An exhibition of artwork by Wayne Thiebaud (1920-2021) is coming to the Courtauld Gallery this October.
I’ve just booked my ticket to the Wayne Thiebaud – American Still Life Exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery – opening 10th October to 18th January 2025.
I’m a big fan of Wayne Thiebaud – not least because I used to love drawing food, foodstuff and meals. I never quite graduated to cakes but I do love looking at the display in the windows of great cake shops!
This is the blog post I wrote when he died in 2021 – An appreciation of Wayne Thiebaud (1920 – 2021). I’ll be writing more about him nearer the time of thre exhibition.
Wayne Thiebaud – American Still Life Exhibition
In summary he is one of the greatest and most original American artists of the 20th century. He is famous for being focused in particular on post-war modern American subjects – typically as still life objects.
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| Cakes by Wayne Thiebaud (1920-1021) |
This exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery will be the first ever museum show of his work in the UK. It will present Thiebaud’s remarkable, vibrant and lushly painted still-lifes of quintessentially post-war American subjects, from diner food and deli counters to gumball dispensers and pinball machines. These are the paintings with which Thiebaud made his name in the USA in the early 1960s.
The exhibition will feature rarely lent works from major museum collections in the USA as well as the Wayne Thiebaud Foundation.
These are my two books about Wayne Thiebaud – which I periodically salivate over.
For me he’s an artist who is a luscious realist of the everyday – until you get up close and realise his artwork is also abstracted from reality and the artist relishes the media he used. More Wayne Thibaud: “This for you is my world to look at” (Making A Mark September 2019)
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| Thiebaud – delicious metropolis, the desserts and urban scenes of Wayne Thiebaud |
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| Wayne Thiebaud 100 the book produced to celebrate the 100th birthday of “one of America’s most loved and respected artists” |
A second exhibition Wayne Thiebaud: Delights, will focus on the artists’s eponymous 1965 portfolio of prints to appreciate Thiebaud as a draughtsman and printmaker.
In 1964, Wayne Thiebaud created a portfolio of 17 prints, entitled Delights, in which he returned to the favoured still-life motifs found in his paintings and which made his name in the early 1960s: ice cream cones, rows of cakes, gumball machines and many of the other objects of everyday American life. However, these subjects look very different rendered in print, on a small scale and in black and white. As Thiebaud told his publisher, ‘When you change something, you change everything.’ Thiebaud was keen to experiment with different techniques and media, and Delights was his first foray into printmaking, a technique he returned to throughout his long career.
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