Word: thiebaud
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...what he's aiming for: the sort of one-shot, spot-on accuracy that Manet displayed when he painted his single stalk of asparagus with what looks like a single brushstroke. Except that Thiebaud has a way of punching up the effect with sharp lines and rainbow profiles of complementary color, a green or a purple, that pulse like halos and throw the whole form into relief. He isn't being hit-or-miss. He is, on the contrary, being intensely thoughtful. The arrays of pie slices or cake stands become Utopian: soft but strict geometry. (No wonder...
...slightly irksome that after all this time, Thiebaud is still thought of by many people as a Pop artist--whatever that name now means. Actually, in relation to his work, it doesn't mean much: only that he was and presumably still is intrigued and delighted by the sight of multiple-produced American food. Not so much the package (like the soup can) as the soup itself, or for that matter the sandwich, the cake or the slice of pie, sitting there in virginal garishness, the coconut icing soft and fluffy as a baby angel's wingpits, under the fluorescent...
...distinct, its presence in the still life making it the only one of its kind. But Nature is a greater mass producer than Culture. The sea is full of sea robins and whiting, all looking the same. The peach tree is laden with identical peaches. So it is with Thiebaud's cakes and pies. He is fascinated by variation within repetition, but he never thinks of repetition as being antipoetic because, in fact, nothing is exactly the same as anything else: two slices of the same pie are never identical...
This point is vividly made in paintings like Thiebaud's Pies, Pies, Pies, 1961. Each of the soft wedges (and how beautifully the squidginess of the oil paint consorts with what it is imitating, the squishiness of the lemon meringue and chocolate!) is very much its own thing. But there are differences of color and shape that save the serried ranks of piedom from monotony, and you are drawn into the small but clear discriminations that make an interesting painting. You end up thanking Thiebaud, in absentia, for reminding you how various and plural the world really...
...What Thiebaud especially loves, however, more than food or the memory of food--and perhaps even more than people, at least from the pictorial point of view--is craft. He is a terrific craftsman. Whatever he asks paint to do, it will (almost invariably) do, and come up smiling and looking effortless after it's done. With a very few exceptions, every picture in this show displays a sort of seraphic ease with itself, an unfussed wholeness. The surface is dense, creamy and unctuous, yet it never looks dragged or displays the laborious appearance of palette-knife work...