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Artist or Maker: Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1920)

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Notes: Reverently painted on an intimate scale, Wayne Thiebaud's Hot Dog with Mustard of 1964 is a paean to one of the shared pleasures of American culture. Thiebaud is unsurpassed in his ability to transform such everyday objects into poetic meditations in paint, and Hot Dog with Mustard is a brilliant example of his seminal still-lifes of the early 1960s that glorified distinctly American foods. Although Thiebaud often arranged his cakes, pies and ice cream cones in egalitarian rows recalling diner displays, here he lavishes his attention on a solitary hot dog that floats like an icon against a creamy white ground.

Thiebaud has described how his interest in highly processed foods, of which the hot dog is an archetype, "has to do with some sort of ritualistic preoccupationthat interest in the way we ritualize the food, play around with it" (as quoted in Thiebaud Selects Thiebaud: A Forty-Year Survey from Private Collections , exh. cat. [Sacramento: Crocker Art Museum, 1996], 8-9). The hot dog emerged in prosperous post-war America as one of the country's favorite foods, associated with the leisure of picnics, barbeques and ball games as well as the diners that served hungry workers constantly on the go. It embodied the new industry of packaged foods, which were disseminated throughout the country and glorified in persuasive advertising campaigns. Having worked briefly as an advertising designer and a cartoonist, Thiebaud respected the clarity and graphic power that such disciplines could achieve, which is reflected in his incisive distillation of the hot dog's form. Yet Thiebaud also takes full advantage of the sensuality of oil paint, building up gentle strokes of impasto to impart a keen sense of tactility of the hot dog cradled in its bun and bathed in a streak of mustard.

While Thiebaud's chosen iconography of mass-produced food would also be a source of inspiration for many Pop works of art, from Warhol to Wesselmann, Thiebaud did not share in Pop's satirical take on American culture. Rather, he was devoted to continuing a tradition of realist painting that draws on the contemporary world for painterly inspiration. His hot dog still-life is at once entirely modern, but also stands in a long tradition of paintings dedicated to food, from Dutch masters to C©zanne.