Salt, Sugar and Pepper

Widely regarded as one of the most important painters of the postwar and contemporary period, for over seven decades Wayne Thiebaud has enthralled both critics and viewers with his extraordinary ability to capture in lusciously rendered oil paint the essence of the objects he portrayed. His preference for humble, everyday mass-produced items allowed him to merge an interest in realism with a superb eye for the visual language of abstraction, so wonderfully achieved in the present work, Salt, Sugar and Pepper.

Throughout his career, Thiebaud's art has both engaged audiences and won praise from critics through the artist’s ability to uplift and transform everyday subject matter, and he revived what had previously been the staid genre of still life. An elegant arrangement of shapes arrayed along a counter or table top, Salt, Sugar and Pepper depicts a scene to be found in any American diner or coffee shop from the 1930s to today. But it’s a scene that isn’t conventionally realistic. Instead, it is conjured with meaning and nostalgia from the artist’s memory. Thiebaud painted many of his subjects from memory, rather than direct observation. This method had the effect of distilling and intensifying the remembered forms, conveying at one and the same time a feeling of remove and imparting the objects with a weight and solidity that seems to transcend time. The real subject of Thiebaud’s work is often not the subject itself, but the artist’s remembered idea of it.

Although the subject matter of Salt, Sugar and Pepper appears ubiquitous, it nonetheless evokes moments that contain small, vital truths. The mood suggests the sort of privacy within a public setting one might find while lingering over a cup of coffee. Memory, desire and longing are a powerful undercurrent in Thiebaud’s paintings and nostalgia and an aura of transience run through them. All of the artist’s works infuse what would otherwise be impersonal objects with a palpable humanity.

In his fascination with subjects such as those in the present work, he anticipated Pop Art's obsession with midcentury American consumer culture. In fact, Thiebaud captured the attention of a young Andy Warhol during the former’s debut show at New York’s Allan Stone Gallery in 1962. However, while delighting in the same commercial-Americana subject matter as the Pop Artists, Thiebaud steered an independent course, relishing the aesthetic pleasures of applying oil paint to canvas. His choice of subject matter together with his sensuous handling of paint resulted in art works that, with great sensitivity, depict the beauty of light and surface, while at the same time delving into the mysteries present in even commonplace objects.

As in all of Thiebaud’s art, the present work is both a still-life scene and a richly prepared canvas. It is characterized by a quiet, deadpan humor and even a sense of poignancy. But Thiebaud’s art is also triumphal, with its joyful handling of paint. “You sense a love of paint and surface…There’s a real joy of painting, a joy of life in his work” (A. Stone, quoted in K. Tsujimoto, Wayne Thiebaud, Seattle, 1985, pp. 36-37). Although living most of his life in California, Thiebaud mingled with Abstract Expressionist painters in New York in the 1950s. He particularly admired Willem de Kooning, especially the older artist’s sensuous and expressive use of oil paint. Thiebaud appreciated the “brush dance” of a number of painters, practitioners as diverse as Chardin and Mondrian. From de Kooning, in particular, he gained an appreciation of the older artist’s supple application of oil and the coloristic inventions de Kooning introduced.

Color and light are as much the subject of the present painting as are the manifest objects themselves. The illumination is clean, bright, evenly lighting the entire field, and is somewhat unreal in overall effect. The artist builds contrast by including darker stripes of alternating hues along the bottom portion and upper third of the canvas. Blue shadows separate the shakers from their background, lending depth. By placing contrasting colors around the edges of objects, Thiebaud suggests lively vitality rather than merely a copy of reality. The shadows here are actually areas of color, not empty black but in fact diversely hued and textured spaces of light. The perspective is almost aerial, the artist editing out every extraneous detail of the environment, allowing the viewer to focus on the geometries of the elements set before us—the play of circles, straight lines, diagonals.

In his interest in realist art and in the still life, Thiebaud was influenced by the Italian painter Girogio Morandi, who specialized in painting still lives of simple objects portrayed in subtle, understated tonalities. Morandi’s influence is evident in Thiebaud’s preference for understatement, and the exploration of the possibilities of the medium of paint. In the late 1950s Thiebaud came to be associated with a group of San Francisco-area artists referred to as the Bay Area Figurative painters, who included Elmer Bischoff, David Park and Richard Diebenkorn and who explored the expressive possibilities of paint but who preferred to render the figure, eschewing abstraction. The start of the mature phase of Thiebaud’s career coincides with the emergence of Pop Art in the early 60s and artists such as Warhol and Lichtenstein. Sometimes associated with Pop Art because of his choice of subject matter, in fact Thiebaud was more interested in exploring the possibilities of the still life genre, looking for inspiration in mentors active earlier in the 20th century, even though he himself depicted the quietly evocative contemporary world around him.