“I’m not a card-carrying Pop artist,” Wayne Thiebaud has said, and indeed, though the 94-year-old painter’s depictions of pastries and everyday objects have been associated with Warhol et al., Thiebaud’s efforts are far too complex to pigeonhole, as this in-depth look suggests. Spanning a 50-year period from the mid-1960s to today, the portraits, still lifes, landscapes and cityscapes on view—some 35 paintings and 14 works on paper in all—reveal his debt to the Old Masters, Edward Hopper, Giorgio Morandi, and such members of the Bay Area Figurative Movement as Elmer Bischoff, Richard Diebenkorn and David Park.
Some of the standouts here include the large 2010–13 canvas Cold Case, which captures a refrigerated store display containing brightly colored cakes and pies that look real enough to eat. Just as tempting are three smaller paintings: 2014’s Dark Heart Cake, 2011’s Two Cheese Cubes and 2001’s Chocolate & Maple, which pictures a pair of éclairs. Drawn from the artist’s memory and imagination, these works are as much about his exquisite use of composition, brushwork, color, light and shadow as they are about food.
Likewise, Thiebaud’s portraits delight the eye with depictions of sober-faced subjects, both real and imagined. In his recent, dreamy landscapes and cityscapes, however, Thiebaud allows his mind’s eye to run wild with a combination of fantastical aerial views, odd perspectives and energetic colors. They are proof that even this late in his career, the artist is still propelling his work to new heights.—Paul Laster