Along with everyone else, I was always thrilled to see another painting of Wayne Thiebaud’s cars screeching up and down the insane hills of San Francisco in one traffic jam after another, melting into another modern painting of man’s insanity. However, when I finally crashed into Thiebaud’s next subject matter, a varied selection of pies and cakes, and even cupcakes, I felt like I had just hit a brick wall. How demeaning, how embarrassing—was he on some strange diet, the fat diet?
The obsessive way some people talk about food—what kind of food, what restaurant, what their mothers cooked—when coupled with the beautiful way this artist handled paint, made for a combination of disgust and glorious sensuality. The combo was wrenching. I couldn’t wait for the next beautiful painting of more desserts. Didn’t Warhol paint Coke bottles and soup cans? Subject matter is important to the artist and dessert is important to us, Goddamn it. It’s American… isn’t it? Well, maybe it’s French.
Camellia Cake, 1995
I confess, my snobby mind was shocked. But my body loved it in a greedy kind of fashion—slurp, gobble and yet so gorgeously painted—my God, I would rather look at it than eat it. Then I became skeptical. We had come a long way from the lavish mounds of dead animal carcasses surrounded by red apples and dappled with green grapes, presented on a splendid mahogany table, in a rich brown gravy moat—the veritable castles of food rendered by old masters.
Cake Slice, 1979
Thiebaud was just giving us the modern version to drool over: a glacier of chipped ice under a thick uninviting sky of cold glass. Little boats of cheap porcelain struggled in vain to sail out of our reach, each one bearing a narrow slice of desperate cake trying to hide under gobs of Technicolor icing, a seductive flotilla of death caught under the fluorescent moon, whose one and only job was to kill you with sugar. And we were excited. We started to salivate but it was only a painting. We thought about ice cream (a milder form of death) and for a moment our childhood played in the back yard of our mind. Now we had to have this painting; it was necessary. Forget Picasso and being uncomfortable, I just wanted a piece of fucking CAKE. I wanted to eat with my eyes and remember all the stupid fun I’d had in this country. Thank you, Wayne.
The Confectioner’s Strike of ‘61 and ‘62, and the resulting sugar cane shortages of ‘63 and ‘64, had a deep and lasting effect upon the population. In the midst of the crisis, one up and coming artist, Wayne Thiebaud, turned from painting fruits, of which there was an abundance, to cakes and pies, of which there were none. Both rich and poor showed up at the galleries, creating numerous crowds all waiting to ogle the delicacies permanently etched onto canvas.
To increase the value of his pieces, Thiebaud got a hold of confectioner’s sugar on the black market and mixed it into his paints. Not only did his works of art look delicious, but they also tasted sweet. This practice spawned the famous “Thiebaud lick test” to determine authenticity. Unfortunately, this also increased the curiosity of the crowd. “What does a Thiebaud taste like?” was the question on everyone’s mind. The authenticators assured everyone that Thiebaud works were all exquisite, even as delicious as they looked.
The first paintings sold were subsequently eaten by their proprietors. This caused an outcry among the populace. The private Thiebaud collectors weren’t collecting Thiebaud’s, at all. They were destroying priceless works of art. The people appealed to the government authorities. The officials responding by purchasing the remaining Thiebaud’s and putting them in a public museum. If the people couldn’t eat cake, at least they could look at a painting of one.
The crowds thronged the museum to get a glimpse of a real Thiebaud. People began to push their way forward and fights broke out. But even after the police were called to restore law and order, a feeling of ill will prevailed.
One day the museum curator noticed damage on one of the Thiebaud pieces: bite marks. “It may be mice,” he said. Additional rodent protection didn’t put a stop to the destruction and day by day additional chunks were bitten off. A forensic specialist was brought in. “These are human bite marks,” he concluded. This caused another uproar among the people.
The Thiebaud is a Baker’s God Club, a super secret gang of Thiebaud enthusiasts, thought it unjust that thieves were eating Thiebaud’s works while the truly dedicated fanatic merely watched as the pieces steadily dwindled in size, so they hatched a plan: at the next museum showing, they would surround a painting, pull it down and eat it.
The day of the feast, the group gleefully tore into a cake painting before anyone could stop them, but their actions incensed the huge crowd, turning them instantly into a mob that demanded to also be able to eat Thiebaud’s art. Within minutes, every Thiebaud piece in the museum was eaten by the mob.
The value of Thiebaud’s new pieces dropped through the floor. Every gallery owner and museum curator said the very same thing: “We can’t display your art. It’ll just be eaten before it’s sold.” Thiebaud eventually went back to painting fruit.
There are rumors that some private confectioner’s art was commissioned and that whole, uneaten, unbitten, unlicked works of his cake art actually do exist in some obscure private collections, but nothing has been verified. Those who make the claim to be in possession of these masterpieces say that they can’t display them for fear of whetting people’s appetite.