America’s ‘laureate of lunch counters’

These exotic confections glowed in my imagination far away in rainy Scotland. I did not want to eat them, only to see them; and, eventually, I did, not in a bakery but in an Edinburgh exhibition in the 1980s, through a work by the great American painter Wayne Thiebaud.

A “laureate of lunch counters”, critic Lawrence Alloway called him; a modern-day Chardin of the sandwich, damn fine coffee and cherry pie. Everything he painted seemed to make the perfect more radiant and ideal.

In that show, I saw a painting of cakes on display stands where each iced confection – pale pink, lemon – cast a cobalt shadow on the counter below, mysterious and wistful, haloed in turn by luminous outlines. My mother and I agreed that every cake could have been made by the baker in the story.

When I came to write a memoir about her in 2019, On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Persons, I wanted above all to use one of Thiebaud’s cakes in the book. People said I’d never get one. The National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington had recently tried to charge me $10,000 just to reproduce a Judith Leyster self-portrait, and its most popular painting was, and remains, Thiebaud’s 1963 dozen (or more) Cakes.

Clearly, I would never be able to afford that picture, so I thought, with barely a hope, that I would try calling Thiebaud’s studio in the US. Send an email, said someone in California – he’s just out playing tennis. I wrote my supplication. He came in from the court and replied immediately. I cherish the memory of this exchange. Open-hearted as his art, Thiebaud understood why his paintings related so perfectly to the story of The Baker’s Daughter (both are, of course, about infinitely more than cakes). He helped me use an image for free. Thiebaud was 95 years old at the time. Five years later, he showed a tragicomic self-portrait with a cherry-red nose – One Hundred-Year-Old Clown – in what turned out to be his final exhibition. Thiebaud was still painting right up until his death, aged 101, the following year, in 2021.

A hero of generosity, humility and industrious longevity, he might have had the longest career of any modern master. Yet Thiebaud is so stinted in Britain that we scarcely see his art anywhere. The Tate has only a couple of small monochromes and there has never been a museum show devoted to his work. Wayne Thiebaud: American Still Life, opening at the Courtauld Gallery on 10 October , is our first.

Thiebaud was born in Arizona in 1920 but moved to California as a child. He remembered selling papers on the streets of Long Beach when he was 11 or 12 and staring mesmerised at trays of sweets in the drugstores. An early draughtsman, he got a job as an “in-betweener” at Walt Disney Studios while he was still at school, filling in the transitional frames of cartoons. The First Motion Picture Unit of the US air force employed him during the second world war and Universal Studios hired him to design movie posters after it ended. When Thiebaud couldn’t get Ava Gardner’s knees quite right, he consulted the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens and that habit of learning art from art was lifelong.

The NGA’s Cakes – whisked away from the American public by the Courtauld – has its formal origins in Degas’s The Millinery Shop, with its pink, chartreuse and chocolate ellipses on their hat stands. Thiebaud saw it in the Art Institute of Chicago and came to London very often, too, with his students from the University of California, Davis, to watch Wimbledon and visit the galleries. He loved Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, with its famous counter of still lifes, which hangs not far from the entrance to this Courtauld show.

Thiebaud didn’t go to university until he was 29 and studied arts education rather than painting. “I’m not trained,” he once claimed. “I have to start over every day.” Until then, he directed lighting and window displays at the Rexall Drug Company. Anyone who visits his wondrous paintings at the Courtauld will see what he learned at Rexall from the eerie cast of fluorescent light, the lengthening shadows inside chiller cabinets, the solitary confinement of a lone pie slice inside a glass box conjured by nothing but sparse blue lines and their shadows.

“Strong display lights can make an object cast coloured shadows, change its local colour before your eyes, glow and develop a halo or imbue it with a pulsating effect … The problem of catching some of this keeps me going.” Thiebaud’s statement for his first New York show is as modest as how he got there, a story he would recount in his deep John Wayne voice. He had travelled to New York in 1961 to track down the venerable abstract expressionists. Willem de Kooning told him to paint something he loved. “I took the canvas and made some ovals, thinking about Cézanne – the cube, the cone, and the sphere – and put some triangles over them and thought, well, maybe that could represent a pie. I had seen them laid out in restaurants where I worked and I was always interested in the way in which they formed these nice patterns. I was really enjoying myself … and as I finished, I looked at it, and said: ‘My God, I just painted a bunch of pies.’”

Pie Rows, from 1961, is in this show. Twelve slices, the tips of several more disappearing out of sight: a regatta in full sail coming towards us. There is a horizon line but no shore. Every segment has its own direction and character. Cherry filler leaves a blushing wet-on-wet stain of crimson paint on the plate. The whiteness of meringue falls unevenly, like icicles on eaves. The shadows are all kinds of marine blue (Thiebaud could be Monet’s equal). His whole method is openly declared: the circles, ovals and wedges, the brushing in of outline over outline, the stupendous buildup of colours, lime to cobalt and cerise, one upon the other “There are still days,” he told an interviewer more than 50 years later, “that start with the thought: This morning, I’d like to paint a pie.”

He took the pies round New York,  hoping for a dealer. The very last stop before quitting was the Allan Stone Gallery. Stone went home that night “and kept seeing these pies in front of my face as I was watching television. Well, any image that can sustain itself like that I can’t help but be interested in.” The following year, he gave Thiebaud a show. The New York Times called him “the Edward Hopper of the dinette tabletop”, the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art bought works and the paintings sold out overnight. Thomas Hess, then executive editor of ARTNews, thought the pies and hot dogs were social criticism made visual, urging us to “leave the new Gomorrah where layer cakes troop down air conditioned shelving like cholesterol angels”. Thiebaud conceded they occasionally offered “notions about conformism, mechanised living and mass-produced culture”.

Jackpot Machine, in this show as in that one, is star-spangled with blue stripes and a gaping mouth for money. But it’s waving one foolish arm. The abstract expressionist painter Barnett Newman saw it as “distinctly American surrealism”.

Thiebaud is always far more poetic and subtle than his subjects. The Courtauld is showing Cold Cereal, painted just before his breakthrough, which perfectly invokes the intense joy of eating while reading, learned from cereal packets in childhood. “FREE” is emblazoned on the back in blue, along with a green starburst, though you cannot read anything else. Perhaps the word echoes John F Kennedy’s inaugural address in January 1961, as critics have suggested: “Ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.” But this is the cold war and Kennedy will soon be dead. There is no spoon to eat with.

Americans must surely see Thiebaud’s paintings differently: the way we were. Their mass heritage passes so swiftly out of time. Candy Counter – he’s always playing with words and numbers – has a strange melancholy for all the brilliance of its lollipops and nougat. Some of the trays are almost empty and the ambient light is unusually bleak. Counters such as this were already disappearing by 1962, the show’s co-curator Karen Serres points out, handmade sweets and weighing scales superseded by pre-packaged candy. Everything in his art is about innocence sustained by hope, but inflected by experience.

I was never there and still some part of me yearns for the fixed prices in those tidy signs: 5 cents for peppermints, 10 for candied apples; an era fading even as you look. To me, his paintings have solitude and time, like a Chardin, built into their slow and loving facture. Thiebaud painted many other subjects – shoes, a standing man (based on Manet’s The Fifer), lipstick, airmail letters, the surging switchbacks of San Francisco streets – but the Courtauld is justly showing the early Americana: ice-creams, cakes, the lunch counter and the soda fountain: his best-loved work.

Glacé cherries that reflect the light, slathers of custard-yellow paint, white icing that casts shadows like Arctic snow: his painting is as calorific as cream, as smoothly spread as lemon curd. The visible brushmarks keep every surface alive. Transfixed by the transparency of the chiller cabinet, he paints the interior as a kind of crystalline paradise. Fascinated by ice-cream, his paint seems to melt accordingly, or turn rich and stiff as royal icing.

There is a benign delight to this show, a rejoicing in everyday objects that finds its parallel in the way Thiebaud’s paint appears buoyantly alla prima on canvas, straight off, uncorrected, and in his harmoniously balanced compositions. Each image appears solid, certain, complete. Thiebaud has the still life master Giorgio Morandi’s love of forms, glorying in the rhyming ellipse of mug, plate and cake, uplifted into incandescent colour. And even in all this multiplicity – seven cakes, 12 cones, one perfect sundae after another – he is reminding you just how singular every object really is.

There were no pie slices or pinball machines in his studio. Nor was he painting from photographs. Something was held in mind, perhaps in heart, and commemorated in these indelible shapes. His art is as immediately recognisable, in all its abstracted beauty, as the comestibles in these paintings, but so far exceeds anything you could ever consume in this golden land of visual joy and plenty. He is content to love, and paint, a piece of cake.

The baker in my childhood story always refused to sell his greatest creation, the famed centrepiece of his bakery window. One day, his daughter steals it to dazzle her schoolfriends at a birthday party. But when they try to cut the cake, the knife won’t pierce the icing, no matter how hard they try. Suddenly, the cake overturns and is revealed to be hollow, nothing but an iced cardboard shell. The story is a warning against vanity and greed, although it was the beauty of the cake, not its flavour, that counted.

No artist has ever more brilliantly captured the idea that such a trivial object can be beautiful, that it can be – and of course would become a thousand times over in his paintings – the stuff of art.

Wayne Thiebaud: American Still Life is at the Courtauld Gallery, London, from 10 October-18 January 

Photographs courtesy of the Wayne Thiebaud Foundation