The Poetry of Pies
Two elderly ladies are looking at cakes and reminiscing about sweet treats from their youth. I ask them if they are feeling as hungry as me and they laugh and nod. We are surrounded by batches of triangular pie pieces, smeared with creamy icing, stickily oozing candy colours, each one bathed in an unusually sharp light that wraps them in warm blue shadow, writes Ed Gray.
This is not a bake-off moment at a horticultural society exhibition, and you really would not want to eat these carefully proffered offerings because these cakes are over 60 years old. The strong light is Californian, and we are in the Courtauld Gallery. The creamy fluid brushstrokes that have the power to make us dream of delectable delights of days of yore belong to the American painter Wayne Thiebaud (1920-2021), one time illustrator and commercial art director turned all-time great American artist, and this is an exhibition of his still lives, entitled American Still Life. I studied Thiebaud’s paintings at art college, making my own versions of cake shop life, but I have rarely seen one served up for real so it’s a great joy to tuck into a hearty portion of his painterly pieces.
The gallery entrance takes you past Manet and Cezanne and it’s a timely reminder of how important the work of post-impressionist painters was for young Thiebaud. Cezanne reduced pictorial elements to simple forms, repeating imagery, and subject matter in a perpetual search for the essence of perception. Cezanne’s influence is evident in Thiebaud’s own work as he meticulously renders his subject matter to achieve his ideal of ‘graphic power.’ Printmaking was key to Thiebaud’s methodology and there is an accompanying exhibition of wood block prints and copper etchings of cakes, pies, hotdogs and gumball dispensers, revealing Thiebaud’s obsessive desire to savour, look and repeat until he was replete enough to reproduce his earthly delights in paint.
Thiebaud’s Boston Cremes become so much more than mass-produced processed triangular slices of sugar-rush mush. Buttery brush marks densely outline luscious subjects; varnish adds a sticky sensuality until you want to run your fingers along the piped cream. The painted cakes and cheeses look gloriously totemic, catching the light as they fill counters in corners of anonymous delis and diners, totally devoid of the hands of overworked and underpaid servers and busboys, and their chubby fingered patrons dicing with diabetic overload from so much calorific content. A dab of messy humanity would sour the taste of these stunning paintings.
These works are not simply nostalgia trips to a post-war era of uncomplicated gratification, they are insights into the American psyche, spoonful by sickly spoonful, staged performances of mass consumption and mass conformity. Too much is never enough and it is all just out of reach. Unrequited desire fills the room, pleasures are transient and it is all just for show. The buttery scrumptious delights are made from oil paint, turpentine, and linseed oil – ingredients that would poison you if you tried to eat them.
Wayne Thiebaud: American Still Life is the perfect metaphor for the illusion that lies at the heart of all art, and all perception, because nothing in life is ever what it appears to be. This is the ad man at work. The similarities between each piece of pie are presumed, but they are not uniform. 1960s America was a boom time, all- American apple pie, finger-licking good times for those that bought into the dream that were also chock full of anxiety and dissent from those that did not or could not afford to pay the price. The American dream was as much Madison Avenue construct as it was Capitol Hill creation. I feel uneasily queasy as I leave the exhibition, intoxicated by Thiebaud’s gripping graphic potency but fast approaching a slump akin to a sugar rush. And yet, I am soon hungry for more.
The Courtauld Gallery until January 18th 2026.
Booking and full details: https://courtauld.ac.uk/
