“I’m interested in foods generally which have been fooled with ritualistically, displays centered and arranged in certain ways to tempt us or to seduce us or to religiously transcend us.”
I n Candy Pieces, Wayne Thiebaud revisits one of his most iconic and beloved subjects with joyful finesse, where multicolor, jewel-like confections sit atop an expansive ledge, their striped sugary surfaces glistening under a theatrical spotlight. This tantalizing tactility is further emphasized by Thiebaud’s signature deployment of ridged impasto, which serves to echo the candies’ pulsating delictibility through the paint’s materiality. The sweets are offset by contrasting passages of rich brown, cream, and gray, which emphasize their seductive, electrifying pop. Framed with careful precision and rendered with extraordinary attention to detail, Thiebaud infuses the carefully displayed scene with an aura of shared nostalgia and cultural memory. With Candy Pieces, Thiebaud returns to the evocative confections of the 1960s that launched his seven decade-long career with same contemplation and precision which defined him as a great American master.
IMAGE © 2023 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
ART © 2023 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Amidst the proliferation of consumer goods and rising commodification of culture which Thiebaud successfully captured in early works, the zealous spirit of the American moment of prosperity and abundance is equally present in Candy Pieces. While we can imagine the group of sweets in the present work as belonging to the crisp glass containers of a candy counter, Thiebaud has isolated the objects from their surrounding context, relying on bold shadows and broad lines to ground the sweets onto their supporting surface. Thiebaud’s signature style is to isolate groups of objects, simplify them into their basic formal units, and align them in a strictly ordered progression comparable to traditional architectonic ordering principles. Through this process, Thiebaud exercises a considerable degree of non-objective experimentation with form, color and composition. Through this method, each vivid, alternating striped confection is regarded not simply as an object, but as a trophy to be revered and celebrated.
IMAGE © 2023 National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
"Each era produces its own still life. Painters use the objects as elements and units of their compositions. It seems to me hat we are self-conscious about our still lifes without good reason. It is easier to celebrate the copper pots and clay pipes of Chardin or to pretend that our revolutions are the same as the ones expressed in the apples of Cézanne. We are hesitant to make our own life special... set our still lifes aside... applaud or criticize what is especially us... But some years from now our foodstuffs, our pots, our dress, and our ideas will be quite different. So if we sent.mes ntalize or adopt a posture more polite than our own we are not having a real look at ourselves for what we are. My interest in painting is traditional and modest in its aim. I hope that it may allow us to see ourselves looking at ourselves."
Consistent with Thiebaud’s best works, the layout of the composition in Candy Pieces is informed by his former professional experience as a commercial illustrator and his consequential preoccupation with ritualization and order. Thiebaud explains that “working from memory, I tried to arrange [the objects] in the same way that an art director arranges things...I tried to be more careful, tried to be more refined and interesting in terms of relationships” (Exh. Cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (and traveling), Wayne Thiebaud, September - November 1985, p. 35). By elaborating on rudimentary shapes—the circle, rectangle, and square—and using serial repetition throughout his composition, Thiebaud engages the most basic elements of pictorial representation to render an extraordinary scene, akin to elevation of quotidian food products to the realm of the icon. Clustered against one another as if forming a quilt of color, the candies speak to an insatiable cultural appetite for consumption and excess, as well as the singular beauty and pleasure that can be found in the everyday.
IMAGE © 2023 Replica Handbags s Museums of San Francisco
ART © 2023 Estate of Morris Louis, Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA)/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Negating his supposed purity as a Realist, Thiebaud’s exceptional and incessant manipulation of color is evident in Candy Pieces. Employing a technique now referred to as ‘halation’ within color theory, Thiebaud juxtaposes warm and cool tones to produce a resounding prismatic synergy that contours and electrifies each form off the surface of the canvas. In the present work, Thiebaud contours the candies with unexpected exaggerations of teal, scarlet, sky blue, and bright yellow which yield sensational chromatic depth to each form. Nowhere is color treated with such a degree of extreme and arbitrary play as in the glowing orange and cerulean shadows and the range of hues that radiate the pillowy banded sweets. Indeed, the contrast between his endearingly decadent forms and his tautly constructed composition evokes a gem-like fragment of childhood memory, vivid and frozen yet shimmering at the edges. Thiebaud elicits this dreamlike quality through kaleidoscopic hues, underscoring a dramatic approach to lighting that evokes the atmospheric nostalgia of Edward Hopper. The paint itself is thick and syrupy yet still suggestive of gossamer gloss, paralleling the very nature of the material being depicted.
“Most of the objects are fragments of actual experience. For instance, I would really think of the bakery counter, of the way the counter was lit, where the pies were placed, but I wanted just a piece of the experience…Those little vedute in fragmented circumstances were always poetic to me.”
Exceptionally evident in the highly focused and vibrant Candy Pieces, Thiebaud evokes an honest appreciation and recollects ion of shared experiences in modern American life. At an intimate scale, Thiebaud alights on the cultural collects ive memory characteristic of Pop Art with the sent.mes ntality of the Old Master still lifes. Almost hypnotic in their lushness, the striped sweets in Candy Pieces rest in the tremor between decadence and discipline.
