Paul Keegan's Delectable "Eat Me"

Wayne Thiebaud, Cut Meringues (1961)

If you love Wayne Thiebaud’s paintings of pies, cakes and ice cream, as I do, you’ll enjoy Paul Keegan’s “Eat Me,” in the October 22  London Review of Books. It’s a review of two books - Wayne Thiebaud: American Still Life (edited by Karen Serres and Barnaby Wright) and Wayne Thiebaud: A Radical Realism (edited by Peter Frank). 

Keegan considers Thiebaud’s work from multiple angles. He notes Thiebaud’s “taxonomic urge,” his fondness for painting groups of items, e.g., Five Hot Dogs, Seven Candy Sticks, Five Chocolate Cookies, Three Cones - “all the same, all different.”

He comments on Thiebaud’s use of “theatrical spotlighting”: “The floodlit cakes and pies look like they are sunbathing, inside a medium which rivals the evenly applied Californian reality outside the window – as if the idea of starkness and glare were his real subject, a mezzogiorno whose shadows are substances, heavier than the things they follow.”

He points out Thiebaud’s love of shadows: “Even a scatter of black olives on a plate, or a circle of maraschino cherries atop a birthday cake, are rhymed by their purple second selves, which shiver on the verge of emancipation” - a beautiful sentence.

He notes Thiebaud’s use of “halation” - "an aura of thin bands of unmixed complementary colours – orange and blue vibrating against each other – which activate the edges and contours of his cakes, proffering them to us with a subliminal charge.”

He says, “Above all, Thiebaud painted surplus.” “Instead of the heaped table of the vanitas, whose cornucopia was linked to human transience, there is oversupply, an excess inscribed in the sagging torpor of Thiebaud’s pies, caught in an endless present of sufficiency.”

He sees Thiebaud’s still lifes in terms of desire, yearning, longing, wish-fulfillment: “Thiebaud’s Boston cremes or pumpkin pie slices are like close-ups in the movies. They make us swoon.”

He notes that Thiebaud’s rows of pies and cakes are from the era of the deli counter, the display case, the luncheonette, the automat. 

Perhaps Keegan’s strongest point is that Thiebaud’s food paintings rouse the tactile sense. He says, 

It is often said that his paint seems to partake of the same materials as its subject: a kind of comestible mimicry or ‘licked trickery’, as Michael Baxandall described trompe l’oeil, with the signal difference that here no effort is being made to conceal the medium, which is aggressively foregrounded. The textures suggest the processes of frosting and coating and glazing. We supply the rest. 

“The textures suggest the processes of frosting and coating and glazing” - right there, I think, is the reason I relish Thiebaud’s work. I first encountered it on the cover of the September 5, 2005, New Yorker - a work entitled Food Bowls. Thiebaud created at least nine New Yorker covers. My favourite is his last one, Double Scoop, on the cover of the August 17, 2020, issue. Keegan describes it superbly as “a small feat of attention, as textured as the surface of the Moon.”