1Two years after his death at the age of 101 on Christmas Day 2021, Wayne Thiebaud was given a major exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland. The neatly simple steel-and-glass architectural gem designed by Renzo Piano and set in a beautiful park offers a perfect environment in more than one way for the Sacramento-based artist, whose grandfather Rudolph Louis Thiebaud was a Swiss immigrant to the United States in the nineteenth century (“Wayne Thiebaud”).

2Though popular in the United States, where he was showcased in numerous exhibitions, including retrospectives of his work organized by the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco in 2001, the Palm Springs Museum in 2009, or the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento in 2020-2021, Wayne Thiebaud has remained largely overlooked in Europe, except for those who attended Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972, visited the Morandi Museum in Bologna in 2011 and or saw the first-ever European retrospective of his work in the Netherlands at the Voorlinden Museum in 2018.

3Covering a seven-decade-long career and bringing out the gist of Thiebaud’s art through 65 works in 9 rooms is no mean feat. But this is what Dr Ulf Küster and Charlotte Sarrazin (Senior and Assistant Curator, respectively) achieve with flying colors through a very well thought-out selection of works displayed in a compelling manner. For visitors familiar with the artist’s pop paintings of oversweet cream-laden pies, cute Mickey Mouse figures and flashy Jackpots, and who might have considered them to be simple, if not simplistic, social comments on a shallow mass-consumer, dollar-obsessed American culture, the exhibition comes as a crash course in the art of seeing, drawing, coloring and composing. All these skills are mastered by Wayne Thiebaud with the modesty of a virtuoso artist unrelentingly delving into the nature of representation, in a constant dialogue with Mondrian, Matisse and Morandi, to mention just a few of his favorite painters.

4Nothing can more effectively prove such was the intention of the curators than the display in the first room, which astutely discards chronology for the benefit of form and synthesis with only five small-to-medium paintings ranging from 1964 to 1988. The visitor is immediately provided with an overview of the artist’s work, his visual rhetoric and concerns, spanning most of the motifs, genres, and techniques used throughout his career, such as still lifes of food or mundane objects, portraits, and cartoon figures. There is, of course, the notable absence of landscapes in the room, which can come as a surprise for visitors versed in the artist’s complete output, but this deliberate omission is part of a careful handling of both suspense and space, as evidenced throughout the visit (Fig. 1).

5The first work on the left upon entering the first room, 35 Cent Masterworks (1970-1972), is worth examining in detail. It is a painting of a shop rack counting four shelves, each displaying three miniature, simplified studies of masterpieces painted on what seems to be the lid of postcard boxes. In this humorous transformation of the motif of the painter’s studio, Thiebaud playfully exhibits a wide range of artists from the 17^th to the 20^th centuries. With this set up, Thiebaud does not only comment on the age of industrial reproduction, the death of originality, the looming post-modern condition of the artist as a collagist of quotes, or the transformation of art into commodity by consumer culture, market economies, and museum shops. In fact, he offers a statement about his own aesthetics by paying tribute to some of his favorite painters, translating into visual terms his belief that “Art comes from Art” (Benson 65). He reproduces or reinterprets the paintings using his own idiosyncratic thick, creamy brush with lush combinations of warm sunlight deepened by bluish and violet shadows.

6The twelve miniatures include in the first row: Thomas Eakins’s The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake (1873), with its “realism dissolved […] into an oil sketch” (Küster 130), a version of Diego Velazquez’s Queen Mariana of Austria (1652-1653), and La Charmeuse de serpents (1907) by Henri Rousseau. Below are featured L’Avocat lisant (circa 1870) by Honoré Daumier, whose background Thiebaud lightens up into a warm yellow, a study of Mont Sainte-Victoire after Paul Cézanne, and Mondrian’s Tableau N°. IV; Lozenge Composition with Red, Gray, Blue, Yellow and Black (1924-1925) with its typical use of primary colors and its art of rhythmic composition that Thiebaud emulated. The third row puts side by side a painting echoing Claude Monet’s water lilies and a still life in the recognizable fashion of Giorgio Morandi, a favorite of Thiebaud’s. He owned three works by the Italian artist, and studied him carefully: “I have taken Morandi paintings and worked with them directly next to my own paintings to try to make mine look more like his” (Dervaux 32). Next comes Danseuses attachant leurs chaussons (1895-1899) by Edgar Degas, with a close-up that makes it verge on the abstract. The bottom row lines up L’Homme nu (circa 1900) by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso’s Nature morte à la guitare (1922), and Le Chant d’amour (1914) by Giorgio de Chirico, whose surrealism imbues so many of Thiebaud’s compositions.

7From the very outset of the exhibition, visitors are therefore invited to tune in to works that directly or indirectly impacted Thiebaud’s own approach to painting, the genres he favored, through “copies” of works that all marked significant artistic revolutions in visual representation, such as impressionism, realism, surrealism, or abstraction. They also come as a reminder that Thiebaud had a thorough knowledge of art history, partly due to his dedicated teaching for 50 years. He “placed great emphasis on the study and analysis of the art of the past as an essential pedagogical tool, which he described as ‘an inspirational wellspring and a sort of bureau of standards,’” encouraging his students to “[c]opy pictures. Enjoy the hell out of it” (Dervaux 30).

8In the same room, on the right of 35 Cent Masterworks, another lesson or insight is given with his small 1988 Mickey Mouse. It provides visitors with a crucial understanding of the impact on Thiebaud’s work of his training in commercial art, which he studied at the Frank Wiggins Trade School in Los Angeles (1937-1938), as well as his 15-year-long career as an illustrator, cartoonist, sign painter, animator for Disney, and a movie poster designer for Universal Pictures before his professorship. He mastered early on the stylistic simplifications and standardized visual language typical of cartoons and comics, their graphic energy, and attention-grabbing strategies, along with the bold cinematographic or advertising lighting techniques commonly found in commercial or popular imagery. Like many Pop artists, Thiebaud wanted to consider all visual styles with the seriousness given to past canons, and the desire to play with—or discard—hierarchies between high and low forms of art: “I’m not too comfortable with that easy categorization of fine and commercial art. Both are precisely the same thing, it’s the same language, with various emphases and syntaxes” (Dervaux 14).

9On the opposite wall, the curators chose to display Three Cones (1964)—a small-scale example of Thiebaud’s first breakthroughs in his quest for his own style—next to a later, more mysterious work: Masks (1970). Both play with the accumulation of similar shapes in rows, transformed through variations in color, texture and light, and set against two blank rectangles serving as “the bottom plane and the top plane” (Benson 66) in a spatial composition emblematically found in all his still lifes and portraits.

10As many young artists in the mid-fifties, Thiebaud had first started working under the influence of the dominant mode of abstraction, with a keen admiration for De Kooning and Franz Kline. But he was also interested in figurative representation along with “basic formalist concerns” (Benson 66), leading to the relentless variations around rectangles, circles, triangles, rhomboids, and ovals. In his last interview given to Edward Kaufman in March 2021 and published in the catalogue of the exhibition, Thiebaud recalls a crucial turning point, after his 1956-1957 sabbatical in New York where he had met De Kooning who had given him the following advice: “you have to find something you really know something about and that you are really interested in, and just do that. Don’t spend so much time looking at what you think will make you successful.” Thiebaud adds:

That was a rude series of thoughts I had not even considered. I was just trying anything that might work. And that’s when I came back to Sacramento and sat down and thought about what he said. I said to myself, well, I’ve never been to art school. I know a little bit about art history. What has my life been? I grew up a Mormon boy in America. I worked in restaurants and helped cook hamburgers, washed dishes, was a busboy. What is that world? So, I said, I’m going to just start as directly as I can. And I took the canvas and made some ovals, thinking about Cézanne—the cube, the cone, and the sphere—and put some triangles over them and thought, well, that maybe could represent a pie on a plate. I had seen them laid out in restaurants and I was always kind of interested in the way in which they formed these nice patterns. I said, alright, I’ll go ahead with this and I’ll make them into pies. I was really enjoying myself…and as I finished, I looked at it, and said, my God, I just painted a bunch of pies. That’s going to be the end of me as a serious painter. (Kaufman & Thiebaud 140)

11It was in fact the start of his success when he showed such food still lifes in 1962 at the Allan Stone Gallery in New York. They sold out, and museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired some of them. That same year, he was included in two key exhibitions, New Realists at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York and New Painting of Common Objects at the Pasadena Art Museum, alongside Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol to name a few.

12Room 2 of the exhibition gives the visitors a good number of examples of this orchestrated geometry of cakes and treats with Pie Rows (1961), refrigerated cases or shop window displays such as Little Deli (2001) and Bakery Case (1996) [Fig. 2], Cupcake Window (2018/2020), Two Wedding Cakes (2015) and Cake Assembly (2005) [Fig. 3].

13As Masks (1970) forewarned visitors in the first room, there is more to the apparently straightforward and simple representations of these pies than might seem. Viewers can revel at the thick layers of paint and notice the strange ties between illusion and reality when the medium and the subject matter share the same characteristics with the shiny, white, sticky paint literally acting as frosting. What’s more, as Ulf Küster insists in his introduction to the exhibition in the catalogue, “these pictures have nothing to do with the purely naturalistic imitation of reality. Thiebaud translates desires into visual images, but his primary concern, clearly, is always with painting itself” (Kuster 127). Bright and shiny as they are, his still lifes seem to contradict the meditative, metaphysical undertones of the genre while ironically underlining the artificial promises of material excess. The cakes and counters are set against white, void backgrounds, as though they were not actually part of reality, just “pies in the sky” so to speak, or beckoning dreams, and at best nostalgic memories. The same double-edged message about desire and yearning reappears in room 3 (Fig. 4), with his series of jackpot and pinball machines, rigged to leave gamblers penniless and hungry for luck, hankering after an elusive American Dream.

14Furthermore, the Magritte-like strangeness of these close-up, frontal depictions of food and objects gives them an eerie presence, while the portraits that are placed in the same rooms tend to objectify the represented women and men, all the more so as their own backgrounds are left equally empty and devoid of context. On the opposite wall to Two Jackpots (2005)—as though the works were acknowledging one another—hangs Two Kneeling Figures (1966), showing poker-faced life-size female bathers wearing bright wide-striped California-style swimming suits, standing stiff on their knees, with their hands identically placed on their hips.

15The same juxtapositions were already at work in the first room (Fig. 1), with Student (1968) placed next to the three cones and four masks, and are repeated with Woman in Tub (1965) disturbingly echoing the white counter of Bakery Case (1996) in room 2 (Fig. 2); with Girl with Ice Cream Cone (1963) and Eating Figures (Quick Snack) (1963) surrounded by Fruits, Vegetables, Melons (2008), Peppermint Counter (1963) and Jolly Cones (2002) in room 5 (Fig. 5). Thiebaud paints his expressionless figures just as he does the cakes and objects: they are all isolated in empty environments, strangely frozen in time, generally passively sitting, or merely eating the ice-creams or comfort food from his still lifes.

16Just as his still lifes allowed for formal concerns with triangles, circles, and rhomboids, his portraits also merge figuration and abstraction. One astonishing example is Woman in Tub (1965) in room 2 (Fig. 6), in which a nearly life-size hyper-realistically rendered head is placed reclining on a set of flat stripes of different sizes and hues standing for the bath. No other part of the body is apparent, even though Thiebaud had considered in an early sketch to have “an arm hanging out of the bathtub” (Benson 72). He put the idea aside as “one of the problems was to in some way devise a painting of a person in a bathtub that did not look too much like [David’s Death of Marat] painting” (Benson 71).

17Many other portraits displayed in the exhibition deliberately draw on several traditions in portraiture. For instance, Student (1968) [Fig. 1], made “to demonstrate the principles of portraiture to his students at the University of California, Davis” (Küster 128), evokes the “Venus pudica” modestly covering her pubis or the work of Ingres in the tradition of “the sovereign portrait,” with its mixture of intensity and aloofness. On the other hand, Girl with Pink Hat (1973) in room 8 echoes Renaissance bust portraits, with a modern background that explores flatness and the abstract shapes of shadows while making a dexterous use of complementary colors.

18Had the exhibition limited itself to Thiebaud’s still lifes and portraits, the visitors would already have been given an overall understanding of the complexities of his art and craftsmanship. But the masterstroke of the exhibition is the way it gives prominence to his landscapes and cityscapes, a motif that he worked on throughout his career. As mentioned earlier, there were no such paintings in the first room, although it was obviously designed as a compendium of some sorts. But this deliberate choice stemmed from the clever use by the curators of the exceptional architecture and setting of the Fondation Beyeler. As visitors walk down the first three connecting rooms, filled with colorful pies, pinball machines and portraits, they move towards the steel-and-glass wall that gives onto a pond, in which they can discover the reflections of trees, and further beyond, the surrounding park. When they turn on the right into room 4 (Fig. 7), they discover five wonderful Sacramento landscapes with rivers, streams and pools flooded with natural light. The real landscape outside acts as a kind of fourth exhibition wall, with glass panes framing the natural views and even reflecting the artworks, while Flood Waters (2006/2013), protected with glass, also reflects its surroundings, mingling their blue, green and brown colors. The overall effect is mesmerizing and further deepens the sensory experience of Thiebaud’s art, especially through the treatment of color and texture. The geometric glass panes of the wall also bring out the original formal compositions of Thiebaud’s work and rather than creating a “feeling of nature,” the set-up puts an emphasis on the construction of vision and sight, showing that realism is not what Thiebaud’s painting are about.

19Rooms 4, 6 and 9 offer an impressive survey of the three types of landscapes explored by the artist. The Northern California agrarian landscape paintings in room 4 adopt a bird’s-eye view of the meandering Sacramento River and canals, surrounded by a patchwork of ploughed fields, clustering trees and oval ponds, beautifully animated by tricks of light, shadows and reflections. (Fig. 7 & Fig. 8) What is most intriguing is the way Thiebaud mixes both vertical and horizontal axes of vision so that viewers feel they are looking both directly beneath their own feet and far away in the distance at the horizon, giving a greatly expanded feeling of panoramic space inside relatively small works (Ponds and Streams 2001, seen on the right in Fig. 7).

20In the more spacious room 6 (Fig. 9 & Fig. 10) is majestically gathered his series of vertical and vertiginous ridges, bluffs, canyons, and steep slopes, with no trace of human presence except for tiny roads or expressways on which even tinier colorful vehicles can be spotted. The thickly painted mesas in variations of blue, purple and reddish browns with patches of light for the odd plateaus, take on a strong corporeal presence, all the while strangely dissolving into abstract forms, shapes, and fields of color. The impastos are also bizarrely reminiscent of the frosting on his cakes seen a few rooms back.

21The even bigger room 9 (Fig. 11 & Fig. 12) gathers his San Francisco cityscapes, with their towering buildings and intersecting streets plunging vertically or diagonally with dizzying effects created by the same use of mixed perspective. The crisscrossing of the roads makes for abstract or surrealist patterns and creates tensions between feelings of flatness and illusions of depths.

22Rather than placing all these landscapes into three consecutive rooms, the curators made the astute choice of creating transition spaces in which viewers can discover other figures, portraits, and still life motifs such as his stuffed toys, scattered pastel pencils, colorful condiment bowls, and paint cans. An extremely stimulating room is the one that displays charcoal drawings and sketches of previously seen motifs, such as cakes, paint cans, and toys, or even ice creams, portraits, and landscapes organized on a single sheet. Another welcome space of transition is the winter garden which can be accessed via rooms 6 and 9, where comfortable seats are set to leaf through the catalogue. On a screen, a short film offers a series of very enlightening series of comments by Thiebaud on his own work, on the Pop Art movement and the need to philosophically address its lessons, influence and quality, on the wonder of everyday ordinariness and the essential engagement of painting the same motifs over and over, on the wisdom of welcoming error and on his vision of creativity as a mysterious idea.

23As a nice final touch, upon leaving through the park of the Fondation, the visitors can stop by the late-Baroque Villa Berower, home to the Beyeler Restaurant. Right at the entrance stands a beautiful glass case filled with all sorts of Thiebaud-inspired cakes and pies, from which to pick a welcome treat.