Many long years before the phrase ‘food porn’ was invented, Wayne Thiebaud had already made an artistic career out of it. The Californian artist also paints portraits and landscapes – but it’s his still-lives of cakes, pies, candy and deli counters that earned him fame, and in this six-decade survey you’ll see why.
Working on the fringes of pop, Thiebaud is perhaps best summed up as an Old World painter of the New; dealing with the optics of modern American life – excess, desire, mass production – but with the mindset of European masters like Matisse and Cézanne. It’s this paradox that makes him arguably the best working colourist today (yes, that includes Hockney), and each painting such a prismatic, confounding experience. How can a gherkin flecked with pink still look like a gherkin? How can every colour in the spectrum successfully figure into a pair of beige nylons? His dense and gooey use of oil paint is as witty as it is gratuitous: he paints the icing on a cake in much the same way as you’d ice an actual cake.
Downstairs, we’re treated to some of his West Coast landscapes: vertiginous quilts of car-studded freeways and candy-coloured cornfields. These are nuts. Their morphing perspectives and 45-degree inclines clearly don’t belong to exact reality, and yet they feel in total obeisance to their subject matter. His portraits have a kind of Rockwell-esque reverence to them – but I’d argue he paints cherry pies and high-heeled shoes with just the same humanity. Just look at the cute picture of two upside-down ice creams (above), wearing their cones like dunces’ caps. Perhaps the only raincloud hanging over this radiant exhibition is that it comes off as something like a final bow: Thiebaud turns 97 this year. In the age of Instagram, freakshakes and rainbow bagels, he’ll need a worthy successor.