The Easel

Archives: The New Statesman

21st October 2025

Wayne Thiebaud’s slices of Americana

Thiebaud was never taken by “preachy” abstraction. He knew from working as an illustrator that his real love was the still life. That genre has a strong tradition in Europe leading this writer to emphasise that Thiebaud was addressing the classic still life problems – “lighting, colour, structure”.  Cezanne, one of his heroes, had declared that art should “treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone”. Thiebaud, with his hot dogs, toffee apples and slices of cake, obliged.