Wayne Thiebaud, Painter of Cakes and Light, Dies at 101

Wayne Thiebaud, who died at the close of 2021 aged 101, found poetry in pie. His glowing, thickly painted rows of cakes, gumball machines and ice-cream cones turned the humble bakery counter into something luminous and tender.

Often lumped in with Pop Art, he was really a painter's painter, obsessed with light, shadow and the buttery physicality of oil paint itself — heir to Chardin and Morandi as much as to Warhol.

Working productively into his hundredth year, the Californian also painted dizzying San Francisco streets and river landscapes. But it is those cakes — sweet, lonely, radiant — the world will remember.

Image: “Piece of chocolate cake on a white plate decorated with chocolate sauce” — Daria YakovlevaMinor edits made by Subsidiary account, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.