“Meringue is a beautiful substance, but there also is a connection with the quality of the paint, the luscious, fatty richness of oil paint and the greasiness of meats and buttery frostings. This is a still-life area we have a tendency to take for granted.”
—Wayne Thiebaud

The surface of Wayne Thiebaud’s Chocolate Merangue, 1961, is nothing short of delectable. The artist’s rich application of oil paints brings the meringue pie to life. Painted over a blue ground, which gives an almost electric quality to his bright, white composition, Thiebaud models his meringue with shadows of yellow and seafoam green, recalling the colored tiles of a midcentury American kitchen where one might taste this delicious treat. His oil paints are thickest on the top of the meringue, mimicking the effect of a generous layer of frosting. Here, the c-shaped arc of white paint—spread with a palette knife, or a frosting spatula?—is so thick, and so gooey, that even sixty-two years after its facture, it still looks wet, like a meringue that’s yet to set. Thiebaud slices his signature into the top left corner, in birthday-cake cursive.

 

Chocolate Merangue dates to Thiebaud’s very first year of food paintings, and compositionally, it offers a rare and exciting view into the development of Thiebaud’s signature repeated foodstuffs motif. Thiebaud himself described his decision to paint foods in 1961 as a return “to very basic, formalistic concerns.” He explained: “I took three basic shapes to work with: a rectangle, an ellipse or a circle and a triangle. Well, that’s a piece of pie.”ⁱ Its composition, of a pie with one slice removed, can be seen as a painted record of Thiebaud’s artistic innovation in action. The depicted act of a cut pie perhaps metaphorically represents Thiebaud’s process of slicing the part from the whole, into a repertoire of repetition. The pie is thus a tool by which Thiebaud explores spatial repetition; a precursor to conceptual works such as Nobuo Sekine’s Phase-Mother Earth, 1968, perhaps, where the presence, or absence, of objects in space is a primary concern.

 

The same year that Thiebaud began his food paintings, he met New York gallerist Allan Stone, who would become his dealer for the next forty-five years.ⁱⁱ The chance meeting was a seminal moment in both men’s careers; Stone offered Thiebaud representation in a group show that December, and a solo show the following spring. At the time, Allan Stone Gallery was new to the New York scene—Stone had only opened in 1960—and until he met Thiebaud, his business was barely breaking even.ⁱⁱⁱ Thiebaud, aged 40, had never had a solo show in New York. All that changed in April of 1962.

 

Wayne Thiebaud: Recent Paintings, the artist’s New York premiere, was an incredible success. The show sold out to esteemed collectors and institutions; to name just one, Alfred Barr, the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, stopped by before the opening and selected Cut Meringues, 1961, for the museum’s collection.^iv Today, at least one third of the works from Recent Paintings are in museum collections, an outstanding statistic that speaks to the significance of this show in Thiebaud’s career.

 

Works hung in Wayne Thiebaud: Recent Paintings, now in museum collections.

Stone hung Chocolate Merangue prominently in the show, at the center of a group of five paintings. An archival photo shows a different composition on the wall during the installation process, with the present work lying on its side while Stone reaches for another frame. The difference between this photo and the final installation shot, both reproduced in this essay, suggests that the placement of Chocolate Merangue at the center of the group held compositional significance for the gallerist, and perhaps the artist, as well.

 

The roundness of the pie in Chocolate Merangue stands out from the surrounding pictures, which show repeated slices of cakes and pies, and it functions as a visual anchor for the installation and Thiebaud’s series work at large. Chocolate Merangue, with just one slice removed, anticipates the repetition that encircles it; the composition guides the eye from the center outwards.

 

The work is also distinct for its white-on-white composition. The white pie on the white tablecloth contains a kaleidoscope of colors: seafoam green, butter yellow, cornflower blue. Thiebaud loved the challenge of capturing the effects of light and shadow in oil paint, and his use of the color white was particularly symbolic in the 1960s: “The whiteness of meringue became for me of great poetic preoccupation,” he said in 1969.^v “It’s like snow, like frost, like the concept of purity and, from a painter’s standpoint, white both absorbs light and reflects light, it’s composed of all colors, like Chardin’s tablecloths.”^vi

 

The multiplicity of meanings Thiebaud finds in one color speaks to the rich symbolism of the still-life tradition, which Thiebaud knew well. His preferred still-life artist was the 18^th century French painter, Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin, whose works are more subdued and quotidian compared to the hyperrealism and visual excesses of the popular 17^th century Dutch tradition. Thiebaud admired this “ordinary” quality in Chardin’s work as a reclamation of the staid still-life genre, saying that “[Chardin’s] choice of objects to paint was really a celebration of very ordinary commonplace things.” ^vii

 

The same could be said of Thiebaud’s Chocolate Merangue, or even of the artist’s oeuvre, at large. Thiebaud’s lush approach to oil painting is a celebration of the beauty of ordinary things; it bridges the gap between art historical still-life and his Pop Art contemporaries, as a veritable slice-of-life of 1960s Americana. But where other Pop artists, such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, had a more ironic edge to their use of pop culture icons, Thiebaud’s works are softly nostalgic, a contemporary eulogy for fast-fading, fluorescent-lit diner dishes. The pie, for Thiebaud, is stuffed full of American meaning, from pie-throwing contests to pied bad guys in Charlie Chaplin films; the diner special to mom’s homemade apple pie.^viii “One makes a pie out of ordinary stuff,” he said. “It’s very magical, very special.”^ix

 

 

ⁱ Wayne Thiebaud, quoted in A. LeGrace G. Benson with David H. R. Shearer, “Documents: An Interview with Wayne Thiebaud,” Leonardo, vol. 2, 1969, p. 65.

ⁱⁱ Allan Stone, quoted in The Collector (documentary), dir. Olympia Stone, 2006.

ⁱⁱⁱ Ibid.

^iv Arielle Hardy, “Illustrated Chronology,” in Rachel Teagle, ed., Wayne Thiebaud: 1958-1968, exh. cat., Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis, 2018, p. 155.

^v Thiebaud, quoted in Benson and Shearer, 66, 70.

^vi Ibid., 66.

^vii Ibid., 65-66.

^vii Ibid., 66.

^ix Ibid.