+ Expand

Dimensions: 24 x 30 in. 61 x 76.5 cm.

+ Expand

Provenance: Allan Stone Gallery, New York
Christie's New York, May 10, 1983, lot 66
John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1983

+ Expand

Exhibited:

Mason City, Charles H. MacNider Art Museum, Area Collectors 111, August - September 1984

+ Expand

Notes: Cut Cakes, 1961 is an endemic and iconic still life by Wayne Thiebaud. Structurally, the painting both addresses and confronts the two dimensional plane upon which it is conveyed, while its choice of subject places Thiebaud at the very crossroads of the Pop and California Abstract Expressionist art movements. Thiebaud's paintings quickly became icons of 20υth Century American painting due to their focus on subjects drawn from popular culture. Yet, regardless of the seemingly quotidian subject matter favored by Thiebaud, his paintings are rendered without the satirical bent of his Pop counterparts. Whereas the Pop artists were preoccupied with the pre-packaged psychological imprint of signs, symbols and imagery tantamount to the daily visual experience, Thiebaud favored the object itself, reveling in their physicality through his direct participation on the surface of his paintings. For Thiebaud, every decadent brushstroke relished in the delectable flavor of the commonplace, and realist subjects were wedded with a sophisticated abstraction. Thiebaud himself stated, "At the end of 1959 or so I began to be interested in a formal approach to composition...I tried to see if I could get an object to sit on a plane and really be very clear about it. I picked things like pies and cakes - things based on simple shapes like triangles and circles - and tried to orchestrate them." (Exh. Cat., San Francisco, Fine Arts Museum, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective, 2000, p. 19). The orchestration of Cut Cakes reveals the complex corollary between the balanced and symmetrical plates which are brilliantly contrasted with the dimensionality created within the layers of the cake slices. The formal arrangement of the plates suggests the rigidity of a counter display, whereas the cakes and their layers create a dynamic composition which resists such structure. The heavy impasto applied in subtle hues brilliantly mimics the reciprocal texture of the paint with icing and vice versa. Coined the leading innovator in "the slice of cake" by Time Magazine, Thiebaud's paintings are the realm in which an oasis of confectionary delight became an object of visual consumption and contemplation.