‘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:

1. Meat counter (1956-9)
2. Pinball machine (1956)
3. Penny machines (1961)
4. Cold cereal (1961)
5. Candy counter (1962)
6. Caged pie (1962)
7. Pie rows (1961)
8. Five hot dogs (1961)
9. Cup of coffee (1961)
10. Three cones (1964)
11. Pie counter (1963)
12. Boston cremes (1962)
13. Delicatessen counter (1962)
14. Delicatessen counter (1963)
15. Candy counter (1969)
16. Peppermint counter (1963)
17. Cakes (1963)
18. Three machines (gumball machines) (1963)
19. Yo-yos (1963)
20. Four pinball machines (1962)
21. 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)

Related links

• Wayne Thiebaud: American Still Life continues at the Courtauld Gallery until 18 January 2026
• Wayne Thiebaud Foundation

Related reviews

• Courtauld Gallery reviews
• Andy Warhol by Klaus Honnef (1990)
• Pop Art Design @ Barbican (February 2014)
• Robert Rauschenberg @ Tate Modern (February 2017)
• The American Dream: pop to the present @ the British Museum (May 2017)