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Lot Essay
“The space inference that I want is one of isolation, Ultra clear, bright, air-conditioned atmosphere that might be sort of stirred up around the objects and echo their presence is what I aim for. For this reason, uninterrupted single-colored backgrounds are used, and this allows the brush marks to be seen more clearly and play their role.”
– Wayne Thiebaud
As much as feast for the eyes as it would be for the palate, Nine Cupcakes shows Wayne Thiebaud at his best. In it, a variety of cupcakes is displayed diagonally across the canvas, each one tantalizing the viewer with its lusciously applied “icing.” The grouping sprawls from one corner to the opposite, visually anchored by a resplendent blue icing with the proverbial cherry on top. Their imperfect alignment suggests the touch of a human hand, as if each one, plopped down post-icing, eagerly awaits its tidier arrangement in a display case window. The variety of flavors—strawberry, vanilla, chocolate, lemon—beckons us in a tantalizing manner, as if to say: there’s a flavor for everyone; take your pick.
Each cupcake is treated with unique attention: some are smooth and seemingly soft to the touch, whereas others were rendered so thickly that the viewer is convinced the paint is icing itself. Indeed, one of Thiebaud’s strongest abilities as a painter is his capability to manipulate paint and transform it into whatever material he is trying to depict. In Nine Cupcakes, the peaks and valleys of the heavily-applied paint seduce us to believe it is a thick chocolate or smooth lemon icing; that the shiny cherries are ripe to be plucked from their sugary beds. The result is so convincing that the viewer is encouraged to reach out and bite into one.
Our experience with the painting is informed by Thiebaud’s purposeful emphasis on the cupcakes themselves. Their eye-catching vibrancy is heightened by the minimalist, pale yellow background, which both coordinates with the pastel palette of the cupcakes themselves and serves as a neutral backdrop on which they can be situated. Thiebaud’s tendency to create compositions in such a reduced manner stems greatly from his early career as an illustrator, including a brief apprenticeship at the Walt Disney Studios. The lessons of reduction in form that he learned there were carried over into his career as an artist. When approaching his subjects, particularly food, he lays them out against blank backgrounds with a strong lighting effect. In what he calls the “isolation of the object,” Thiebaud explains “The space inference that I want is one of isolation, Ultra clear, bright, air-conditioned atmosphere that might be sort of stirred up around the objects and echo their presence is what I aim for. For this reason, uninterrupted single-colored backgrounds are used, and this allows the brush marks to be seen more clearly and play their role.” (W. Thiebaud, R. Teagle, Wayne Thiebaud 1958-1968, Oakland, 2018, p. 23).
This “isolation of the object,” as such, achieves multiple goals: it not only emphasizes the object itself, elevating it to an esteemed status, but also, much to Thiebaud’s delight, places an emphasis on the brushwork and the paint itself. It is in the paint itself that Thiebaud’s talent shine. His exemplary use of color is unmatched among his generation of artists: from the soft pastel tone of the background, to the prismatic kaleidoscope that he uses to render the shadows and recesses of the composition. Adam Gopnik describes Thiebaud’s signature halation of his foodstuffs best: “The cakes, which seem so honestly and forthrightly described, turn out, when they’re seen up close, to be outlined with rings and rainbows of pure color; bright blues and reds and purples, which register at a distance only as a just perceptible vibrator. These rings are Thiebaud’s own invention; there’s nothing quite like them in any other painting, and they give to his pictures not just a sense of the shiver of light in a particular place but also the sense that the scene has the interior life and unnatural emphases of something recalled from memory” (A. Gopnik, “Window Gazing,” The New Yorker, Apr. 29, 1991, p. 80).
Painted in 2009, Nine Cupcakes is proof that Thiebaud’s mastery of the subject, begun in the early 1960s, continues well into the 21st century. Over a career spanning seven decades, Thiebaud has developed a reputation as one of the foremost proponents of figurative painting. His paintings capture the emotional resonance of a bygone age, turning ordinary and everyday objects into objects of quiet beauty. His bountiful paintings of diner counters, confectionary and row-upon-row of sumptuous pastries captured the prosperity of postwar America as much as Andy Warhol’s Coca-Cola bottles and tins of Campbell’s Soup. Yet his meticulous painterly style helped to revive what had previously been the staid genre of still life before Thiebaud took hold of it in beginning in the early 1960s. Breaking onto the scene in 1962 with an exhibition at Allan Stone Gallery in New York, Thiebaud anticipated Pop Art’s infatuation with the everyday objects and images of American life. “His method…has the effect not of eliminating the Pop resonance of his subjects but of slowing down and chastening the associations they evoke, so that a host of ambivalent feelings—nostalgic and satiric and elegiac—can come back later, calmed down and contemplative: enlightened” (A. Gopnik, ibid, p. 80).
– Wayne Thiebaud
As much as feast for the eyes as it would be for the palate, Nine Cupcakes shows Wayne Thiebaud at his best. In it, a variety of cupcakes is displayed diagonally across the canvas, each one tantalizing the viewer with its lusciously applied “icing.” The grouping sprawls from one corner to the opposite, visually anchored by a resplendent blue icing with the proverbial cherry on top. Their imperfect alignment suggests the touch of a human hand, as if each one, plopped down post-icing, eagerly awaits its tidier arrangement in a display case window. The variety of flavors—strawberry, vanilla, chocolate, lemon—beckons us in a tantalizing manner, as if to say: there’s a flavor for everyone; take your pick.
Each cupcake is treated with unique attention: some are smooth and seemingly soft to the touch, whereas others were rendered so thickly that the viewer is convinced the paint is icing itself. Indeed, one of Thiebaud’s strongest abilities as a painter is his capability to manipulate paint and transform it into whatever material he is trying to depict. In Nine Cupcakes, the peaks and valleys of the heavily-applied paint seduce us to believe it is a thick chocolate or smooth lemon icing; that the shiny cherries are ripe to be plucked from their sugary beds. The result is so convincing that the viewer is encouraged to reach out and bite into one.
Our experience with the painting is informed by Thiebaud’s purposeful emphasis on the cupcakes themselves. Their eye-catching vibrancy is heightened by the minimalist, pale yellow background, which both coordinates with the pastel palette of the cupcakes themselves and serves as a neutral backdrop on which they can be situated. Thiebaud’s tendency to create compositions in such a reduced manner stems greatly from his early career as an illustrator, including a brief apprenticeship at the Walt Disney Studios. The lessons of reduction in form that he learned there were carried over into his career as an artist. When approaching his subjects, particularly food, he lays them out against blank backgrounds with a strong lighting effect. In what he calls the “isolation of the object,” Thiebaud explains “The space inference that I want is one of isolation, Ultra clear, bright, air-conditioned atmosphere that might be sort of stirred up around the objects and echo their presence is what I aim for. For this reason, uninterrupted single-colored backgrounds are used, and this allows the brush marks to be seen more clearly and play their role.” (W. Thiebaud, R. Teagle, Wayne Thiebaud 1958-1968, Oakland, 2018, p. 23).
This “isolation of the object,” as such, achieves multiple goals: it not only emphasizes the object itself, elevating it to an esteemed status, but also, much to Thiebaud’s delight, places an emphasis on the brushwork and the paint itself. It is in the paint itself that Thiebaud’s talent shine. His exemplary use of color is unmatched among his generation of artists: from the soft pastel tone of the background, to the prismatic kaleidoscope that he uses to render the shadows and recesses of the composition. Adam Gopnik describes Thiebaud’s signature halation of his foodstuffs best: “The cakes, which seem so honestly and forthrightly described, turn out, when they’re seen up close, to be outlined with rings and rainbows of pure color; bright blues and reds and purples, which register at a distance only as a just perceptible vibrator. These rings are Thiebaud’s own invention; there’s nothing quite like them in any other painting, and they give to his pictures not just a sense of the shiver of light in a particular place but also the sense that the scene has the interior life and unnatural emphases of something recalled from memory” (A. Gopnik, “Window Gazing,” The New Yorker, Apr. 29, 1991, p. 80).
Painted in 2009, Nine Cupcakes is proof that Thiebaud’s mastery of the subject, begun in the early 1960s, continues well into the 21st century. Over a career spanning seven decades, Thiebaud has developed a reputation as one of the foremost proponents of figurative painting. His paintings capture the emotional resonance of a bygone age, turning ordinary and everyday objects into objects of quiet beauty. His bountiful paintings of diner counters, confectionary and row-upon-row of sumptuous pastries captured the prosperity of postwar America as much as Andy Warhol’s Coca-Cola bottles and tins of Campbell’s Soup. Yet his meticulous painterly style helped to revive what had previously been the staid genre of still life before Thiebaud took hold of it in beginning in the early 1960s. Breaking onto the scene in 1962 with an exhibition at Allan Stone Gallery in New York, Thiebaud anticipated Pop Art’s infatuation with the everyday objects and images of American life. “His method…has the effect not of eliminating the Pop resonance of his subjects but of slowing down and chastening the associations they evoke, so that a host of ambivalent feelings—nostalgic and satiric and elegiac—can come back later, calmed down and contemplative: enlightened” (A. Gopnik, ibid, p. 80).