Around the Cake, Wayne Thiebaud (1920–2021)

Wayne Thiebaud, a painter usually classified as Pop, began painting mass-produced foodstuffs in the 1950s. Prior to his painting career he was a commercial artist. Thiebaud, who considers himself more realist that Pop, paints common American edibles - pies, cakes, hotdogs, ice cream cones, -- which he says, “every American child has been brought up on.” He presents his subject with deadpan repetition, again a blank background, to demonstrate “how much alike yet how different an image can be.”

Thiebaud works in an improvisational manner, creating each painting quickly from his imagination. Fascinated with Jasper John’s interplay between illusion and reality, Thiebaud playfully reconstructs the look and feel of real cake frosting. Of such creamy confections the artist says: “The decoration in Europe, particularly of cakes, seems more delicate. Here they are full of globs of material such as chocolate and cream. The materials are used as a kind of metaphor of plentitude. Americans always put on much more frosting, etc. than is needed.”