well as in her watercolours. What we were.
Thiebaud provides little setting for his neatly arranged sweets. His light strikes the most dramatic pose, as in Juan van der Hamen y León’s bodegones pictures made on the cusp of what historians call the “sugar revolution.”
This is also Thiebaud’s practice in paintings made of and from life. In Two Kneeling Figures, his wife Betty Jean and what must be her double are joined by their raking blue shadows as they kneel beside each other.
A teacher of art for much of his life, Thiebaud liked what could be done with imitation and repetition. We find this also in his cityscapes of San Francisco, and his Sacramento landscapes.
Sun comes towards us as we look down on managed fields and a series of ponds skipping out to a distant sky; instead of rows of pies or Betty Jeans, rows of acrylic crops and trees.
This is California from on high, like Ed Ruscha showed us in his 1967 photographs of an early Sunday morning in Los Angeles, empty parking lots revealing their own man-made geometries.
While Ruscha used a helicopter and a professional photographer, Thiebaud compiled his river delta vistas from bits and pieces of views he knew and sketched. (A few of his sketches are in the exhibition.) Sometimes he used a telescope, but he didn’t truck with photography, saying in a 2017 interview with Apollo:
“I avoid it like the plague; you can tell immediately, even a sniff of photography will show up. You would think it would help, but it’s absolutely the opposite. Photography is not like the way we see at all. Because we’re seeing with two eyes all the time, and that is a human view rather than a mechanical view. Photography, television, video have taken us over, but that’s fortunate in a way because it’s left painting alone as painting, preserved its uniqueness.”
Yet seeing how pies and sitters and ponds are lined with prismatic colours in Thiebaud’s works, you might think that something has gone wrong with the lenses of your own two eyes.
After using prisms to work out that light is colour, Isaac Newton wanted to look at the stars. He found them ringed with colour. The lens of his telescope was breaking up the light; for “as the Sun’s Light is mix’d of all sorts of Rays, so its whiteness is a mixture of the Colours of all sorts of Rays...and whenever any sort of the Sun’s Rays is by any means...separated from the rest, they then manifest their proper Colours.”2
Colours also manifest in works by Thiebaud. We seem to look at his Girl with Pink Hat as if through a prism. Similar to the woodcuts showing prismatic effects made for Goethe by his right-hand man Christoph Sutor, Thiebaud’s lines of pure colour cling onto the edges of things. Often, these fringes of spectral colour are found where the mixed colours of light run into darkness.
Thiebaud used colour as light, and the blue, orange and cadmium undersides of the girl’s chin and hat make the painting seem to glow and hum. When looking closely at a Thiebaud painting, there is the sense that a smack on its side might resolve the vibrating picture.
According to Thiebaud, he came upon this “halation” accidentally, while busy at work on a slice of pie as the ‘50s passed into the ‘60s. In many interviews since then, he’s mentioned the light and palette of Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, as well as those of Matisse and Bonnard.
Despite this sampling of painters, I can’t help but get a sniff of photography.
In 1973, the same year Thiebaud painted the technicolor girl in her hat, Franz Gertsch began taking photographs of a group of friends living together in Lucerne. He’d then project a slide of the photograph directly onto the canvas as he painted. In a few of these snapshot paintings, the friends are readying to go out.
Marina, having painted her own face, helps Luciano with his. Going through the lens of Gertsch’s camera (not to mention his projector), the colours of light have broken apart. The white-lace bathroom curtain has dispersed into fringes of red, yellow and blue; areas of shine take on a prismatic gleam; and Marina and Luciano’s shadows on the wall are haloed with spectral colour.
There are ways of fixing such optical aberrations, but as Thiebaud also knew, sometimes you have to be wrong to get it right.
Near the end of the Basel exhibition is a pair of shoes à la Van Gogh, except a good deal slicker. In reviews of the show, as in the writing on Thiebaud at home, the focus is on the luscious sweets. I think instead about how much anyone can say of their own influences, when the lens always distorts.
Joan - thanks Beatrice for these light breaks. A striking record - I'll remember the colourful pies, and
the figures (quick snack) and interesting to hear of the long lived painter, Wayne Thiebaud
Superb - light, witty, and informative, though I must admit I would never purchase one of Thiebaud's paintings to adorn one of my own walls. Thank you.