Child's Block

Thiebaud's use of a plain background recalls the artist's experience in advertising in the 1940s. Thiebaud understood the visual impact of commercial artists' treatment of their subjects, such as using blank backgrounds--in this case a subtle white with a hint of grey in it--to isolate the products and quick, decisive lines to delineate them. This device, which is present in some of Thiebaud's most mesmerizing work, has been likened to the strict formalism of Malevich and Mondrian, but other critics have identified it as being central to Thiebaud's unique brand of warm American romanticism: "Such features tend to transport the familiar yet highly simplified and conceptual objects that Thiebaud sculpts with paint and brush away from out quotidian world where the laws of physics, optics, and weather prevail into his own world where the sun always shines, gravity in inert, and nothing spoils. It is a world constructed equally of memory and longing, and a very pleasant place to be" (S. Nash, 'Thiebaud's Many Realisms', Wayne Thiebaud: Seventy Years of Painting, exh. cat., Palm Springs Art Museum, 2009, p. 15).