I absolutely enjoy reading about the artists featured on Diane Tucker’s blog, The Shy Museumgoer. She’s dropped a new post and I whipped right through reading it. https://theshymuseumgoer.com/2024/09/18/thiebaud-cake-and-freeway-paintings/ Then I went back for a slower appreciation.

Tucker discusses the artist, Wayne Thiebaud, who I guess is very modern. But when I say that, all I mean is, that he is contemporary. Actually he lived to be 101 years old, arriving in the world in 1920 and dying in 2021. I love his pictures. You can see from the URL that he did pictures of cake and also pictures of freeways … he did other things as well, but those are the pictures commented on here, along with a few of San Francisco.

What set my brain buzzing was a quote from Thiebaud, that is included in the article.

Each era produces its own still life. Wayne Thiebaud

I immediately thought of pictures I had seen as a child in the National Gallery of Art, the ones with dead peacocks and oysters.

Still Life with Peacock Pie. Pieter Claesz. 1627. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington On the NGA website you can actually see how much bigger this picture is than the one of just oysters.

I’m totally into the idea that Thiebaud’s cake pictures are worthy successors of those paintings. If you study the Pieter Claesz picture you can be sure he wasn’t fully straightforward. The tablecloth is clean if wrinkled. There are two carefully placed crumbs, not more, etc. And the dead peacock?! Actually two dead peacocks… Honestly, I would rather have the cake picture on my own wall, even if Claesz exhibits some amazing technical ability.

There are pictures of the steep San Francisco hills as well as tangled freeway overpasses, that Thiebaud did after he moved to that city. I’d put that last picture, Urban Freeways, 1979, on my walls as well.

A picture called Cold Case, 2010-1013, with eight beautiful cake creations inside a deli case, and a ninth cake on top that is missing one piece, gets a lot of attention. In the first place there’s no room for that ninth cake inside the case. So what’s up? There’s discussion of the color choices the artist made, and the potential ‘loneliness’ the picture shows. The shadows suggest that day has ended. It is a great example of a modern still life but…
It’s called Cold Case and the first thing I thought when I saw the picture, combined with the title, was, “Who took the slice that’s gone?”

Anyway, go enjoy the essay. And while we are at it, here are two more pictures at the National Gallery of Art, still under copyright.

Sardines. https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.97450.html

Paint cans. https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.172009.html