Nicholas Fox Weber

THE PLEASURE OF

CRAVING

THE BOUNTIES OF

AMERICAN LIFE

20

Ever since the first time I saw a painting by Wayne Thiebaud,

his work has always made me hungry. Ravenous . It is

not the hunger of one who is famished . Rather, and the

distinction is important, it is the appetite of intense p leasure.

Thiebaud's art induces the longing for what is reassuring .

His landscapes and portraits are as beneficent to the sense

of seeing and the joy of memory as his colorful paintings of

french fries and laden buffet tables are to the wonders

of texture and flavor as experienced by the taste buds,

although those delights, too, are by no means negligible.

This may seem like the most obvious point in the world:

that Thiebaud - among other things, the great artist of

American desserts, of everyday home-cooked fare­

sharpens the appetite and brings on certain immediate

cravings. It may strike you as simplistic. But the gut reaction

occurs, accompanied by a rich sense of abundance,

because Thiebaud is such a sophisticated painter.

The book published in 2012 about this Californian artist born

in 1920 reproduces work by Andrea Mantegna, Albrecht

Durer, Henri Fantin-Latou r, Edgar Degas, Thomas Eakins,

Paul Cezanne, Giorgio Morandi, Nicolas de Stael, and

Donald Judd, and the comparisons are all apt, because

Thiebaud has the qualities of thoughtfulness and intense

purposefulness of each of these very different artists.

I am fascinated that this is the list of people, from the

Renaissance through Minimalism, with whom Thiebaud is

linked, because they are all masters who are very personal

to me, in every case someone about whom I have chosen to

wr ite in the past. I found myself thinking about the qua lities

that infuse the relationship between Wayne Thiebaud and

the Italian Renaissance master whose ceiling at the Palazzo

Ducale in Mantua inspired me to lie flat on the cold floor

underneath it the better to absorb the intense force of

its figures, the German genius whose drawings of hands

and portraits of pale noblemen have a verisimilitude that

boggles the mind, the nineteenth-century Frenchman who

orchestrated bouquets of flowers so that they enchant one

with the fullness and resolution of a Mozart piano concerto,

the whiz in pastel and oil and bronze whose racehorses

and ballet dancers alike celebrate muscularity and grace

to unique effect, the American painter of sporting scenes

as well as medicai procedures who presents eye-to-hand

FIG 6

Pie Counter, 1963, oil on canvas, 30 x 36 in.

21 THE PLEASURE OF CRAVING THE BOUNTIES OF AMERICAN LIFE

coordination with such penetrating intelligence, the Post­

Impressionist who invented a new approach to form that

gives everything from single apples to mountain scenes

unprecedented presence and weight, the subtle master of

rows of simple bottles and kitchen objects who devoted

years to rendering the divine poetry of their interaction one

on the other, the Russian-born Frenchman who poured his

fiery soul into stilllifes and landscapes and nudes so that

they have a cosmopolitan beauty and forcefulness and

· color bravura previously unknown, and the courageous

and utterly original American sculptor who assembled

rows of steel boxes on the Texas plain and ladders of

cantilevered rectangles of white plaster walls so that these

objects of simple geometry sing through their repetitions.

In the sequential descriptions of each member of the

pantheon-Mantegna, Durer, Fantin-Latour, Degas, Eakins,

Cezanne, Morandi, de Stael, and Judd-you see attributes

of Thiebaud's work as well. Beyond that, all of them have

shared traits. Their work is both gorgeous to behold and

profound in its nature, worldly and intelligent while at the

same time really fun to consider.

In addition, for almost forty years I have been a specialist

in the work of Josef Albers, to whose art others have

also compared Thiebaud's . Here, too, the link makes

sense. Thiebaud's marvelous engagement with serial

imagery, the vibrancy of his palette , the value he accords

to repetitiveness, and the bravery with which he abuts

contrasting hues that less audacious painters would

deem unrelated or inharmonious, are in sync with Albers's

paintings and prints, not just his Homages to the Square

but some of his earlier abstract art as well. Moreover, like

Josef Albers, Wayne Thiebaud is a celebrant. His art is that

of someone enjoying himself and savoring pleasures . And it

induces the same feelings, in spades, in its viewers.

The abundant happiness has a primal aspect. I felt this

when I saw my first Thiebaud, Pie Counter, a small and

masterful oil on canvas painted in 1963, long owned by the

Whitney Museum of American Art, and it remains every bit

as immediate today. As a teenage boy happening upon that

gorgeous picture of individual pieces of cake and pie, in

neat rows, I simply craved those desserts. As I imagined their

tastes and textures, I was taken from my adolescent angst,

my doubting the value of everything, to the reassurance of

atavistic pleasures. That a painting can do that is a gift.

NICHOLAS FOX WEBER 22

I am writing this essay in Paris, ·and ·1 am now sixty-six years

old. A book with a reproduction of Pie Counter is open

before me. I don't think you can imagine the well-being,

or the nostalgia, it has induced in me. Here I am, in the

city of Care me and Le Notre and Escoffier, of the world's

greatest patissiers, a place where chefs slave for entire

days on their croquembouches, where the amount of air

in a puff pastry or the moisture content of a genoise or

the smoothness of a dacquoise is the mark of brilliance or

of its lack, where lychees and kiwis are being pureed to

maximum intensity and acclaimed chefs are having nervous

breakdowns because a creme anglaise tastes more of sugar

than vanilla, or a chocolate mousse has less dark flavor

than it should . The culture of the current era demands the

latest in pyrotechnics and the mechanics of making foam;

it requires new heights in exotic spice pairings and insists

on the marrying of ingredients that have never before been

put together. The art of dessert making today is based

on originality above all; there is little trust in the past, a

pathological fear of repetition, an insistence that even what

one eats must be multicultural . And I look at those cakes

and pies by Thiebaud and not only do I want them more

than any of the creations being consumed at the price of

caviar all over this city, but I want my childhood back and I

love my country again.

Transformed by Wayne Thiebaud's universe, I feel a rare

edge to my appetite, a simple desire to eat something

fulfilling when one is hungry. This is infinitely more satisfying

than the weighty feeling that comes when, after securing a

booking at the latest touted place where reservations are

more difficult to achieve than admission to college, one must

endure repeated phone calls and confirmations that are as

onerous as the school application process. Looking at Pie

Counter-as at all of the art of Wayne Thiebaud-reminds

me of the supreme importance of informality, the relaxation

that comes with cake mixes and deliberate ease rather than

the tenseness that is the result of enforc~d struggle.

Pie Counter, like Thiebaud's paintings of cupcakes and

layer cakes under their domes, conjures meals at lunch

counters, or in booths in diners with jukeboxes. Equally,

when Thiebaud paints a hat rack, or rows of shoes, or candy

counters, he celebrates the quotidian, in a way that is

distinctly not elitist, not linked to deeper national or racial

origins, not connected with the individual or the personal.

In that superb egalitarianism, and the way that a sort of daily that term, which is invariably uttered with a certain pomp, as

experience could occur in central Des Moines as easily as a if it were conferring a unique stature on what it is describing.

small village in Northern California or a manufacturing town What he is, though, is someone who has the extraordinary

in rural Maine or a Main Street in Kentucky horse country, ability of the greatest poets and painters: a capacity to

American culture assumes its greatness again. look at the everyday and render it as magical. He is both

What a spirit of bounty Wayne Thiebaud conveys I Cake

is beautiful; sustenance is wonderful; color and light and

form are all miraculous. In Pie Counter, the subject matter

is specific, but it is the triangles on circles that are pure

magic-as sheer abstractions at the same. time that they are

wedges of lemon meringue pie on glistening white china

plates . Shadows are ethereal wonders. In this particular

painting, it is the blue shadows falling with force to the

edge of those same pie plates, and then languishing onto

the counter, that offer the thrill of sights that are universal,

that remind us that matter enhanced by light is, in any form,

miraculous. These are qualities that apply anywhere, to

any time period, with any subject matter or range of colors,

but Wayne Thiebaud has done something very much his

own by locating them in this carefully chosen imagery. It is

much the same as what Thornton Wilder achieved in Our

Town . America has a spirit and a culture all its own. Betty

Crocker was our Simone de Beauvoir. Yet, we are reminded

that, as surely as we are in the land of paper routes and

cheerleaders and baseball and chicken pot pie and ice

cream sodas and the Model A Ford, we are, for all the

specificity, for all the localness, anywhere in the universe,

in any epoch . The requisites are air and light and human

life. The national flavor is there in Thiebaud's paintings of

school flags and hot dog stands and Yosemite, as in Wilder's

Grover's Cor.ners, but it is the universality that is most

impressive of all.

At the same time, I return to the perspective of being in

Paris . In the land of Gide and Baudelaire and Matisse and

Debussy and Chanel and Givenchy, Wayne Thiebaud is

a glorious reminder that the culture of the United States

also produced a form of beauty that epitomizes joy and

panache. He evokes American ness in a way that captures

our combination of innocence and bounty, particularly as it

came to flourish after the Second World War (and, I regret

to say, may now be waning), to unique effect.

life-affirming and technically excellent, able to work impasto

energetically so that the visi ble act of evoking life has the

flair that gives the alchemy of picture ·making the panache

and sheer excitement it deserves.

I may not be able to write much longer without running out

of our apartment to one of the bakeries in Paris that now

makes things typically American.

I assume that for all of you, Pie Counter is a mnemonic, that,

wherever you grew up, whether you are from the American

heartland or a medieval town in Burgundy or a fishing village

in Puglia, this sunny, incredibly articulate, hedonic painting is

stimulating your own memories, and taste buds, as it is mine .

That it does so testifies not just to its artistic excellence, but

to the very particular quality of Wayne Thiebaud 's work, its

unique capturing of a milieu , its faithfulness not simply to

surface details but, more importantly, to the friendliness, the

sense of well-being, fundamental to that milieu.

In my particular case, the painting has an effect I relish. It

takes me back to the regular, happily routine experience

of having lunch wi th my father at the YMCA iri downtown

Hartford, as we did on repeated Saturdays when I was

growing up. The program was that, after we shot baskets or

played squash, we would go to the cafeteria, and I, skinny

as a rail, would eat meatloaf and perfect scoops of gluey

mashed potatoes under thick brown gravy, ignore the soggy

string beans , and then delve into a piece of pie or cake.

But looking at Pie Counter, I am also seeing the glistening,

shiny aluminum of the accoutrements of certain diners and

hearing the waitresses shouting orders to the chefs vi sible

only through long and low horizontal openings behind which

there was, clearly, a sizzling-hot grill. Why mention all this?

Why think of the friendly owners of those establishments , of

the truck drivers coming in for lunch? Because this painting

makes it all happen.

The flow of thought, wit h sheer joy underlying it, is a

I refuse to use the word "iconic." Thiebaud is too good a significant part of Thiebaud 's achievement. He has us start

pa inter to be blemished with anything as trite or cliched as with the familiar, with a knowable facet of ordinary American

23 THE PLEASURE OF CRAVING THE BOUNTIES OF AMERICAN LIFE

life-be it a van on a highway or a gum-ball machine or a

group of people sunbathing on a flat sandy beach-and

then expand within ourselves. As in Our Town, what is on

the surface unspectacular and everyday becomes, with

the reflection and flights of feeling and thought its brilliant

presentation (here I am referring to the extraordinary craft

of both Wayne Thiebaud and Thornton Wilder) invariably

induces, while still usual and familiar, utterly miraculous.

Specifically, in Pie Counter:

Starting on the left-

Devil ' s food cake. What an incredible term I Thiebaud's

painting of it evokes to aT the way the chocolate insides,

quite simply cake textured, not anything like the fondants or

pudding cakes of today, contrast with the brighter flavor of

the almost crystallized icing.

For me, this particular cake has always conjured an evening

that took place almost half a century ago, just as memories

of that evening invariably make me long for the cake . I was

nineteen years old . I thought I was in love, and the object

of my enchantment was a girl, about sixteen, who seemed

more like a character in a nineteenth-century novel than

the sort of woman I was more likely to meet at the time-

the year was 1967-at Columbia College, where I was a

student. She had been brought up in Europe, in Gstaad

and Portofino, but was totally American, and attended a

boarding school in Virginia. She had incredible fair skin and

slightly wispy hair, and wo re no makeup; she was pretty in an

old-fashioned way. Her grandmother lived in New York, in an

old apartment building on the East Side, and the young lady,

whom I had met when I was a tennis camp counselor in New

Hampshire the previous summer, was staying with her. When

we came in from our date, we saw that her grandmother had

left out for us two glasses of milk and a Pepperidge Farm

cake-exactly like the one in the Thiebaud .

My roommates were probably smoking pot with far worldlier

women in black turtlenecks that evening. Meanwhile, I have

never gotten over the milk and cake. And it is because of

the way Thiebaud has painted the six pieces, lined up as if

they are striding forward, offering themselves cheerfully, the

white and dark playing so perfectly against one another, that

NICHOLAS FOX WEBER 24

I relive now not just the details, but the spirit of the evening:

the feeling of optimism, of life to be enjoyed.

Then , coconut layer cake. Please understand: I am not

someone given to endless free association . It is brought on

here very specifically because of the way Wayne Thiebaud

has painted this row of cakes. The generous portions­

ampleness and quantity play a big part in the emotional

response inspired-make me feel the sense of ease and of

my world of surplus in exactly the way that has driven me

to give much of my time and energy to projects devoted

to nutrition and education and medical care in one of the

poorest parts of the world, in rural Senegal. There is no

denying that with these cakes in Pie Counter, their whiteness

is part of their character, and it is the whiteness of middle

America, of white culture, all of which figures in my deep

wish to enable at least a few black African children who

might not otherwise have the chance to experience some of

what was indigenous to my own upbringing. This is a food

we associate with comfort, with cleanliness, with the genuine

unhypocritical goodness of nineteenth-century American

wooden Congregational churches painted a sparkling white,

and the light shining on it is not unlike the pure sunshine

that makes those gems of New England architecture such

paeans to energy and warmth on sunny winter days when

the ground is covered with snow.

Now, the lemon meringue pie. If you have not already found

me unbearably personal, here I may really have pushed the

limits. But to me the pies in this painting are too gelatinous,

too perfect, too out-of-the-can. I associate lemon meringue

pie with lunacy in the best way, with tests of character, with

the eccentricities of my natal family. I never met my maternal

grandfather, who died five years before I was born, but

he left a legend, and his was, in part, that wh ile president

of a small printing company, he was also head of the

Socialist Party of Hartford. I don't know the substance of his

revolutionary beliefs, but my mother, his only daughter, was

obsessed with two stories about him . One was that he ate a

ham sandwich, conspicuously, in front of the synagogue on

Yom Kippur. The other was that, the first time she invited her

parents to dinner, in 1939. shortly after my mother and father

were married, she wanted everything perfect, and made

a lemon meringue pie. It did not gel. She cut the pie, and

while the meringue had its moxie, the lemon was simply soup

on top of crust . My mother had to switch plates for bowls,

in order to serve it with a spoon. She was horrified and

apologetic. Her father just kept saying how utterly delicious

it was, and ate the lemon soup with a spoon as if it were the

greatest delicacy he had ever experienced. So Thiebaud's

pies, by being so chem ically infused in appearance,

so rigid, represent the antithesis of everything on which

I was nurtured.

Moreover, one Thanksgiving my mother, characteristically,

consulted me on the types of pies I wanted her to make.

There were to be three, and I requested apple, pumpkin,

and pecan. She said she would make apple, pumpkin, and

lemon meringue. (What was characteristic was that she

wou ld allegedly seek opinions and then do precisely as

she intended.) I told her-1 was about ten years old-that

lemon meringue pie was preposterous. It had nothing to do

with Thanksgiv ing, and was too sour. She told me she would

make it and I would love it.

It failed, very much as had the one for her father. My mother

had a terrific sense of humor. She accused me of putting

a hoax on her pie, but said it was also a testament to my

power in some way. In this case, she could not even serve it.

So Wayne Thiebaud has brought me back to my real self.

As for the pumpkin and chocolate cream, they are, quite

simply, furious exercises in color, great American foods, still

lifes that render the inanimate jaunty, and upright citizens of

the world. You could take any painting by Wayne Thiebaud,

from any period, and go that far, in any and all directions,

because his is such a generous art and endowed with such

unique capacity.

Recently, in 2010, Wayne Thiebaud made a painting of ice

cream sundaes. What could be more the essence of its

subject? Anyone brought up in the American culture of the

past hundred years knows those thick glass tulip dishes.

These are the ice cream sundaes of Sinclair Lewis novels :

a treat that at first sight conjures an honest fellow working

behind the counter, the happy consumers sitting on the

plastic-covered round stools on sh iny stainless steel supports

while eating them, the ambient feeling of sheer unadorned

goodness and pleasure.

For me, this small canvas on board-14 x 17 inches-evokes

a particular pleasure that I am thrilled to have return to

consciousness. From 1965 to 1969, when I was a Columbia

student, delighted to study art history with Meyer Schapiro

and Howard Hibbard and Jane Rosenthal and Howard

Davis and other great and lively thinkers who led us into the

depths of medieval and Baroque and Modern art, for nine

months of every year I inhabited the city's great museums,

rode the subways, wrestled with the issues of revolution and

a war most of us bitterly opposed, and both struggled and

Aourished. Then, each summer, I taught tennis and directed

plays and made Super-8 movies at Tamarack Tennis Camp

in Franconia, New Hampshire. Often, late in the afternoon,

after a long day on the courts in the mountain ai r, we would

head, campers and counselors together in a caravan of

cars, to a place with the superb name of Lotta Rock Dairy

Bar. (I have no idea why it was called as such , and I have to

admit that, at the t ime, the name brought on such immediate

pleasure that it never occurred to me to ask .) And there we

ate ice cream sundaes.

More than any other, I would opt for bitter hot fudge

on vibrant peppermint stick. Some of you may accuse

me of being too specific here, too personal , but there is

a reason . My hunch is that each of you , looking at the

Thiebaud, would have your own personal recollections.

Some of you would be dreaming of coffee ice cream, in

all of its sophistication, others of vanilla, the quintessence

of innocence. Or, if you are a Frenchman or an Italian or a

Spaniard looking at this Thiebaud, you are simply trying to

figure out how to secure an air ticket to the U.S.

Thornton Wilder's Grover's Corners was a made-up town,

but it, too, was in New Hampshire. That said, the deta ils are

only the prompters for the sense of something far greater.

Near the end of Our Town, we hear the immortal words,

"Do any human beings every realize life while they live it?­

every, every minute?" Wayne Thiebaud's art is a superb way

in to that realization.

25 THE PLEASURE OF CRAVING THE BOUNTIES OF AMERICAN LIFE

on top of crust. My mother had to switch plates for bowls,

in order to serve it with a spoon. She was horrified and

apologetic. Her father just kept saying how utterly delicious

it was, and ate the lemon soup with a spoon as if it were the

greatest delicacy he had ever experienced. So Thiebaud's

pies, by being so chemically infused in appearance,

so rigid, represent the antithesis of everything on which

I was nurtured.

Moreover, one Thanksgiving my mother, characteristically,

consulted me on the types of pies I wanted her to make.

There were to be three, and I requested apple, pumpkin,

and pecan. She said she would make apple, pumpkin, and

lemon meringue. (What was characteristic was that she

would allegedly seek opinions and then do precisely as

she intended .) I told her-1 was about ten years old-that

lemon meringue pie was preposterous. It had nothing to do

with Than ksgiving, and was too sour. She to ld me she would

make it and I would love it.

It failed, very much as had the one for her father. My mother

had a terrific sense of humor. She accused me of putting

a hoax on her pie, but said it was also a testament to my

power in some way. In this case, she could not even serve it .

So Wayne Thiebaud has brought me back to my real self.

As for the pumpkin and chocolate cream, they are, quite

simply, furious exercises in color, great American foods, still

lifes that render the inanimate jaunty, and upright citizens of

the world . You could take any painting by Wayne Thiebaud,

from any period, and go that far, in any and all directions,

because his is such a generous art and endowed with such

unique capacity.

Recently, in 2010, Wayne Thiebaud made a painting of ice

cream sundaes. What could be more the essence of its

subject? Anyone brought up in the American culture of the

past hundred years knows those thick glass tulip dishes .

These are the ice cream sundaes of Sinclair Lewis novels:

a treat that at first sight conjures an honest fellow working

behind the counter, the happy consumers sitting on the

plastic-covered round stools on shiny stainless steel supports

while eating them, the ambient feeling of sheer unadorned

goodness and pleasure .

For me, this small canvas on board-14 x 17 inches-evokes

a particular pleasure that I am thrilled to have return to

consciousness. From 1965 to 1969, when I was a Columbia

student, delighted to study art history with Meyer Schapiro

and Howard Hibbard and Jane Rosenthal and Howard

Davis and other great and lively thinkers who led us into the

depths of medieval and Baroque and Modern art, for nine

months of every year I inhabited the city's great museums,

rode the subways, wrestled with the issues of revolution and

a war most of us b itterly opposed, and both struggled and

Aourished. Then, each summer, I taught tennis and directed

plays and made Super-8 movies at Tamarack Tennis Camp

in Franconia, New Hampshire. Often, late in the afternoon,

after a long day on the courts in the mountain air, we would

head, campers and counselors together in a caravan of

cars, to a place with the superb name of Lotta Rock Dairy

Bar. (I have no idea why it was called as such, and I have to

admit that, at the time, the name brought on such immediate

pleasure that it never occurred to me to ask.) And there we

ate ice cream sundaes.

More than any other, I would opt for bitter hot fudge

on vibrant peppermint stick. Some of you may accuse

me of being too specific here, too personal, but there is

a reason. My hunch is that each of you, looking at the

Thiebaud, would have your own personal recollections.

Some of you would be dreaming of coffee ice cream, in

all of its sophistication, others of vanilla, the quintessence

of innocence. Or, if you are a Frenchman or an Italian or a

Spaniard looking at this Thiebaud, you are simply trying to

figure out how to secure an air ticket to the U .S.

Thornton Wi lder's Grover's Corners was a made-up town,

but it, too, was in New Hampshire. That said, the details are

only the prompters for the sense of something far greater.

Near the end of Our Town, we hear the immortal words,

"Do any human beings every realize life while they live it?­

every, every minute?" Wayne Thiebaud's art is a superb way

in to that realization.

25 THE PLEASURE OF CRAVING THE BOUNTIES OF AMERICAN LIFE