Wayne Thiebaud was an early proponent of Pop art’s fascination with mass culture. His paintings of cakes, pies, candy, gumball machines and deli counters were first exhibited in New York in 1961.
The counter in ‘Desserts’ (1961) is loaded with a seemingly endless display of seductive confections. The inspiration stems from Thiebaud’s youthful experience working in a restaurant during the Great Depression and noticing how items on a counter were lit. Thiebaud’s paintings consistently include shadows and reflect his experimentation with direct and diffuse lighting. The artist’s style—thick paint, bright colors, monochrome backgrounds and sharp contours—was influenced by his early career as a cartoonist for the Army, and also briefly in Disney’s animation department and later as a commercial artist in Los Angeles. The cartoonish sentimentality is underscored by a rigid study of objects that continues an art historical lineage of still-life painting.