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Wayne Thiebaud: American Still Life @ the Courtauld Gallery

‘The laureate of the lunch counter.’

I know. Another American artist. And a very old one. The curators tell us that American painter Wayne Thiebaud had his big stylistic breakthrough back in 1961.

Still, according to the Courtauld, Wayne Thiebaud is ‘one of the most original American artists of the 20th century’, ‘one of the major figures of 20th-century American art’ and ‘ one of America’s most beloved artists’, although it’s a little hard to believe from this relatively small (21 paintings, two rooms) but beautifully presented exhibition.

Everyday Americana

Basically Thiebaud’s schtick, his brand, was realising that everyday objects of mid-century American life – bubble gum dispensers, fruit machines, cake counters in diners – could be painted with the same seriousness as the countless vases, flowers, plates of fish and so on painted by the Old Masters of the European tradition – still lifers from Chardin to Cezanne. Why not? As he put it, in a quote you come across several times in the wall labels, ‘Each era produces its own still life.’

In the mid-1950s Wayne was painting displays of food such as you see in delicatessens or butchers shops but, as the first couple of examples in this exhibition demonstrate, in a blurred and murky style which feels like it owes a lot to Francis Bacon and other Holocaust-haunted existentialist painters.

Meat Counter by Wayne Thiebaud (1956) The Kondos Collection

Then he had a Eureka moment. According to the curators:

In 1956 Thiebaud travelled to New York to meet the avant-garde artists working there. Willem de Kooning was especially inspirational and encouraged him to find his own voice and subjects as a modern painter. Back in Sacramento [Thiebaud’s home town], he began painting commonplace objects of American life, largely from memory, and soon crystallised his unique approach, isolating his richly painted subjects against spare backgrounds.

Thiebaud’s big breakthrough was to lighten up and get happy, to paint his subjects 1) with more clarity, accuracy and precision 2) against clean white backgrounds, in order to make them stand out more, in order to make them feel more like exhibits.

Pie Rows by Wayne Thiebaud (1961) Collection of the Wayne Thiebaud Foundation © Wayne Thiebaud/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2025. Image: Wayne Thiebaud Foundation

1961 is the key date because it was in that year that he took this body of modern still lifes to New York looking for a gallery to show them.

Having been rejected by almost all of them his last stop was at a gallery run by a young dealer, Allan Stone. Stone understood what he was doing and took him on. The following year, Thiebaud staged his first solo show at the Allan Stone Gallery, which was an overnight success, propelling him into the limelight. Important collectors and institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, purchased works and the exhibition sold out. His career was set.

Five Hot Dogs by Wayne Thiebaud (1961) Private Collection © Wayne Thiebaud/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2025. Image credit: John Janca

Thiebaud’s roots in graphic design

For me the key fact about Thiebaud’s art is that he began his working life as an illustrator and commercial art director. The curators tell us:

Thiebaud lived and worked almost his entire long life in Sacramento, California, and was a longstanding teacher at nearby University of California, Davis. In the 1940s and 1950s, before becoming a painter, he worked as an illustrator, cartoonist and art director, including a summer spent in the animation department of Walt Disney Studios and a role as a graphic designer for the US army as part of his military service during the Second World War.

So he spent years and years honing the ability to present commercial products to best possible advantage. This, it strikes me, has two consequences:

1) At some point he realised: all the effort and creativity devoted to designing adverts and promotions, why not transfer it into the realm of ‘high art’, ‘serious’ art? In a sense his career amounts to making that transfer, that move, from arranging everyday products for commercial photoshoots to arranging everyday products to be painted in a serious, fine art style.

2) It gave him a tremendous ‘eye’. Being a graphic designer means understanding the energy and impact of images within a frame, how to position them, how to create visual effects. Although he was not aiming for advert-level flashiness, nevertheless that eye for a product, a strong fundamental sense of design, underlies all his work.

Three Machines by Wayne Thiebaud (1963) Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco © Wayne Thiebaud/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2025. Image: Photograph by Randy Dodson, courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Thiebaud and Pop Art

In the same year as his solo show at the Allan Stone Gallery, 1962, Thiebaud (born 1920) was included in two historic shows that established the Pop Art movement, alongside other artists of his generation like Andy Warhol (born 1928) and Roy Lichtenstein (born 1923).

Now on the face of it Thiebaud has the classic profile of a Pop artist: 1) a background in commercial design (like Warhol), 2) a belief in taking the everyday bric-a-brac of American consumer life as a subject for fine art, and 3) a predilection for presenting the objects in a sterile, formalised way, like exhibits. I.e. there are no people in them, there’s nobody serving behind his counters, there’s no crowds in the cake shop, there’s no-one pumping the fruit machines, all his objects are painted as if they’re exhibits in a sterile museum context.

BUT Thiebaud never considered himself part of the movement and the thing which sets him apart is this: most Pop Art rejoices in reproducing its objects on flat canvas, prints or silk screens, flat and slick and clean. By sharp contrast, Thiebaud’s work is painterly almost to the point of exaggeration. What this means is that he laid his paint on with a trowel. One of the main things about going to this gallery rather than just flicking through the images online is that online reproductions make them look and flat and clean whereas in the flesh you immediately realise that all the paintings are made of thick layers of paint laid on very heavily, with the brushstrokes big and heavy and deliberately visible.

Also, to emphasise the effect, instead of self-effacing matt paint, he used high shine gloss paint which, under gallery lighting, really brings out the swirl and contours of his brushstrokes. To be honest, after the first half dozen paintings of cakes, cake counters and cake displays, my mind began to glaze over a little. I found it more interesting to go really close up to the paintings and savour the thick, heavy, super-visible brushstrokes, that’s where the interest seemed to me. I took a number of close-ups to try and capture the effect. Note the thick heavy gloopy brushstrokes and the shiny gloss paint in this one.

Detail of cake by Wayne Thiebaud (photo by the author)

And the raw messiness of the paintwork in this one.

Detail of Cakes by Wayne Thiebaud (1963) (photo by the author)

This is what the critics mean by ‘painterliness’. They mean the deliberate application of the paint so as to leave each brushstroke and the squeezed out ridges between strokes as visible as possible. And it is this deliberate drawing attention to the paintedness of the works which distinguishes him from the cool, ironic and flat surfaces of all the other Pop artists.

Thiebaud and Abstract Expressionism

One last point. Remember how Thiebaud went to New York in 1956? Pop Art didn’t exist then. The dominant art movement was Abstract Expressionism, epitomised by the splat paintings of Jackson Pollock, all highly visible drips and dribbles. And the artist who encouraged him most was Willem de Kooning, a leading light of the Abstract Expressionist movement.

So you could say that Thiebaud’s achievement was to take an Abstract Expressionist sensibility and apply it to Pop Art subject matter.

Thiebaud’s limited subject matter

The curators make a deal out of how Thiebaud realised the everyday objects of American life were worthy of a high art, fine art, classical treatment, the modern-day equivalent of the great still lives of the European tradition, and they reel off a list of his subject matter: ‘quintessential modern American subjects’ such as cream cakes and meringue pies, hot dogs, candy counters, gumball dispensers and pinball machines.

Yes, but it turns out that these subjects fairly quickly pall. Seen one painting of slices of thick gooey iced cakes on a shop counter and, well, it quickly feels like you’ve seen them all. A moment’s thought makes you realise, that if you take the phrase seriously, we are absolutely surrounded by ‘everyday objects’: phones, cookers, fridge and freezers, pots and pans, tables, chairs, sofas, TVs and that’s just in the home, before you get to streets and cars and buses and taxis and advertising hoardings and street signs, phone boxes and letter boxes and so on, and that’s before you get to the huge variety of buildings you see in an urban environment. Cigarette packets. Chewing gum packets. Newspapers.

Some of this was depicted by the Pop artists or American artists of urban life but none of it is in Thiebaud, along with the other really glaring absence in his work, which is of any people. Looking round each of the two rooms it feels like a very, very restricted, self-imposed restriction of subjects. Here’s a complete list of the 21 paintings in the show:

Meat counter (1956-9)
Pinball machine (1956)
Penny machines (1961)
Cold cereal (1961)
Candy counter (1962)
Caged pie (1962)
Pie rows (1961)
Five hot dogs (1961)
Cup of coffee (1961)
Three cones (1964)
Pie counter (1963)
Boston cremes (1962)
Delicatessen counter (1962)
Delicatessen counter (1963)
Candy counter (1969)
Peppermint counter (1963)
Cakes (1963)
Three machines (gumball machines) (1963)
Yo-yos (1963)
Four pinball machines (1962)
Jackpot machine (1962)

As you can see from the number of counters in this list, the smart-alec critic who called Thiebaud the ‘laureate of the lunch counter’ was actually being very accurate.

Mind you, maybe it’s an artificial uniformity created by the curators. One of the wall labels from a late-60s work (Candy counter, 1969) tells us that by the end of the decade ‘Thiebaud’s work extended beyond still life and, during his long career, he was also famed for his figure paintings and cityscapes.’

Ah. OK. None of that is here. Shame. It would probably be optimal to see the cake works in the broader context of the figures and cityscapes, in other words to have a really extensive retrospective of his career. But the gallery visitor can only judge by what is presented by the curators.

Candy Counter by Wayne Thiebaud (1969) Private Collection © Wayne Thiebaud/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2025

American graffiti

Nostalgia. Despite all the burning political issues of the day – the Cold War, the spectre of nuclear war, Civil Rights issues and many more – America was in fact enjoying an economic boom. The 1950s saw affluence spread among the middle classes. Thiebaud’s gloopy still lives, especially the many thickly decorated cakes, convey a sense of this new post-war abundance. A kid in the Depression-era 1930s, for young Wayne all these brightly coloured cakes and candies represented boyish joy and freedom.

Now we know that all these cakes and candies have contributed to an epidemic of obesity and heart disease across the western world. Speaking as a man on a low cholesterol diet, I came to feel surfeited and then a little sickened by the sight of all this sugary poison. We know too much.

But looking at these cake counters and fruit machines and gum machines now, and pondering their provenance from the early 1960s, before (for example) the Vietnam War ruined everything, they also feel like exercises in boyish nostalgia, reminiscent of the candy-coloured nostalgia of a movie like George Lucas’s ‘American Graffiti’.

Comparison with Manet

The curators recommend that we compare and contrast Thiebaud’s arrays of treats with an older work in the Courtauld Collection, Edouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, a painting Thiebaud greatly admired. If you look away from the dominant figure of the barmaid, you realise that this, too, is a depiction of a counter of treats. They’re mainly alcoholic ones in beautifully rendered bottles but seeing it through Thiebaud’s eyes made me notice for the first time the little pile of mandarin oranges in their shiny glass bowl. Yes, you can see the continuity of interests.

A Bar at the Folies-Bergère by Édouard Manet (1882) The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust) © The Courtauld

The most obvious difference is that, whereas the Manet is densely populated with the crowd at a popular bar and features the (rather gawky) interaction between the customer and a barmaid, the Thiebaud paintings on display here contain no human beings at all, not a trace, not in any of them.

Drawings and etchings

There are actually two exhibitions. The one of Thiebaud’s paintings is up in the third floor. A floor below (and easy to miss because of its small doorway) the small gallery devoted to drawings hosts a display of 17 prints and etchings Thiebaud made in the same period (the 1960s). It’s mostly black-and-white prints although four of them have been hand coloured. The display focuses on a portfolio of 17 prints which were published in a 1965 edition titled ‘Delights’.

Two obvious contrasts with the often fairly large paintings in the main display. 1) They’re small, generally A4 size or smaller. 2) They’re flat. They have none of the glossy, gloopy, brushstroke-dominated surface of the paintings. Instead they feel flat and chaste and restrained. Tidy. Sweet (in two senses, given the cakey subject matter).

But they’re almost all of the same very limited topics. Cakes and more cakes, mostly black and white, a few coloured in. An exciting exception is the plate of bacon and eggs.

I sort of liked them, or respected the craftsmanship. In their rather scratchy, sketchy approach they reminded me of the early drawings of David Hockney, which I don’t like very much. The one I liked most was the least characteristic because it was made using graphite i.e. had the warmth and shading of a charcoal drawing, the kind of thing I am more drawn to. It’s a depiction of salt and pepper shakers on a café table. I can’t find it anywhere online so here’s my terrible photo of it.

Installation view of Untitled (Sugar, salt and pepper) by Wayne Thiebaud @ the Courtauld Gallery (photo by the author)

For Thiebaud completists, there’s a display case containing a first edition of Delights, with a list of all the prints it contained, alongside a display of his etching tools.

Display case containing a first edition of ‘Delights’ alongside Wayne Thiebaud’s etching equipment: note his magnifying glasses at centre back @ the Courtauld Gallery (photo by the author)

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Image of the Artist @ the Royal Academy

This tiny little display is next door to the current ‘Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers’ show – not worth making a pilgrimage to the Royal Academy just for itself, but worth popping into if you’re in the building (as is the small Emma Stibbon display which is right next to it). No rush: it’s on till the end of the year.

It’s a display of eight self-portraits by current and recent Royal Academicians from the last 50 years. They are (in alphabetical order) Anthony Green, Chantal Joffe, Hew Locke, Sidney Nolan, Patrick Procktor, Paula Rego, Gillian Wearing and Clare Woods.

Obviously the genre of the self-portrait raises multiple, many-levelled issues of intention, agency and identity: Who am I? How do I depict myself? How much do I compromise what I see with the medium I’m using? How much am I influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by the vast tradition pressing down on me? How do I escape the weight of the past and develop my own voice and vision?

Here are the pictures in question, along with selected facts from the curators’ wall labels. Which ones do you like, and why?

Anthony Green – The Artist (1976)

The Artist, 1976 by Anthony Green RA © Royal Academy of Arts

Green’s humorous creations, cartoony paintings made in imaginative shapes, used to appear every year in the summer exhibition (he passed away in February of this year). Looking closely you realise there’s a whole narrative going on: for a start the curators tell us the thing is in the shape of a crown, which I didn’t immediately ‘get’. Spotlights shine down from the top right onto a full-length, fully clothed portrait of the artist standing on a sort of stage in front of a yellow stage curtain. And on the left are the stalls of a theatre, full of serried ranks of more self-portraits. The general idea is: Who is the artist performing for, creating for? Himself, copies f himself, clones of himself? I like Green’s works well enough when I see them but, well…

Chantal Joffe – Looking towards Bexhill (2016)

Looking Towards Bexhill, 2016 by Chantal Joffe © The Artist

Here’s Joffe and her daughter on the beach at St Leonard’s-on-sea. According to the curators, the image catches a girl on the cusp of adolescence, turning away from her mother. Joffe is quoted as saying, the more intense the emotion, the more she is driven to simplify the image. Personally I find this a disturbing and upsetting painting. The lack of any effort to convey sand, sea or sky repels me, but not as much as the faces. Eyes are what we look at in the people that we meet or look at and both sets of eyes here are distorted and bent and speak very loudly of physical deformity and/or mental illness.

Hew Locke – Chevalier (2007)

This is one of a series of eleven life-sized photographs from the series ‘How Do You Want Me?’ in which the artist adopts menacing personas. Here he is a sort of surrealist knight in an image saturated with colour and collages of unlikely images, not least the halo of machine guns and daggers which surrounds him. Locke says the series title ‘How Do You Want Me?’ is a satirical reference to the way the art world voraciously consumes the ‘latest thing’, especially the exotic or strange and – by implication – Black artists. So it’s by way of showing two fingers to the art world. Fair enough, but this rational explanation gets nowhere near conveying the over-coloured demented collage with a sword-wielding maniac at the centre.

Sidney Nolan – Self-portrait in Youth (1986)

Nolan’s dates are 1917 to 1992 i.e. he’s one of the older artists here. This may or may not be reflected in the fact that this is pretty much the weirdest and most abstract work here. According to the curators, as a young man Nolan worked with spray paint in a factory and, later in his career, returned to spray paint as a medium. The heavily distorted image and bars of colour down the left, in one mode make me think of raves and acid and hard-edged psychedelic drugs i.e. a positive image. But then, really looking at the head and deep damage that’s been done to it, the radioactive degrading of the image, make me think of Francis Bacon and all his heads turning into meat or screams. Scary.

Patrick Procktor – Self-portrait (1991)

I like stylised paintings but I don’t warm to this one. According to the curators he’s holding a thick paintbrush loaded with white paint in his right hand. I thought it was a mirror or a mobile phone glinting in the sun. I ought to like the plain orange background but I don’t. The curators think this is a very ‘intellectual’ image because he’s glancing up at the frame of the picture i.e. investigating the limits of art etc. The asymmetry of his face, the unevenness of his eyes, speaks to me of mental illness and unhappiness.

Paula Rego – Self portrait (1994)

The curators point out how many artist’s self-portraits capture the artist holding a palette and brush and looking at the viewer in a pose which captures the moment of creation, as if we are there, with them, in that moment. They also shrewdly point out how the two most completed parts of this sketchy image are the face/eyes which see and the arm/hand which creates – as if the two most important parts of the act of creation are fuller, wholer, more complete, than the rest of the body, which fades away into irrelevance. So it’s an image about artistic force and power.

Gillian Wearing – Me as a Ghost (2015)

Apparently Wearing has ‘explored’ her identity with numerous self portraits playing with format and genre. The smoke is meant to be a reference to her place of birth, industrial Birmingham but made me think of a genii appearing from a lamp. The t short slogan, ‘HEAVY METAL’ is a reference to the disproportionate number of heavy metal rock bands who haled from Birmingham. The artist and curators may think of this as an experimental investigation of issues of identity and mortality, but it also looks very much like the cover of a certain kind of album depicting a rock chick fan of the band.

Clare Woods – Life with the Lions (2020)

Apparently this painting is based on a photograph of the artist’s cat climbing over her, something which just about makes sense once it’s pointed out but I didn’t guess beforehand. Maybe I have a morbid imagination but I read it as the image of someone’s fact (blonde hair, eyes and nose) horribly melting into a great white blancmange. As paintings of cats go, it’s not a classic, is it? Neither is the mood exactly typical of most cat lovers: Woods explains that the title is from the Billy Bragg song of the same name, which captures the feeling of being present but detached, ‘a feeling of suffocation by responsibilities and expectations.’ All this puts into words the very negative response I had to this image. The glutinous melting effect is achieved by mixing thick oil paint directly onto the aluminium surface of the base, which maybe accounts for the powerful feeling of being asphyxiated.

Personal tastes

Personally, I like the Wearing and Rego, in that order. Wearing because it’s a photo/image which looks like a rock poster, could be on a billboard or a poster on the tube i.e which is very assimilable, not least because it makes her look very attractive in a rock chick kind of way.

The Rego I like because I like charcoal sketches, particularly if they’re unfinished (hence my veneration of Degas). I also like the strong female vibe, the aura of strength and indomitability about it. The obvious feature is the dark eyes which are about twice the size of an ordinary adult’s eyes. Decades ago I read some pop science which pointed out that the eyes are proportionately larger in babies than in adults and that, therefore, we humans are programmed to feel soft and sentimental and attracted by large eyes i.e. in order to warm to, and protect, babies. Obvious evolutionary advantage.

This apparently explains why we feel warmly towards Disney cartoons, from Mickey through hundreds of cartoon characters to Nemo or Frozen – they all have disproportionately large eyes and trigger a soppy sentimental feeling; certainly disarms our adult cynicism. If anything, the Rego portrait inverts the convention, because she looks not soft but spooky – not threatening exactly, but lowering and damaged. And the stumpy muscular right arm gives the image a dwarfish, freakish atmosphere, too. Don’t Look Now.

Reynolds

There’s a twist in the tail. This miniature display takes up only part of The Collection Gallery, the narrow corridor-shaped space at the start of the gallery. At the end of this corridor you can see the start of a completely separate exhibition, which is a selection of highlights from the Royal Academy’s Old Master collection, grand mythological themes, Biblical paintings and Renaissance statues. But the first work in that, completely separate display, is a portrait of Sir Joshua Reynolds, founder and first President of the Royal Academy. So when you look away from the eight self-portraits I’ve just discussed, your eye passes over the lovely image of Reynolds at the end of the corridor.

The point is, the Reynolds portrait is clearly head and shoulders (pun intended) better than the eight works in this little display. It has class and dignity and gravitas. It reminds me of the umpteen histories of art which try and put into words the revolution in visual technology which the development of oil painting during the Renaissance brought about; how artists used the new medium of oil to portray depth and scale of subject, with true perspective etc, but then went on, as the centuries progressed, to focus on the conjuring of light and shade, in particular of dark shadow, to convey psychological and spiritual depths unlike any art which had gone before (Leonardo, Rembrandt).

In this picture Reynolds is clearly channelling Rembrandt and the sophisticated Old Master tradition of strong contrasts of light and shade which came to be referred to as chiaroscuro. It has a human dignity and depth and sensitivity which none of the eight modern images come close to matching.

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