Exemplary of Wayne Thiebaud’s career-long exploration of seriality and his now-iconic singular still-life renderings of midcentury American pop culture, Pop Bottles is a compelling expression of the artist’s lifelong preoccupation with and deft mastery of color. A particularly elegant embodiment of the artist’s meticulously arranged goods, Pop Bottles displays a neat row of a distinctly American commodity: the soda pop bottle. A subject reimagined by multiple masters of Pop—including Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein—the pop bottle exemplifies the saccharine, carefree spirit and fashion of the midcentury, as well as the zeitgeist of global commodification and mass advertising. Indeed, what could be more “Pop,” than a pop bottle? Thiebaud simultaneously pays homage to his contemporaries beyond the Pop movement: most notably, Ellsworth Kelly, whose iconic Spectrum paintings – and, in particular, Spectrum V, executed the year before the present work – is readily evoked in the precise rainbow spectrum of liquids. A work which fuses Minimalism and Pop with an ease that conceals the seemingly opposing conceptual framework of each movement, Pop Bottles is a masterwork of Thiebaud’s early production. Acquired by Mr. and Mrs. Morton G. Neumann the year following its execution and held in the family’s collection ever since, Pop Bottles emerges as an icon of Thiebaud’s signature manipulations of color and decadent impasto and stands as an icon of its time.

Within Pop Bottles, Thiebaud isolates his iconic, stylized color by giving each bottle a unique and vibrant jewel-tone hue, each rendered with subtle, gestural indications of materiality and the consequential interaction with light. Set upon a gray blue background and stark white foreground, Thiebaud’s brushwork creates rich textural detail that dances about his subject matter. Meanwhile, the artist’s signature blue shadows alternate to create a visually rhythmic, horizontal sightline that simultaneously separates and connects each bottle. This optical effect is deliberate: Thiebaud’s shadows occupy space as a means of relating objects to one another, signaling to the viewer that the scene is constructed from the artist’s own reality. At a closer glance, Thiebaud renders seven shadows for six bottles, indicating that the present composition is merely a snapshot within an indefinitely longer march of the ready-made objects. Just as in Thiebaud’s iconic candy counters and confectionary subjects, here, the artist elevates the subject of the pop bottles through his deft rendering, thus transforming the quotidian, mass-produced product into a seductive tableau of American life.

Though the aesthetics of the concurrent Pop and Minimalism movements were largely thought to be diametrically opposed, Thiebaud’s Pop Bottles proves this only ostensibly so – the identically manufactured glass bottles pay just as much homage to the mechanized process of Judd’s El Taller Chihuahuense as it does Warhol’s Factory. The rote, modular compositional quality of the present work owes a debt to his Minimalist peers, while the isolation of tone, hue, and value and use of bold primary and secondary colors recall the chromatic distinctions made in Kelly’s Spectrum paintings. In fact, the present work’s art historical dialogue is so far-reaching that it engages the very origins of the readymade, offering a midcentury answer to Marcel Duchamp’s iconic Bottle Rack of 1914, while its compositional perfection achieves the unique structural clarity with which Mondrian approached his paintings. Indeed, within the framework of objects set in simplistic seriality, Thiebaud offers a complex painting of infinite variations and invites the viewer to revel in the unique formal characteristics of each carefully rendered bottle. A breakthrough departure from the lush fullness of his dessert counters or his elaborately packed San Francisco cityscapes, Pop Bottles offers a moment of aesthetic integration, joining the most significant breakthroughs in the two leading movements of postwar art in the United States.

Thiebaud’s distinctive use of bold color to articulate shadows is readily evident in the purified, chromatic display of the present work, which notably pays homage to the masters in color who preceded him –particularly to Giorgio Morandi, who Thiebaud has acknowledged as a notable point of reference throughout his career. In Pop Bottles, Thiebaud reimagines his Modernist predecessor’s subtle tonal shifts and whispered monochromatic palette in favor of a punchy, spectral presentation of soda pop bottles alluding to his own characteristic palette. A decade after the present work was executed, Thiebaud penned an admiring and reflective homage to Morandi for the New York Times on the occasion of the November 1981 opening of the Morandi retrospective at the Guggenheim. Revealing a long-harbored veneration for the late master, Thiebaud mused: “On his simple ‘stages’ objects are cast in various roles. Tableaux and friezes in scene after scene infer arresting little dramas” (Thiebaud, “A Fellow Painter’s View of Giorgio Morandi”, The New York Times, 15 November 1981, Section 2, p. 36). In a later text, Thiebaud goes on to articulate the importance of depicting objects and shadows to his practice in relation to his analysis of Morandi’s meditative still-lifes, stating: “the object more or less stays the same…the shadow on the other hand, depending on the light source, can be highly variable…those options give you this great source of possibility in your compositions. You can then, in a sense, orchestrate objects and shadow in such a way that you’re rhythmically - almost like a musical composition - working these two elements: object, shadow, object shadow.” (Ibid., starting at 10:40).

Pop Bottles not only epitomizes Wayne Thiebaud’s career-long adoration for and exploration of confectionery items but also his rare and particularly deft union of Pop and Minimalism. Imbuing the serial, identical bottles with his highly individuated and subtly varied painterly touch, the vocabulary of Minimalism is cast in clear, electrifying relief, as his richly impastoed surface and vivid periwinkle shadows bring the pop bottles to life. The result is a joyful yet rigorous composition of lyrical magic. Recently honored with a landmark retrospective at the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Thiebaud remains a titan – the voice, even – of postwar Americana, whose work’s nostalgia, enduring cultural resonance, and irresistible charm remain archetypal.

Artist

Wayne Thiebaud