Published by Hatje Cantz. Edited with text by Ulf Küster. Text by Janet Bishop, Jason Edward Kaufman, Charlotte Sarrazin.
Wayne Thiebaud’s (1920–21) iconic still lifes of pies, cakes, gumball machines and lipsticks critically reflect on the promise of the American dream: a society of plenty where supply exceeds demand. Thiebaud depicted these objects as mass-produced commodities rather than idealized entities, updating the still life genre for the modern age. He achieved this effect through serial repetition and synthetic colors and by applying his paint impasto-style; Thiebaud quite literally spread the frosting effects onto his famous cakes. This catalog, published in tandem with the exhibition at Foundation Beyeler in Switzerland, presents all aspects of the legendary American artist’s oeuvre, including his still lifes and portraits, as well as his deserted, multiperspectival cityscapes and river landscapes. All his paintings, rendered in luminous pastels, exude a peculiar flavor of summertime sadness.
Published by Edizioni Corraini. Edited by Alessia Masi, Carla Crawford.
Wayne Thiebaud (born 1920) is to cakes and pastries what Cézanne is to apples: his renderings of sugary treats are more mouthwatering than the treats themselves, so creamily and lusciously depicted are they. Despite friendships with Johns and Rauschenberg, Thiebaud was never personally affiliated with a particular movement, though his pop-culture subject matter has tended to ally him with Pop. In fact, Thiebaud is simply a painter of Californian still lifes, as this volume underlines in relating him to the Italian still-life painter Giorgio Morandi. Conceived as a parallel journey through the works of the two artists, this volume reveals the close affinities that underlie their work: everyday subject matter simplified to pure formality, neatness of arrangement, repetition and variation and strong brushwork. It includes a piece on Morandi written by Thiebaud that first appeared in The New York Times in 1981, plus an interview by Alessia Masi.
Wayne Thiebaud at Museo Morandi