Study for Delicatessen Counter

Demonstrating Thiebaud’s distinguished, early style, Study for Delicatessen Counter is an exquisite celebration of American food, one of the artist's signature motifs. Best known for his luscious paintings of ice-cream cones and pies, Thiebaud has been a prolific draftsman since the early days of his career as an illustrator. With its rich colors, sly geometry, shallow depth of field, wry humor, and common everyday subject matter, Study for Delicatessen Counter is a remarkable example of the artist’s mastery of his iconic visual vernacular.

Study for Delicatessen Counter is an upbeat, mouth-watering view of a deli counter, with tight groupings of blocks, wheels and wedges of meats and cheeses progressing sideways out of the picture plane. Fusing the still life and landscape traditions, the canvas is split horizontally in two by a white counter which acts as a horizon line and balances the composition. Above, a wheel of cheese sits in its glass casing while a grouping of brightly-colored sausages dangles in the distance giving the work perceivable depth. Drawing attention to the immediacy of frontal planes, the numbered enamel platters and stacks of rectangular cheeses inside the case seem to be at the forefront of the picture plane, and visually mimic the rows of houses lining the streets in Thiebaud’s famous landscape paintings.
Thiebaud defines mass, volume and space through his deft manipulation of color and tone, and adds texture and dimensionality through skilled layering of paint. His use of chiaroscuro is reminiscent of Dutch old master still life paintings. The stark contrast between light and dark yields dramatic effect; the bundles of rich red, burgundy and brown meats loom in darkness against the muted beige background, and the warm orange wheel of cheese, displayed like an encased relic, casts a cobalt shadow along the pale, icy blue counter. Both a lover of realism and a commercially trained artist, Thiebaud embraces the pureness and directness of geometric shapes, which he drew naturally out of the aesthetic delights of the common place.