Rediscovering Wayne Thiebaud
A tribute to America's most beloved painter of foodstuffs, one year after his passing at the age of 101 🍰
Welcome to the latest issue of Weekly Special, a food-art newsletter by Andrea Gyorody.
Hello and happy holidays! I hope this email finds you well, having survived gatherings with family and/or the worst of the arctic weather (is it still cold out there beyond California??). Either way, I hope you’re as full of holiday treats as we are. We had a week of latkes and donuts, capped off with the best Chrismukkah meal of all, a dim sum feast from Din Tai Fung. Life is good.
For this last issue of 2022, I considered some kind of listicle — best food-artworks I’d seen this year, best new books on food art, etc. — and then I realized I’d been sitting on the almost-finished tribute to Wayne Thiebaud that I began writing in January. He died a year ago yesterday, on Christmas Day, 2021, at the inspiring age of 101, and it seemed as good a moment as any to finally finish this remembrance. With the possible exception of Claes Oldenburg, there has been no more prolific an artist dedicated to images of food than Thiebaud, who, like Oldenburg, will no doubt appear in Weekly Special again and again, as no single post could possibly do justice to his oeuvre.
Here’s a belated first taste. Let’s dig in.
Rediscovering Wayne Thiebaud
A year ago, when I first read that Wayne Thiebaud had died, my reaction was, Whoa, he was still alive? (When you live to 101, I’m guessing you encounter this kind of incredulity a lot.) My second thought was, I love his work and I’ve seen a good deal of it, so why do I know so little about him? Thiebaud feels ubiquitous, his paintings probably recognizable to a broad swath of the American public, but in all of my coursework in modern and contemporary art, never once did a professor of mine show his paintings or drawings in class, nor have us read anything about him. I’ve tacitly absorbed Thiebaud, encountering his work in museums (and museum gift shops) and on the internet and in Facebook birthday posts by my friend Katia Zavistovski (who you may remember as the author of this fantastic WS guest post about Vija Celmins, a kindred spirit of Thiebaud in her early days).
Why is Thiebaud absent from the academic canon, overshadowed by Warhol and Lichtenstein and a handful of other Pop stars? I pondered this question in the weeks after his passing, reading more about him to fill in my own severely lacking knowledge. (I especially loved this well-researched profile by Martin Kuz, published in the October-November 2010 edition of Thiebaud’s hometown monthly, Sactown Magazine.) I came to understand that the reasons for Thiebaud’s back burner positioning are several, and in unpacking why he hasn’t been more prominent in scholarly art history, I also found new reasons to love his work.
Thiebaud’s sidelining begins with the mantra of real estate agents everywhere: Location, location, location. You know how the New York Times publishes an annual piece in which they “discover” that LA has art and food worth the nation’s attention? Well, that East Coast cultural bias has deep, deep roots. Thiebaud was a California artist through and through, and the canon of mid-century art has always been myopically centered in New York, despite loads of art history produced in the last few decades aiming to upend that misconception. Thiebaud debuted his food paintings in New York in 1962, attracting positive critical attention and selling works to major collections, including MoMA, which bought from that show his delectable painting Cut Meringues. But he didn’t live in the city (save for a sabbatical year in the late ’50s) and wasn’t really part of the brash, incestuous milieu that eventually became known as Pop.
Thiebaud’s physical and emotional distance from Pop didn’t stop galleries and critics from aligning his work with it, though, as a lazy shorthand for what he was up to. The art world likes to periodize and categorize, smushing a bunch of artists together whose work is actually quite diverse. Sure, sometimes these artificial groupings into “styles” or “movements” can help articulate the attitude of a historical moment. But just as often, these groupings flatten difference and make it harder to contend with what we’re looking at because it doesn’t totally conform to what we think we know about it based on whatever group it supposedly belongs to.
Thiebaud has suffered this art-historical smushing because his work, at surface level, appears Pop enough: his still lifes capture everyday objects in a relatively straightforward way, akin to Oldenburg’s lumpy sculptures of cheeseburgers and ice cream sundaes, Warhol’s soup cans and bananas, and Lichtenstein’s glasses of Coke and bowls of fruit.
From the dawn of Pop to the present, however, there’s been debate about what Pop is all about. Some argue that it offers a critique of capitalism and industrial production and the increasingly oppressive ubiquity of advertising, and others argue that any such critique is mere projection, that Pop is celebratory or observational, not political. (I tend to believe that these positions aren’t mutually exclusive, and the ambivalence of the work mirrors our own ambivalence — the way we yo-yo between pleasure and guilt — as consumers under late capitalism.)
Whatever you think Pop is, Thiebaud’s work is something else. Where Pop is deadpan (whether political or not), Thiebaud is sincere, nostalgic, melancholic. As Michael Kimmelman wrote in his obituary in the Times, “To Mr. Thiebaud, the humble objects and everyday people and friends he painted were touching and deserved respect. Like him, they remained true to themselves, a quality his art celebrated.”
His art also celebrated the wonder of paint on canvas. Look at the brushstrokes in Cut Meringues and tell me this isn’t an artist who loves his craft — an artist who would later say, “it has never ceased to thrill and amaze me, the magic of what happens when you put one bit of paint next to another.” It’s the magic of light and shadow, which, in Thiebaud’s hands, feels pointedly modern, with swoops of meringue rendered in thick brushstroke, almost like a duck-rabbit visual experiment where the strokes are mere paint and then you squint and all of a sudden they’ve transformed into meringue, only to deflate back into luscious brushstroke again.
That painterliness separates Thiebaud from his Pop contemporaries, and also from the uncomplicated, feel-good kitsch of Norman Rockwell, another artist who seems superficially related in his focus on Americana. Thiebaud’s materials announce themselves in a way they never do in Rockwell, where paint is merely a vehicle for storytelling, always subservient to the image. (To that point, Thiebaud talked of being inspired, somewhat surprisingly, by de Kooning, whereas Rockwell, according to an anecdote told by his son, was utterly baffled by the same.)
Thiebaud also isn’t afraid to darken a counter of fluffy meringues with heavy cast shadow, a device he often uses to introduce both dimension and mild foreboding into his paintings, bringing the vibe closer to the urban alienation of Edward Hopper than the small town idyll of Rockwell. One of my favorite Thiebaud paintings knits all of these distinctions together, articulating both his penchant for subtle disquietude as well as his non-Pop-ness, his singularity among peers who preferred coolness and detachment.
It's a simple, straightforward painting of a roast beef dinner, a "trucker's supper," according to the subtitle of the work, which is in the collection of the Toledo Museum of Art. Unlike the many Thiebaud paintings of dessertscapes, which seem to barely acknowledge an embodied viewer, this dinner is set for us. Neatly arranged on a white expanse of table, we have a generous slab of roast beef coated with gravy, a pile of steak fries, and a modest tomato-and-lettuce salad, complete with two slices of white bread topped with two generous pats of butter, and a full glass of milk to wash it all down. The cast shadows are heavy, suggesting that we're facing strong light coming from somewhere in front of us—which means we're probably not sitting at a diner counter, nor at a side-lit table by windows looking out onto the street.
Where, then, are we supposed to be? This might be grossly modernist of me, but I think we're in Thiebaud's studio, or, if that seems too intimate, then in the space of the art gallery. Where else is there such slippage between thick, glossy oil paint and a slick of brown gravy or a plop of salad dressing? Thiebaud loved the familiar and the everyday, but his works never aim to fool you into thinking they're anything but paintings, representations of things quite apart from the things themselves. He emphasizes that here even in the white ground, which, far from being flat and undifferentiated negative space, is activated with thick brushstrokes that encircle each of the elements of the meal, making their forms pop.
The sight of a real roast beef dinner hits me in the nose and the gut, no doubt triggering brain signals that generate saliva and stomach rumbles. This painting of a roast beef dinner has an entirely different effect: set for one, it's enticing in theory but also a bit lonely, familiar but also defamiliarized in its lack of context (the white tabletop seems to go on forever) and in the combination of bright light and stark shadow, which gives the illusion that everything is levitating. This roast beef dinner strikes the eye and the heart more than the gut, engaging curiosity and nostalgia, maybe even empathy when we imagine the trucker, out on the road and apart from his family, who would have sat down to this kind of meal when Thiebaud painted it in 1963.
For Further Eating
Let’s end this issue on a sweet note, shall we? Contemplating Thiebaud’s sea of meringue pies and anticipating the avalanche of citrus awaiting us at January farmer’s markets put me in mind of key lime pie, which made me realize that, despite keenly following Nicole Rucker’s rise in the LA food world, I’d never had a taste of her signature version. So I paired a visit to MOCA with a stop at Grand Central Market, where Rucker runs the bakery stand Fat & Flour.
I ordered my slice ahead of time to ensure they wouldn’t run out, but then asked the reluctant guy behind the counter to let me photograph the whole pie because it was mesmerizing and a lot sexier than my boxed slice.
See?
The pie itself did not disappoint, its sweetness expertly calibrated to complement the tart key limes. The bottom was a teensy bit soggy, but I prefer that to a hard, overbaked cookie crust that requires a jackhammer and threatens to strike neighboring parties (or worse, wind up on the floor), and the silky smooth custard and airy meringue were delicious enough to forgive minor flaws elsewhere.
Lest you non-Angelenos hate on me for sharing these photos of pie you can’t have (which yes, I ate outside in the middle of “winter” and it was glorious), here’s the recipe! Rucker published it in her 2019 cookbook Dappled, and the LA Times provided a public service by reprinting it shortly thereafter. I have yet to test it at home, but please report back if you do!
Nicole Rucker’s Key Lime Pie
Ingredients
1½ cups graham cracker crumbs
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
1 teaspoon kosher salt
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled
6 medium limes
1 can (14 ounces) sweetened condensed milk
4 large egg yolks
1 cup cold heavy whipping cream
¼ cup sour cream
Instructions
Heat the oven to 325 degrees. Lightly coat a 9-inch pie plate (not deep-dish) with nonstick cooking spray.
Make the crust: Combine the graham cracker crumbs, sugar, salt and melted butter in a large bowl and stir until moist crumbs form. Transfer to the prepared pie plate and press evenly into the bottom and up the sides of the plate (but not over the rim).
Bake the crust until lightly browned, about 10 minutes. Transfer to a wire rack to cool completely. Leave the oven on.
Make the filling: Finely grate 1 tablespoon zest from the limes into a large bowl, then halve the limes and squeeze ½ cup juice. (You may not need all 6 limes.) Add the condensed milk and egg yolks and whisk until all the egg yolks have been incorporated and the zest is speckled throughout the mixture. Pour into the cooled crust.
Bake until the filling is set around the edges and the center wobbles slightly when touched, about 15 minutes. Transfer to a wire rack and let cool completely, at least 2 hours.
In a large bowl, whisk the heavy cream and sour cream with an electric mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, or by hand, until soft peaks form; do not overbeat. Pile the cream on top of the pie and swirl and swoosh with a spoon or rubber spatula. Refrigerate the pie for at least 3 hours before serving.
The pie can be refrigerated for up to 5 days… if you could possibly go that long without devouring the whole thing.
Thank you for reading!
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You’re the best. See you again in 2023!
What a nice tribute to Thiebaud—thank you!! I hadn't seen "Roast Beef Dinner" before and wow, what a stunning painting that shows his skill so well and tells a story about a certain place and time.
Always love your posts, Andrea, and just the other day was missing the newsletter, although I may have missed out on recent issues. This one really hit home though, between your luscious descriptions of Thiebaud, the mention of citrus triggering my nostalgia for the overflowing stands at HFM, the blue skies and warmth which are terribly lacking here this time of year, well, I was drooling and wishing I could teletransport to LA, sigh!