Wayne Thiebaud’s artistic training could hardly have been more American: he apprenticed as a cartoonist at Walt Disney Studios and served in a unit commanded by Ronald Reagan when he was making art for the Air Force during the Second World War. So it’s no surprise that American popular culture, in an era when people’s wallets were ever swelling, provided his most important subjects: painting lipsticks, pinball machines or decadent desserts, Thiebaud captured consumer pleasures so frequently and single-mindedly that not only individual works but his oeuvre as a whole transmits a sense of surfeit. That’s not to say that the still lifes are simple celebrations of post-war affluence. Many of the objects cast long shadows and appear untouched, as if surplus to requirements; the resulting melancholy is as reminiscent of Morandi as it is of Chardin or Cézanne. This exhibition at the Courtauld focuses on the lush yet somehow ambivalent paintings Thiebaud made in the 1960s (10 October–18 January 2026).
Find out more from the Courtauld’s website.
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