Rosebud Cakes
Wayne Thiebaud at the Frederick R.
Weisman Museum
“Ainchew cumin ta gitchore creamin
sugarn sech?”, Festus asks the Marshal, in the most poetical description
of a cake I know. Eggs and cream and sugar weren’t plentiful out West,
let alone bakeries. The furthest thing from a cowboy’s mind would be a
frosted cake, perhaps, but the prospect on a festive occasion is a moment of
relaxation combined with keen gustatory delight. “Memory and
desire” is a phrase that comes to mind.
The paint can is a motif in Thiebaud’s
work. It holds a color in its metal cylinder, and stands in a group of colors
similarly situated. Pure oppositions of color are cast shadows in rounded
perspectives, and the floral decoration that sets the seal on the upper surface
is the maker’s mark.
Add to the astonishing list of landscapes
equal to their painters—Dali’s Port Lligat, the cylindrical
mountains of Chinese scroll painters, Van Gogh’s
Arles—Thiebaud’s Davis. This field in a niche alongside the
freeway, that river in and out, patchwork as the thing seen and not
comprehensive in memory or (bless us) imagination. Likewise the cityscapes,
which Childe Hassam or Edward Hopper might have, combined in sharp
perspectives, figured as the likely outcome of the long patience of drawing and
etching this or that street at length, a vertical outcome, a sheer precipice
walked.
