Wayne Thiebaud: American Still Life – AN EXHIBITION REVIEW
The Courtauld Gallery, London — until 18 January 2026
By Hector Chen
On its first day open to the public, the Courtauld’s new Thiebaud exhibition glows with quiet optimism — proof that the everyday can outlast the avant-garde, and that nostalgia, in the right hands, can look like prophecy.
At ten past ten this morning, the first visitors began to drift through the gallery. A mother and her young son entered just ahead of me. “What do you see in this picture?” she asked. “Cakes!” he replied. “Which one would you like best?” They moved along the wall, her gentle questions looping: “How do you make a hot dog? Which candy would you choose?” I smiled — those are the very questions Thiebaud’s paintings seem to ask, and that we, too, instinctively answer.
Wayne Thiebaud: American Still Life — the first museum exhibition in the UK devoted to the Californian painter — shows how a lifetime of looking at ordinary things became something extraordinary. Curated by Barnaby Wright and Karen Serres, it focuses on the early 1960s, when Thiebaud developed the style that would define him: creamy impasto, luminous colour, and a startling ability to make the familiar feel both solid and dreamlike.
The exhibition begins with Meat Counter (1956–59) and Pinball Machine (1956), made before his breakthrough but already animated by movement and surface. The diagonals of the pinball table reveal his debt to de Kooning, whom he met in New York in 1956. De Kooning famously told him that he was “painting the signs and symbols of contemporary painting, not pictures that are yours.” Thiebaud went home to Sacramento, took the advice literally, and turned to what he knew best: diners, display cases, sunlight on glass. In doing so, he anticipated what America would continue to look like.
By 1961, his palette lightened and his brushwork thickened. Cup of Coffee isolates an everyday object on a nearly blank field. Its soft blue shadow glows, the rim flickers red; the brushwork is slow and deliberate. The scene could belong to any year in the last seventy, which is precisely Thiebaud’s point. His chosen motifs — the diner mug, the bakery slice, the gumball machine — are not the most modern of objects, but the most enduring. He painted the kinds of things that resist time, that would still feel recognisable to the six-year-old wandering through this exhibition.
The centrepiece, Cakes (1963), on loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington and never before seen outside the U.S., embodies that instinct for permanence. Its size is extraordinary - Each cake is rendered as both memory and monument. The frosting is piped in thick strokes of oil; light dances across the tiers as though through a bakery window. Thiebaud once said he wanted to see “how close paint and what it’s depicting can get.” Here, the two are inseparable — the paint almost edible, the sweetness excessive but disciplined by geometry.
Wayne Thiebaud, Pie Rows, 1961, Oil on canvas, 46 x 66cm, Collection of the Wayne Thiebaud Foundation. © Wayne Thiebaud/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2025. Image: Wayne Thiebaud Foundation
Wayne Thiebaud, Cakes, 1963, Oil on canvas, 152.4 x 182.9cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. © Wayne Thiebaud/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2025. Image: Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
Wayne Thiebaud, Candy Counter, 1969, 120.7 x 91.8 cm, Private Collection © Wayne Thiebaud/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2025
Wayne Thiebaud, Pie Rows, 1961, Oil on canvas, 46 x 66cm, Collection of the Wayne Thiebaud Foundation. © Wayne Thiebaud/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2025. Image: Wayne Thiebaud Foundation
On either sides of Cakes sits Three Machines (1963) and Lollipops (1966); together, they extend this language of repetition and restraint. The gumball dispensers stand like altarpieces; the candy circles line up in near-perfect perspective. What might have been Pop Art irony becomes, in Thiebaud’s hands, a meditation on desire and stillness. The rhythm is hypnotic: his America is less about consumption than about contemplation.
The mother and child reappear beside me in the last room. “Do you think these cakes are real?” she asks. The boy tilts his head. “They look real.” He’s right — they do. But they also look eternal.
That sense of timelessness defines Thiebaud’s achievement. His Pop contemporaries painted the surface of their age — the Coke bottle, the comic strip, the instant image. Thiebaud chose instead the symbols that would outlast their moment. He painted not the new, but the permanent. His genius lay in selecting subjects that never needed updating. His cakes, coffees and candies feel as fresh now as when he painted them. They speak to generations at once — to art historians tracing line and texture, and to a child simply naming what he sees.
His vision of America — full of bright repetition, sweetness, and solitude — has proved truer to how the country looks today than any of his peers could have guessed. And here at the Courtauld, with Manet’s Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère hanging just beyond the gallery doors, it does indeed look as though Manet were Thiebaud’s teacher — two painters united by their fascination with surfaces of desire and the quiet melancholy beneath them.
The Courtauld’s Wayne Thiebaud: American Still Life — his first museum exhibition in the UK — makes that distinction clear. What emerges is not irony but intimacy, a vision of everyday America filtered through memory, paint and light.