Looking With Wayne Thiebaud

Wayne Thiebaud, Caged Pie, 1962, oil on canvas, 20 1/8 x 27 1/8 in., a 1977 purchase by the San Diego Museum of Art from the painting’s fifth owner In “Eat Me,” his excellent essay in the LRB on Wayne Thiebaud, Paul Keegan writes how “the sliding catastrophe of impossible and unreachable spaces, without visual foothold” was …already latent in his pie slices, which turn into cliffs of fall if viewed with the passion they invite. His most demure arrangements of pies and meringues imply a compression of space. The backgrounds and the tabletop surfaces are elements of composition rather than naturalistic settings: there is nothing beyond the table’s presumed edge, if indeed there is a table, as opposed to the blank fact of nearness. Their horizontality is troubled by extreme recession, so that they seem like ledges. The lack of co-ordinates, of background, serves to unsituate his cakes and pies, which orbit in their solar system like planets, and he insisted that the effect he wanted was…

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