At the Courtauld, Wayne Thiebaud’s Poignant—if Long-Vanished—America

Flattering visions of America are not exactly a dime a dozen these days, but “Wayne Thiebaud. American Still Life” (on view through January 18, 2026) in London at the Courtauld Gallery provides one such respite from the present turmoil. The Californian artist (1920–2021) broke onto the scene in the 1960s with depictions of lavish Boston creme pies and cheerful gumball dispensers, refashioning what was worthy of being commemorated in paint. In fact, Thiebaud saw his work as being in conversation with that classical artistic archetype of the still life as practiced by the likes of Paul Cézanne and Édouard Manet. Thiebaud reframed American consumer culture as its own sacred offering. Crowned “the laureate of lunch counters,” there is a kind of localized earnestness to his work that is deeply touching, one that makes other American cornerstones like social inequality and strident ambition fully recede. Even a loaded symbolic choice like the jackpot machine, painted in 1962, is posited as economic optimism as opposed to delusion or compulsion.

To access the Wayne Thiebaud show on the third floor of the Courtauld, visitors have to pass through rooms of 20th-century art. On the left side of the entryway of the temporary exhibition space is a young woman powdering herself in an 1888 painting by Georges Seurat, a work of pointillism with a soft color palette. Elsewhere in the room are van Gogh’s Peach Trees in Blossom (1889) and Claude Monet’s Shoreline of Antibes (1888). These delicate canvases serve as a fitting prelude to the pastel insouciance of the American painter’s oeuvre. However, within the exhibition itself, Thiebaud’s work is likened to that of Giorgio Morandi, an Italian painter and printmaker known for his still-life paintings in subtle, muted hues, where carafes and vases stand with quiet pride against monochrome backdrops.

The first painting on view in the exhibition shows a blearier, harsher brushstroke and darker palette than one is accustomed to with Thiebaud: his 1956-59 Meat Counter is densely articulated relative to the airy restraint later used for a mug of coffee, a cold breakfast cereal or waiting cones of ice cream. It contrasts sharply with his similarly themed Delicatessen Counter from 1962, with its prim stacks of cheeses and assemblages of sausages. Thiebaud quickly graduates to a luxuriant yet lightweight hand, deemed “buttery brushstrokes conjuring the subject of the creamy cakes themselves.” Although Pop Art was contemporaneous to when he practiced—and similarly examined tokens of Americana—Thiebaud’s work shared none of the polished slickness ascribed to the movement. He does allude to the homogeneity of food production but willfully disrupts it with minute diverging details. That attention to peculiarities separates him from the mechanized themes and approaches alike of other artists.

Thiebaud’s work isn’t just about its inanimate subjects but also about plenty and bounty. The profusion of sweets spurs a rush of Veruca Salt-level greed for sensual pleasure. Even the non-comestibles, like a panorama of yo-yos, seem almost edible with their swirls and stars, as decorous as the neighboring cakes. Through these multiples, his world is rendered colorful and palatable. That feeling of plenty, threaded through with the ordinary appetites, is augmented by the referential formal qualities at play. As the wall text notes of the peppermint counter, “display windows packed with sweets are like abstract paintings in their own right.” In Thiebaud’s Four Pinball Machines, the square backglasses double as winks to Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly.

But Thiebaud’s work is also interesting to recast within today’s obsession with food photography. On Instagram, that hashtag alone has 122 million posts. One thinks of Laila Gohar and her stylized food installations or the New York bakery sensation From Lucie with her frosted flowered creations. Aestheticized treats are just as much relished visually—that sensuality is as much a pleasure as actual consumption. Although as someone who himself worked at a restaurant, there is the sense that Thiebaud had an understanding of hospitality as a lens. Becca Schuh wrote in her essay Bad Waitress: “I’ve been privy to countless conversations about how intellectual labor is labor, about how someone needs to do the sitting around and thinking and theorizing, with the thought underlying this being: and it certainly wouldn’t be the people who carry things for a living.” (Perhaps speaking to this tension between physical and intellectual, in the exhibition catalogue texts about Thiebaud’s work, the word “belie”—to fail to give a true impression of something—is recurrent, as if his work has to smuggle in meaning that is otherwise not possible to perceive at the surface level.) Although Thiebaud’s canvases are never peopled, there’s a sense that service has its beauty. Recategorizing the quotidian from unremarkable to resplendent is in function of appreciating a certain kind of routine—overlooked—labor.

In an accompanying annex section on the first floor in the Drawings Gallery is “Wayne Thiebaud. Delights,” focusing on the artist’s 1965 portfolio of 17 prints, which showcase his adeptness as a draughtsman and printmaker. (In the two decades before becoming a painter, Thiebaud worked as an illustrator, cartoonist and art director.) The etchings are absolutely lovely, presenting the cordial signage for ice-cold watermelon, a comforting plate of bacon and eggs and salt-and-pepper dispensers on a diner table. Many etchings were hand-colored in watercolor, pastel and crayon, in a gentle and appealing palette. The prints capture the richness of their subject more concisely than the paintings, and the medium feels like a genuinely fresh approach even to the very same pictorial mise-en-scène. Thiebaud compared the act of drawing—relative to painting—to translating a language: a different cadence and texture, but the same meaning.

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