"The American painter Wayne Thiebaud's (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 "the force of an earthquake"."
"The 21 paintings that form the focus of the artist's 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's family. The Californian artist is celebrated in his home country, but is little known in Europe; the Fondation Beyeler's 2023 Thiebaud survey was the German-speaking world's first encounter with the artist."
"Seeing his work first hand is a revelation, says Barnaby Wright, the co-curator of Wayne Thiebaud: American Still Life. "The first thing you realise is just how extraordinarily painterly it is," Wright says. "Reproduced, it's flat and slick, but in the flesh it's not like that at all. Although he's 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.""
Wayne Thiebaud produced vivid paintings of iced cakes, cherry-pie slices and carefully arranged deli counters that recast still-life within an American context. Twenty-one paintings on loan from US public and private collections form an exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, supported by loans from the Wayne Thiebaud Foundation. The artist enjoys strong recognition in the United States but remained less familiar in Europe before recent surveys. The actual paintings reveal a tactile, richly worked surface that often reads flatter in reproduction. Thiebaud’s imagery sits between 1960s Pop art and a painterly lineage linked to Manet, Cézanne and Chardin.
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