Paul Keegan: Eat Me

Paul Keegan

‘Cut Meringues’ by Wayne Thiebaud (1961).Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

In a statement to accompany the accession of Cut Meringues by the Museum of Modern Art following his first New York exhibition in 1962, Wayne Thiebaud suggested that each era produces its own still life. Rather than the props and evidences of discreetly arranged domesticity, he would paint edible America and its impersonal machinery of desire. Cakes and pies and slices and cones, prearranged in rows or lines, and gazed on by eyes other than the artist’s. He spoke up for ‘the stainless steel, porcelain, enamelled, plastic world that interests me now’, but his versions of it are handmade: easel works full of painterly tact. Reviewing the New York show, Donald Judd described the combination of elite means and commonplace ends as ‘having and eating your cake’.

The pies and slices drew little local attention at their first outings in Sacramento and San Francisco galleries in 1961, but the New York show was a sell-out. Gone was the muddy expressionist Soutine-like Meat Counter (included in the small Courtauld show, Wayne Thiebaud: American Still Life, last year) and its like. He now painted what he called ‘non-essential commodities’, well drilled and sharply rendered. Aged forty, he found his subject, or rather the means to express it, a little ahead of similar East Coast moves. His early and laconic pronouncements about what he was up to would hold good for most of what followed.

Thiebaud painted things, but also the order of things, mid-century. The curator Walter Hopps – who in Pasadena in 1962 put on New Painting of Common Objects, the first museum survey of Pop Art, which included Thiebaud’s Five Hot Dogs – noted the taxonomic urge: ‘Pies, singly and in groups, sectioned and whole; layer cakes, singly and in groups, sectioned and whole; pie à la mode; ice cream sundaes in groups … hamburger and French fries; hamburger singly … lollipops in various groups.’ The groups are more of the same: each item is alone of its kind but contains multitudes. They seem related to Saul Steinberg’s contemporary line-ups or mugshots of American ‘types’ – hollow-eyed gamblers, city dogs, bedecked hostesses, shady entrepreneurs, unshaven cowboys, hats galore – which combine unrepeatable oddity with dizzying sameness. Steinberg’s gift for analogy, for seeing this thing as that thing, submits joyfully to his sense of mid-century America as a vast agora or adventure playground in which likeness is all. Hence the numbers game: Steinberg’s Ten Women or Twenty Americans (Twenty Professions); Thiebaud’s Five Chocolate Cookies or Seven Candy Sticks or Three Cones. All the same, all different. Thiebaud suggested mysteriously that art in America had become ‘a play on the closeness of similarities and dissimilarities’.

Thiebaud brought with him all of what he called his cheap tricks. His portraits of things are like layouts for advertisements, set against a blank background with theatrical spotlighting. He creates a plein-air effect on a countertop or inside a glass case. The floodlit cakes and pies look like they are sunbathing, inside a medium which rivals the evenly applied Californian reality outside the window – as if the idea of starkness and glare were his real subject, a mezzogiorno whose shadows are substances, heavier than the things they follow.

Even a scatter of black olives on a plate, or a circle of maraschino cherries atop a birthday cake, are rhymed by their purple second selves, which shiver on the verge of emancipation. The pathos of Thiebaud’s things has many sources, which include their tiny monumentality and their drama of small differences: each olive sporting its separate reality. The isolation is achieved in part through an effect of ‘halation’: an aura of thin bands of unmixed complementary colours – orange and blue vibrating against each other – which activate the edges and contours of his cakes, proffering them to us with a subliminal charge. More generally, he manages unlikely feats of verisimilitude by pushing a loaded brush across the canvas, alla prima, one stroke, many colours, wet on wet. One of his most silent and intent pictures is of a single slice titled Caged Pie, inside its elongated glass counter case, its volumes defined by the slow brush. This is in part the Thiebaud effect: a card-sharper’s open-handed candour, crossed by anxiety. The high viewpoint implies a mastery of the visible, but equally suggests the panopticon, a structure of surveillance from which nothing can hide.

Above all, Thiebaud painted surplus, or the postwar moment when there was suddenly more than enough of what Warhol called ‘the great modern things’. Instead of the heaped table of the vanitas, whose cornucopia was linked to human transience, there is oversupply, an excess inscribed in the sagging torpor of Thiebaud’s pies, caught in an endless present of sufficiency.

Desire is the great leveller in these pictures, and Thiebaud’s Boston cremes or pumpkin pie slices are like close-ups in the movies. They make us swoon. Even alone in a room with one of his small canvases, the viewer is a ‘We’ rather than an ‘I’. The bright exhaustion of his things (at the top of their game but about to spoil: melting, oozing, collapsing, losing shape, overflowing their corsetry) is itself a provocation. ‘Have a good one!’ they seem to say, and you wonder do these pastel performers ever get to have some down time?

If still life involves looking at the overlooked, in Norman Bryson’s phrase, Thiebaud paints what has been over-looked-at, and this visual hearsay seems crucial to the second-order effect he seeks. However fresh the appearances, we have come late, and we intuit the traces of those who looked before us. Thiebaud’s things sit like Rilke’s parrots in the zoo, ‘waiting for witnesses’, and the attention they have received translates into the attention they now solicit. It is a seduction scene, described in an essay by Rachel Teagle as ‘the network of visual exchanges encoded in acts of display and consumption’. His protagonists depend on the fiction that we are there.

But for all their neon ‘Eat Me’ blowsiness, Thiebaud’s comestibles have an anchoritic air of self-containment. The rows of pies and cakes are tangibly close but inaccessible, too decorous to be disturbed. They invite contemplation, equally remote from the domestic table or its re-enactments in the painter’s studio: no cutlery, no goblets, no napkins, no fruit, no walnuts, no crumbs, no spinet, no begging spaniel, no chequered floor, no cavaliers. No people. His delicatessen counters are deserted, as if his multiplied cakes and pies must stand in for sociability.

The effect seems closer to anorexia, which is all about the compulsion to gaze. The high viewpoint implies that seeing is enough, that these are confections ‘whose consumption can perfectly well be accomplished simply by looking’ (as Roland Barthes said of mid-1950s food photographs in Elle magazine). Of Caged Pie, Thiebaud said: ‘What I want is to get the dimension between the viewer and the glass and the object,’ by which he meant a certain trick of light, but also a notional seeing of ourselves ghosted in the glass, as we peer into these compositions.

‘I paint those foods that have mostly undgergone some kind of change or metamorphosis,’ he said: a preference he shared with Warhol and with Joseph Cornell, whose sweet tooth was legendary. Sugar fuels the dreamtime of Cornell’s boxes, and it preserves their unlived life of frozen desire. Longing is the staple of this sublimated fantasy world – a mid-century emotion, distilled in Hollywood, which bears the same factitious relation to desire as lonesome bears to lonely. Like Cornell’s boxes, Thiebaud’s portable icons of pies and slices belong in the realm of wish fulfilment. Let them eat cake.

The attempt to arrest time suffuses the boxed or bounded microcosms of Cornell and Thiebaud, who does not paint what a cake looks like, but the way we remember it, yearn for it. Thiebaud’s leisurely brushstroke and impasto seem to record the slow passage of recollection over the surface of the thing, a scrutiny in which details stand out and are then submerged, in a constant shuffle. Food is the memory of food. ‘From when I worked in restaurants, I can remember seeing rows of pies, or a tin of pie with one piece out of it and one pie sitting beside it. Those little vedute in fragmented circumstances were always poetic to me.’ He insisted that he painted things from memory, which is close to saying that he paints the memory of things. Their tense is not quite the present, but a remembered present, pristine and perishable.

He chose not to paint the newly anonymous regimes of fast food and disposability, and Lucy Bradnock writes well about this in the catalogue to the Courtauld show. In effect, his deli counters and display cases were already being replaced by supermarket shelves and the empire of the prepackaged. These developments overlapped in time, and included the luncheonette (dedicated spaces in drug stores and candy shops, where eating is a solitary activity carried out hastily among strangers, but still catered by staff) and the nickel-in-the-slot automats, where individual glass-fronted compartments contain a single cherry pie or burger. Self-service forsakes display and the loaves-and-fishes effect of multiplication which Thiebaud portrayed.

His canvases are mostly compact in scale, cabinet pictures whose objects appear as if life-size, portable theatres akin to Cornell’s shadow boxes. The actors are arrested in the light, against a featureless ground. The cakes are wholes, but are painted as if they are details, or close-ups: ‘fragmented circumstances’. They have the unexplained emphasis of screen memories, which stand out from the flux of recollection by what Freud called their unnaturally clear (überdeutlich) presence, their preternatural vividness. Thiebaud remarked that his rows of pumpkin pie slices exude ‘a kind of lonely togetherness’, pooling their solitudes, with a nod to the gloomier sociological truisms of the day. Richard Shiff in his catalogue essay points to The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman, which appeared a decade earlier and cornered the term ‘anomie’, arguing that abundance and the invention of leisure led to thin sociability and inner anaesthesia. ‘These are the tranquillised Fifties and I am forty,’ Robert Lowell wrote in 1958. Thiebaud sniffed the air of lost connections, but he held onto the moment when we all wanted the same things, sensing how fragile it would turn out to be.

It is often said that his paint seems to partake of the same materials as its subject: a kind of comestible mimicry or ‘licked trickery’, as Michael Baxandall described trompe l’oeil, with the signal difference that here no effort is being made to conceal the medium, which is aggressively foregrounded. The textures suggest the processes of frosting and coating and glazing. We supply the rest. Thiebaud paints surfaces and his paint is also manifestly a surface, or a thing – two facts which may pretend to be one, but what stands out is their non-identity. The paint has ideas of its own. His pies look more like each other than they look like pies, as he discovered when his gallery served up the real things at an opening as canapés provocateurs – surprised to find that his realism was quite so removed from the reality. He wondered at various points if it was possible to caricature things as well as people. It is an odd notion, the legacy of his apprenticeship as a cartoonist, and it underpins the combination in his still lifes of minimal content with maximal expressive resonance: diminishment and exaggeration.

This can seem a far cry from Pop, whose removed but beady gaze and concealed stake in what it disowned was antipathetic to Thiebaud. Like Cornell or Warhol (whose work is more infused with affect than was clear at the time), he is a celebrant. ‘Thiebaud preaches revulsion by isolating the American food habit,’ the critic Thomas Hess, wrong as ever, claimed in response to the 1962 New York exhibition. But the question arises: without the alibi of irony, what was he up to, with his focus on consumerism in its most fugitive forms? One answer is that these were New York questions, and Thiebaud, who lived there for a brief year, was safely distant from its imperatives. His confectionery is without apology or explanation, and he knew that its silence was its strong suit.

If the relation to Pop was strained, it was also closer than his new admirers like to suggest. Despite the brushstroke, which speaks of craft and the dialogue of hand and eye, he shares a preference for imagery already mediated by advertising and technologies of reproduction. Halation is more perceptual than real, a property of analogue photography. Thiebaud is painting an effect, akin to Lichtenstein’s patient rendering of the Ben Day dots that are the DNA of newsprint imagery. He dismissed photography but learned its lessons: the close-up, the use of ‘involuntary’ cropping at the edges of his compositions, or of studio floodlight so extreme that it seems to invent what it sees. His paintings are ambivalent about Pop, but they are also forms of Pop ambivalence.

His wariness at being labelled led Thiebaud away from still life, whose emphatically rendered grounds were already landscapes of sorts. The Courtauld exhibition, with its narrow focus on still life, was too small to suggest these afterlives, and the excellent catalogue is similarly constrained. For a broader view, Wayne Thiebaud: A Radical Realism also considers the portraits and landscapes. In 1972, Thiebaud purchased a house in San Francisco and began to paint streetscapes in frankly exaggerated verticals. He also began to paint a quasi-imaginary California of ridges and ravines, extreme and fantastical – an existential geology in which the Earth’s crust is invoked as a membrane onto which we cling. Or stretches of freeway in Southern California where the interstate forges a seemingly vertical incision through mountains. These paintings are a sliding catastrophe of impossible and unreachable spaces, without visual foothold.

This was already latent in his pie slices, which turn into cliffs of fall if viewed with the passion they invite. His most demure arrangements of pies and meringues imply a compression of space. The backgrounds and the tabletop surfaces are elements of composition rather than naturalistic settings: there is nothing beyond the table’s presumed edge, if indeed there is a table, as opposed to the blank fact of nearness. Their horizontality is troubled by extreme recession, so that they seem like ledges. The lack of co-ordinates, of background, serves to unsituate his cakes and pies, which orbit in their solar system like planets, and he insisted that the effect he wanted was ‘one of isolation’. He must have seen the astounding still life of Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber painted by Juan Sánchez Cotán in 1602 and acquired by the San Diego Museum in 1945. Each exactly rendered vegetable globe hangs from a string or overhangs the frame, which is at once a mundane larder and a conceptual void.

In the townscapes, the unsettling vistas and the views from windows are also scenes you cannot consume, out of reach yet too close for comfort. Thiebaud learned from cinema, especially the dolly-zoom shot (whose earliest use was in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a San Francisco story), where the background looms increasingly closer while the foreground stays unmoved or oblivious. As is the case with his various canvases titled Apartment View, in which an enormous outdoors bears down through vast windows on a small-scale and placid domestic scene of table and chair, set for a meal but, it seems, hastily vacated. Thiebaud was master of a Gothic mood or tense in which the place you are in is about to become dreadful.

In his ‘Freeway Curves’, a series of monoprints on which he worked from the mid-1970s until his death, a wide black and white freeway full of cars and trucks starts at an upper edge and descends impossibly. The drop is vertical but it depicts with level accuracy the deferred horizon of freeway driving, its banal extension of experience, neither arrival nor departure. Vertigo might be described as a real response to an imagined fall. The distortions of gradient in Thiebaud’s outdoors are like a San Andreas Fault in psychic life, the conviction that where we stand is about to melt into air or eat itself from under our feet. It is one side of Thiebaud’s California, where nature and culture puncture each other, or are at a stand-off, awaiting their dénouement.

There is another and more surprising side. An hour inland from San Francisco is the Sacramento Delta, a thousand miles of waterways and farmland, much of it below sea level, protected by raised earth levees and criss-crossed by dredged channels. Fresh river water pushes back Pacific seawater in an everyday Sisyphean drama. Thiebaud lived on this fragile waterland for three years in the 1990s, when it was difficult to access other than by narrow dirt tracks along the embankments. He painted it systematically, evolving a repertoire of trees, crops, water and agricultural elements from which he freely extemporised, creating composite images which ponder this patchwork of small islands in terms of formal considerations. Some of them look like overhead views of 1970s pinball machines.

If San Francisco or the ravine and ridge pictures are vertical, the Sacramento Delta is dead flat. But Thiebaud shows the landscape from above. In many of these compositions the eye is drawn downwards and then crawls slowly upwards to reach the horizon line at the top of the canvas. Or the images are horizonless, without a readable perspective. As in his still lifes, the background does not stay back, but is raised and tipped forward, pressing its nose against the picture plane, as vertical as Braque’s billiard tables. Within this shallow pictorial space the various features of the delta (crops, water, orchards, levees) have to be separately negotiated by the eye, as elements of composition, adjacent but isolated.

These landscapes are in effect Thiebaud’s continuation of and tribute to Richard Diebenkorn’s great Ocean Park series, a work in progress from the mid-1960s until his death in 1993. Thiebaud grew up in Long Beach, ten miles from Ocean Park, in Santa Monica, and continued to visit when Diebenkorn moved there from Berkeley in 1966. There are many affinities: the squeezed horizons, the topographies, the bleached palette, the to-and-fro between figurative and formal means and ends. Diebenkorn spoke of aerial views as ‘my favourite kind of looking’, from his early experience of making reconnaissance flights for the Bureau of Reclamation in Colorado and seeing from above an ageless palimpsest of desert and cultivation.

Above all, both painters needed the collusion and collision of natural and artificial, and Thiebaud’s Sacramento Delta is a man-made landscape overprinting a natural landscape. Aerial views tend to make the natural look like a tapestry of intentions, and Thiebaud’s landscapes of the delta are versions of what he called ‘nature transposed for man’ – in many senses a reclaimed landscape, just as his San Francisco cityscapes celebrate the engineered conquest of nature, as a grid imposed on a mountainside.

If the evidence of human activity in a landscape was a matter of mournful regret for Edward Hopper, it becomes heroic subject matter for Thiebaud, whose attempts at wilderness proper (ridges and ravines) are less convincing – just as his real portraiture is not the mannequin-like figures of his formal portraits, as mute as meringues, but the vivid and vestigial human presence in such compositions as Reservoir and Orchard or Green River Lands, where even the shadows of the poplars fall for man. The same could be said of the labour to be beautiful that suffuses his cakes and pies. He paints a georgic world rather than a version of pastoral, and sidesteps the sophistries that might be expected of such a late meditation on nature and nurture.

His uneasy acceptance, as a naif (‘the pie guy’, Barnett Newman said), lasted to the end of a long career: one of his best ice creams, titled Double Scoop, a small feat of attention, as textured as the surface of the Moon, was painted to order for a New Yorker cover in 2020, a year before he died aged 101, and it might have hung without comment in his first New York show, sixty years earlier. He was an outsider at large inside his purviews, like Douanier Rousseau, and his art is easily swamped by the attention it courts. Perhaps in this case tone matters unusually: urbane, suburban, self-reliant, unreadable, Californian at a time when there was still a hub and it was thankfully elsewhere. Like Steinberg, Thiebaud saw American life as a serious cartoon. His images are best thought of in terms that balance their own just bearable lightness of being.

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