In Memoriam - Wayne Thiebaud: An Ode to Cake

"The whiteness of meringue becomes for me of great poetic preoccupation; it's like snow, like frost ... like ... purity.'' - Wayne Thiebaud

Wayne Thiebaud, who passed away on Christmas day at the age 101, was to cake what Giorgio Morandi was to bottles. Both artists kept painting the same objects again and again throughout their life. This enduring fascination with seemingly banal everyday objects was such that it can only be defined as devotion. One could argue that there is nothing banal about cake, but you follow.

There is something profoundly pure about this pictorial obsession, this meticulous, respectful and yet relentless engagement with the same subject. Like Thiebaud said (as always, look no further than primary sources to REALLY understand) it was a 'great poetic preoccupation' that gave life to pictures of sublime texture and luminous energy. His honest, contemplative style transcends realism and lacks the gimmicky side of Pop Art. In my view, like Morandi's, it exists in a space of its own.

Thiebaud reproduced cake like it had never been done before. He elevated it to the role of protagonist and, in doing so, he celebrated the beauty of the commonplace. Now you have seen and fallen in love with his luscious cake paintings, go look at his landscapes for, in their deceptive formal simplicity, they are just as mesmerising.

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Pie Slice, 1991

Around the Cake, 1962

Cakes, 1963

Neapolitan Meringue, 1986

Giorgio Morandi

Still Life, 1946

Giorgio Morandi

Still Life, 1951

Drunk on art.

Whether it’s the first one or the latest of many, a visit to Florence’s Uffizi is bound to leave you breathless. Such are the quality and the breadth of its collection, it’s like embarking on a relentless quest for the best picture, with the disarming awareness that it’s impossible to pick one. So you just keep going, room after room, masterpiece after masterpiece, soaking it all in until you’re almost drunk. Hoping that at least a tiny fragment of the exhilarating energy that is running through your body and soul is going to stay with you.

My aesthetics are firmly rooted in the works of the Italian Renaissance masters. My Baxandallian ‘eye‘ is shaped around them. When I think of a blue sky, I visualise Bellini’s serene backgrounds. My ideal man looks like Moroni’s tailor (look him up, he’s at the National Gallery in London). For me, there is no doubt that Bronzino painted the most obnoxiously gorgeous women, that Titian changed the way we engage with portraiture with the use of that haunting dark background, that Lotto gave us some of the most insightful and honest portraits. And if I were to reincarnate, I want to look like a Botticelli Madonna. Alternatively, a Veronese courtesan will do. Ah those pearls around their neck.

I realise this post is verging on the incoherent, for such is the power exercised by Renaissance art on my psyche. I’m in a glorious daze driven

by colour, form, light and composition. Most likely though, I just wanted an excuse to share a small selection of what I’ve seen today with you. So here it is. You’re welcome.

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Personal protection: America's love story with firearms

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” - Second Amendment of the American Constitution (ratified in 1791).

I'm not even going to get into the relevance to today's society of something written 230 years go (a militia?). Suffice to say that the United States are home to more privately-owned firearms than human beings. That's right, 393 million guns versus 328 million people. Of these, 63% were purchased for self-protection. Importantly, this has zero to do with class, race or politics, it's a transversal and deeply-ingrained phenomenon.

Unfathomable. I cannot think of another word to describe how culturally far removed this cultish relationship is to us Europeans. On rereading the amendment, I think the conflation of arm-bearing and freedom, a word that lately seems to be taking on equally mystifying meanings, may well be at the core of it. Freedom from the invisible enemy, which would explain why sales have risen sharply during the pandemic. The mind boggles.

Italian photographer Gabriele Galimberti has travelled across the US to produce an astonishing visual survey of gun ownership, winner of the World Press Photo Award 2021, and now made into a book titled The Ameriguns. His photos are aesthetically pristine, precisely staged to convey not just the jaw-dropping magnitude of these collections, but also the pride exuded by the owners. I'm both fascinated and horrified, to me it looks like a complete freak show.

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All photos © Gabriele Galimberti