Wayne Thiebaud at Museo Morandi

Wayne Thiebaud (born 1920) is to cakes and pastries what Cézanne is to apples: his renderings of sugary treats are more mouthwatering than the treats themselves, so creamily and lusciously depicted are they. Despite friendships with Johns and Rauschenberg, Thiebaud was never personally affiliated with a particular movement, though his pop-culture subject matter has tended to ally him with Pop. In fact, Thiebaud is simply a painter of Californian still lifes, as this volume underlines in relating him to the Italian still-life painter Giorgio Morandi. Conceived as a parallel journey through the works of the two artists, this volume reveals the close affinities that underlie their work: everyday subject matter simplified to pure formality, neatness of arrangement, repetition and variation and strong brushwork. It includes a piece on Morandi written by Thiebaud that first appeared in The New York Times in 1981, plus an interview by Alessia Masi.