Wayne Thiebaud was born in 1920 and grew up in California, so his childhood and adolescence were lived during the Great Depression. Although the Thiebaud family did not suffer Steinbeckian deprivation, it is perhaps no surprise that when he became a painter around the late age of 40, he chose as his personal theme something rare and longed for from his youth: cakes and pastries. In his abundant displays of sickly icing and sugary fillings there can be traced the yearning of a young boy, face pressed against the baker’s window. He hadn’t been able to satisfy his sweet tooth then – he would sneak into confectionery stores to see if anyone had dropped a candy on the floor – so he would do so now with fondant-coloured paint.
Thiebaud, who died in 2021 aged 101, did not just paint confectionery and patisseries, he could be a distinctive portraitist and landscapist too, but the neon-lit abundance of postwar America – bubble gum and ice cream, pinball and slot machines – held him in thrall. Thiebaud was clear about the “Americanness” of his pictures and in this he shared a sensibility with Edward Hopper: where Hopper painted the melancholy and ennui of sparsely populated diners, Thiebaud painted their contents.
For all that consumer products were his subject, as they were for the pop artists he slightly predated, he painted them with one eye on the past. His pictures were part of a historical still-life tradition harking back to Dutch Golden Age paintings, the more poetic works of the 18th-century French master Jean-Siméon Chardin and, later, Cézanne, who claimed that “with an apple, I will astonish Paris” (Thiebaud substituted a piece of pie). For them, still-lifes were about bounty but about painting too. As they were for Thiebaud, who acknowledged both his debt to earlier painters and that, whether he was painting cakes or faces, “the problems are inherently the same – lighting, colour, structure”.
Indeed, he recalled a teenage part-time job at a Long Beach café named “Mile High and Red Hot”: “I remember seeing pies laid out, processed food that I’d worked on, so I started painting these triangles and turning them into pies. I thought, ‘My God! I’m done in! Nobody will ever take me seriously!’ Then I found I couldn’t leave it alone, it was so real to me.”
Thiebaud’s early still-lifes from the 1960s, his breakout period, are the subject of a choice new exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery. It represents the first museum exhibition of his work in Britain, a reflection of his relative anonymity here: there are none of his paintings in a British public collection. The fact that he spent most of his life in Sacramento was another contributing factor, since the big movements in 20th-century American art, abstract expressionism and pop art were largely East Coast affairs. Although Thiebaud spent a year in New York in 1956-57, and became friends with the likes of Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, he disliked the “churchy feeling of a lot of New York painting” with its theories and chin-stroking seriousness.
His route into painting was different from that of most of his peers. As a 16-year-old he had a summer job in the animation department of Walt Disney Studios, drawing “in-betweens” – individual frames of cartoon characters for the animated films. He went on to study commercial art and illustration before war broke out. In the Air Force he was spared combat and worked in the Special Services Department as a cartoonist for the base newspaper before being transferred to the First Air Force Motion Picture Unit, commanded by Ronald Reagan. After the war, he worked for Universal-International Studios as a designer of movie posters and later as an advertising art director for a drugs company. When he turned to fine art, he approached it with the egalitarianism gained through experience: “I don’t like the term ‘artist’. It’s a term I’m uncomfortable with, but I love the idea of being a cartoonist, a draftsman, a designer, a painter.”
His paintings – brightly coloured, with clear outlines, no backgrounds, strong shadows, clarity of composition – show the lessons he had learned as a graphic artist. In the late 1950s, he tried his hand at some gestural paintings under the influence of his New York friends, and in 1962 he was exhibited alongside Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Ed Ruscha but Thiebaud determinedly stood outside the abstract expressionist and pop schools. “I’m just essentially a traditional representational painter,” he said.
Unlike Warhol, Thiebaud’s paintings were not meant to be read as a critique of American consumerism but as something more personal. Some of the paintings in the exhibition show near-empty delicatessen counters, or a single slice of pie on a shelf, and reflected his own experience that times of plenty could be transient and that even a cornucopia could be emptied. So a lonely piece of cherry pie becomes a symbol of melancholy. “From when I worked in restaurants, I can remember seeing rows of pies, or a tin of pie with one piece out of it. Those little vedute [views]… were poetic to me.” Even as he painted his hand-baked fancies, supermarkets filled with packaged industrialised food were taking over Main Street. A dollop of nostalgia was one more Thiebaud ingredient.
Although Thiebaud made one corner of Americana his own, he was not an isolationist. He travelled widely and was a regular visitor to Wimbledon, even bringing over some of his art students from UC Davis, where he taught for many decades, for a week of tennis and art. America has no real history of still-life painting, so the European connection was important to him: “I’m very influenced by the tradition of painting and not at all self-conscious about identifying my influences.” From Giorgio Morandi, the Italian painter of bottles, he took lessons in how to give mundane objects a sense of monumentality; from Manet he borrowed the counter the barmaid stands behind in the Courtauld’s own Bar at the Folies-Bergère; from Cézanne he learned how to make geometric forms expressive. The Frenchman had famously declared that a painter should “treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone”, and a Thiebaud slice of cake on a plate is, after all, nothing more than a triangle atop a circle.
It is these formal concerns that stop his pictures descending into kitsch adjacency – lollypops, pies and pinball machines can be serious entities too. As Thiebaud noted: “Common objects become strangely uncommon when removed from their context.” His Five Hot Dogs (1961) is a case in point. It shows a row of the diner staple, each a shiny dark pink with the obligatory smear of mustard, laid out on a starkly lit white background, and is both an exercise in solving what Thiebaud called “a conscious problem in design and space” and a game in which his paint mimics the juiciness of the food itself (something that distinguished him from his pop art colleagues and their fixation with mechanical reproduction). Indeed, for some of his cake and pie pictures, Thiebaud added a commercial thickening agent to his pigments to make them more luscious. The result was to turn fast food slow – look before you eat, the pictures say. Not everyone saw his point: his five hot dogs sold for $500, leading one wag to ask: “Would they have paid $800 for eight?”
Because, for Thiebaud, a pie was never just a pie nor a hot dog just a sausage in a roll. His deceptively simple pictures became an integral dish in the buffet of modern American art.
Wayne Thiebaud: American Still Life
Courtauld Gallery, London WC2
Runs until 18 January 2026
[Further reading: Frida Kahlo’s multi-million dollar moment]
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This article appears in the 16 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Emperor