What makes Wayne Thiebaud's painting so different, so appealing? Perhaps the creaminess of his material, enhanced by the recurrence of orange tones that surround even his shadows? Died in 2021, the American painter born three years before Roy Liechtenstein, passed through advertising graphics like Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist and, like them, became a key figure in the United States from the 1960s onwards, refused to accept the Pop label that many wanted to attach to him. In fact, his early choice to depict the banality of the American Way of Life - the duplicated solitude of the hot dog-eating couple in Eating Figures (1963) or the alignment of promises of pleasure with his paintings of cake slices, slot machines or lipsticks - did not enjoy the same fortune in Europe. The posthumous retrospective of 65 paintings and drawings organized by the Fondation Beyeler remedies this lack of knowledge, which is limited to a few people here, including the painter Guy de Malherbe, who sees his pastries as "small painted architectures". In parallel with these, Wayne Thiebaud painted urban views, exacerbating the abrupt perspectives offered to him by the slopes of San Francisco in a vertiginous orthogonality, also shown in Basel.

Extract from the article by Tom Laurent published in the N°105 de la revue Art Absolument. Publication date: March 17, 2023.

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