Around the Cake, Wayne Thiebaud

Episode 8. I’m David Cateforis with another art minute from the Spencer Museum of Art. The California artist Wayne Thiebaud made his reputation in the early 1960s with still-life paintings of ice cream cones, gumball machines, cakes and pies. Like the New York Pop artists, with whom he was often compared, Thiebaud painted familiar icons of American consumerism, but he did so without irony, and with affection. And unlike the Pop artists, he was primarily committed to the process of painting, choosing subjects that attracted him in terms of form, line, color, and texture. The Spencer’s Thiebaud, a 1962 painting called “Around the Cake,” depicts a white frosted cake encircled by eight cake slices on plates. The luscious, thick oil paint conjures the texture of frosting, tempting the viewer’s sense of taste as well as sight. Thiebaud did not paint the cake and slices from observation but worked from memory, building them out of basic geometric shapes such as ellipses, trapezoids, and triangles. He also gave them colorful shadows to enhance their vitality and to suggest stage lighting, recalling his early work as a theater set designer. From the Spencer Museum of Art, I’m David Cateforis.