You're not supposed to lick the museum's paintings, it's cruel when you're faced with a mouthwatering piece like the art of Wayne Thiebaud. The American pop pioneer devoted his long career to cakes, sweets, and gumball machines, the visual world of candy and confectionery laid out in American diners and deli counters, tempting the viewer to commit the ultimate crime and take a big, juicy bite.
But he didn't paint just to make you drool. His work (in his first UK museum show at the Courtauld) is both an ultra-serious approach to the material history of painting, a kind of update on the still-life legacy that's still alive and kicking, and a deep dive into the growing consumer and capitalist enthusiasm for mass production, the mid-century American dream.
His background offers the biggest clue as to how he created his world of kitschy cakes and sticky cherry pies. He came to art through illustration and animation, becoming a Walt Disney Studios apprentice before becoming a cartoonist and filmmaker. When you're painting for a huge, broad audience, you get a clear understanding of directness and readability, of how to get your ideas across immediately, like a pie in the face.
Then in the 1950s, he met Elaine and Willem de Kooning and a bunch of other abstract expressionists and at Hay Presto, you get a flavour combination that works: a background in art for a broad audience and knowledge of modern, conceptual experimentation. Delicious.
The earliest works here, from 1956, are a meat counter and a pinball machine – quintessential Thiebaud themes – but the marks are thick and scruffy. They're all dark, scruffy, almost pushing towards abstraction. They're not yet, too scruffy to get their ideas across properly.
But by five years later, it's all sorted. By 1961, it's all Thiebaud. A bowl of cereal, a few candy apples, a row of pickled cakes, five hot dogs, a cup of coffee – all captured in cool whites, steel greys and the bright yellows and pinks of lemon pie and cherry sauce. They're startlingly lifelike images, beautifully and thickly painted. They're also exercises in exploring the precision of painting, studying the geometry of consumer goods. The pies are just triangles, the cakes are cylinders. It's very, very art historically conscious, the ripples of Cézanne and Chardin. Look at these gumball machines, spheres in spheres, countless, precise, beautiful. It's still-life painting at its contemporary best.
It's also very conceptual. It's a slice of American life, it's the economic boom of world power, it's all the consumer and post-war capitalism of the US, expressed in the lavish depictions of the deli and diner and the goods they sold. It elevates the ordinary side of American life to unprecedented levels of historical, aesthetic significance.
That's why pop artists loved him and why he was involved in so many pop shows: it's consumer as subject and medium. But it's not smooth and detached, like Warhol, it's not thrown away and reproducible, it's something more serious than that.
And that mix, that conflict, is the empty canvas on which you can read countless ideas. These paintings are so easy to interpret, but they're so beautifully made that they can be anything. Want them to be consumer and commercial? You've got it. Want them to be about America? Easy. The geometry, the art history, the physical nature of the paint? Go for it, it's all of those and none of them.
The show only goes up to 1969, which means you'll somehow leave feeling hungry for his mouthwatering, waist-expanding calorie-packed painting. That's what Thiebaud does, he makes us all gluttons.
