Wayne Thiebaud

Private Collection, Fort Worth
Private Collection
Christie's, New York, 7 May 1996, Lot 25
Acquired from the above sale by the present owner

Houston, Rice University, De Menil Institute for the Arts, Wayne Thiebaud, January - February 1975
Fort Worth Art Museum, Wayne Thiebaud: Recent Work, May - June 1981
San Francisco, John Berggruen Gallery, Wayne Thiebaud: Objects of Desire, May - June 1995

This work is in very good condition overall. Please contact the Contemporary Department at (212) 606-7254 for a professional condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. Framed. Please also note this work has been requested for the upcoming exhibition Wayne Thiebaud: 1958-1968 at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at University California, Davis to be held January 16 - May 13, 2018.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

"Most of the objects are fragments of actual experience. For instance, I would really think of the bakery counter, of the way the counter was lit, where the pies were placed, but I wanted just a piece of the experience. From when I worked in restaurants, I can remember seeing rows of pies, or a tin of pie with one piece out of it and one pie sitting beside it. Those little vedute in fragmented circumstances were always poetic to me."  
Wayne Thiebaud

In Wayne Thiebaud’s Nine Candy Apples from 1964, nine crimson delicacies sit atop an empty white expanse, their sugar-coated surfaces glistening under the spotlight. Each impeccably plump orb is crowned with a protruding popsicle stick and assigned its spot in the pristinely cubic formation of fruit. The perspective is slightly raised, producing an effect as if the viewer is peering down upon the apples, cupping hands over the glass of the display counter for an unhindered view of the mouth-watering sweets. The allure of the present work rests not only in its luscious quality of epicurean delight but also in the cultural appeal and powerful sense of nostalgia with which Thiebaud is famously capable of infusing in his work—a nostalgia that is irrefutably linked to the cultural feel and tone of the sixties. Amidst the proliferation of consumer goods and rising commodification of culture, Thiebaud successfully captured in early works, such as Nine Candy Apples, the zealous spirit of the American moment of prosperity and abundance.

While we can imagine the group of apples in the present work as belonging to the iridescent white shelf of a bakery counter, Thiebaud has isolated the objects from their surrounding context, relying only on bold shadows to ground the apples onto their supporting surface. Thiebaud’s signature style is to isolate groups of objects, simplify them into their basic formal units, and align them in a strictly ordered progression comparable to traditional architectonic ordering principles. Through this process, Thiebaud exercises a considerable degree of non-objective experimentation with form, color and composition. For example, in Nine Candy Apples, Thiebaud’s structural arrangement of color and form follows the same theory of structural organization and interest and positive-negative space seen in Malevich or Mondrian’s abstract blocks of color. Similar to these early Modernists, we witness in the present work Thiebaud’s underlying interest in balancing horizontal and vertical weight, as achieved through a satisfying rhythm of apples, shadows, and popsicle sticks. Consistent with Thiebaud’s best works, the layout of the composition in Nine Candy Apples is informed by his former professional experience as a commercial illustrator and his consequential preoccupation with ritualization and order. He explains, “I’m interested in foods generally which have been fooled with ritualistically, displays contrived and arranged in certain ways to tempt or seduce us” (the artist in Exh. Cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Wayne Thiebaud, 1985, p. 27). Further elaborating on his compositional strategy, he says, “Working from memory, I tried to arrange [the objects] in the same way that an art director arranges things…I tried to be more refined and interesting in terms of relationships” (ibid., p. 35).

Further negating his supposed purity as a Realist, Thiebaud demonstrates an exceptional and incessant manipulation of color. Employing a technique now referred to as ‘halation’ within color theory, Thiebaud juxtaposes warm and cool tones to produce a resounding prismatic synergy that contours and electrifies each form off the surface of the canvas. In the present work, Thiebaud contours the apples with unexpected exaggerations of lavender, fuchsia, lime green, and neon orange that yield sensational chromatic depth to the forms. Nowhere is color treated with such a degree of extreme and arbitrary play as in the glowing cobalt shadows and the range of hues that decorate the typically manilla popsicle sticks. The paint itself is thick and syrupy yet still suggestive of gossamer gloss, paralleling the very nature of the material being depicted.

A magnificent companion to Thiebaud’s best known early works based on cakes, pies, ice cream, gumball machines, and parfaits, Nine Candy Apples endures as a powerful tribute to the cultural consciousness of the sixties in America. Though readily remembered as a Pop Artist, Thiebaud differs from Oldenburg and Warhol in that his aim is not to critique society but rather to celebrate and remember it. Thiebaud’s work therefore functions as an honest and commemorative societal mirror based not only on personal, but more importantly, collective memory. As eloquently summarized by Steven Nash: “Andy Warhol remarked famously that his art was mostly ‘about liking things.’ With the things in Thiebaud’s work—the household goods, people, roadways, or mountain cliffs—we feel the empathy of the artist, but other attributes as well. Thiebaud’s are deeply reasoned paintings that still allow instinct and emotion to thrive. His object are nuggets of nostalgia, encoding fond memories from his youth but also aspects of American life meaningful to a great many of us” (Steve A. Nash, “Unbalancing Acts,” in Exh. Cat., Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective, 2000, p. 35).