Pastries, cakes, and cupcakes. The great Wayne Thiebaud, the icing painter, dies at the age of 101.
He left at the age of 101, on Christmas Eve, to his home in Sacramento. We had just celebrated here the great Wayne Thiebaud. Painter of a dense, bright, pasty, sensual painting. Delicate and very slow. An extremely tactile icing paint. Revered for its soft and wonderful sweets made with sugar and oil, it has eternalized cupcakes crystallizing them into a work of art. So far no more details have been released about the causes of his death.
He made the pastry a pop icon, fed to everyone. Celebrated and reproduced everywhere, he chiseled them one by one, giving the dough, the shortcrust pastry, and the mold that cradles them, that infinity of iridescent shades and chrome reflections that thicken them and make them sparkle. And it elevates to other dimensions of meaning that run far beyond easy pop. As he did with ice cream, candy, muffins, cakes, pie slices, and cream. The layers of cream, with various textures and softness where the sour cherry drowns. All strictly multicolored, caressed with overflowing material blown over it like icing sugar that melts on every centimeter of the canvas, wrapping the work of a dreamlike cream of icing. An infinite quantity of replicating pastries, painted, constructed, in series, or individually. Multiple or unique, spread out on horizontal planes and with a severe geometric formal architecture. Always with a softly marked shade, often blue, to wet the milky bottoms with a metaphysical flavor.
Cantor and lover of sweets, yes, but also of everyday objects, cosmetics, toys (the classic symbols of Western consumerism, rendered without bombastic American rhetoric), and also an excellent portrait and landscape painter with dizzying perspectives (always two-dimensional, objective, frontal), Thiebaud leaves us after having just passed the century (he was born in 1920 in Mesa, Arizona) and after having celebrated his 100th birthday last year, November 2020, with his new auction record at Christie’s which took place a few months earlier in July: Four Pinball Machines of 1962 sold for 19 million dollars (double the second top, reached 9.8 million in June from Phillips – Winding River of 2002). A market on the shields, whose total turnover at auction in the last 3 years alone has reached 93 million.
“The wonder of intimacy and the love for a prolonged gaze. Gaze for a long time but at the same time move your eye to really discover what’s behind it. And then there are so many subtleties, elements that can seem like one thing at a time and another the moment after “. Wayne Thiebaud on Giorgio Morandi
Raised in a Mormon family, he began his “career” as a commercial graphic designer, illustrator, and advertising director in New York. After the Second World War, he returned to California where in 51 he set up his first solo show at the Crocker Art Gallery (Sacramento). Inspired by the paintings of De Kooning, Diebenkorn, and our Giorgio Morandi, in 1967 he represented the United States at the San Paolo Biennale. Five years later, in 1972, he participated in Documenta 5 in Kassel. In 1985, the San Francisco Museum of Art inaugurated one of the largest retrospectives of his career. Always present with some work at every level fair (Acquavella his historic reference gallery), especially American, he was one of the great and most influential American artists of the twentieth century. An eternal painter. Like his cupcakes.
Amelia Warner
Amelia Warner writes all the Latest Articles. She mostly covers Entertainment topics, but at times loves to write about movie reviews as well.
