Wayne Thiebaud’s cakes arrive in Seoul, revealing an artist who painted order beneath every sweet surface

American painter Wayne Thiebaud is a rare artist whose work is liked instantly upon viewing and understood much later, if at all. His seemingly ordinary subjects, including cakes, pies and gumball machines, have been filed under pop art or under themes like nostalgia for the better part of six decades, but neither quite fits.

“Hyundai Card Culture Project 31: Wayne Thiebaud — The Order of Things,” Thiebaud’s first retrospective in Korea, opening at the Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP) on Saturday, is large enough to argue the significance of the artist with 105 paintings and drawings across 70 years, all hung around a single idea. Beneath the frosting of the cakes — Thiebaud’s most well-known and often-painted subject — he was a painter of structure.

The exhibition title is borrowed from philosopher Michel Foucault’s “The Order of Things,” a book concerned with the invisible grid that determines how a culture sees and categorizes its world. The argument of the cocurators of the exhibition, renowned art world figures Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer, is that Thiebaud spent his career painting that grid — and that Seoul, of all places, should recognize it.

“Korea has long understood something that Thiebaud understood too, that the objects of everyday life — the things we eat, the spaces we inhabit, the rituals we repeat — carry within them the deepest codes of a culture,” said Buchhart at a press conference at the DDP on Friday. “The tteok [traditional Korean rice cakes] arranged on a ceremonial table, the porcelain bowl placed just so, these are not decorations but orders.”

The desserts that Thiebaud painted make the case directly. Thiebaud himself once said that he started out painting triangles and ended up turning them into pies, and his cakes, looked at long enough, turn back into cylinders and wedges, each repeated with a small, deliberate variation.

In “Salads, Sandwiches, and Desserts” (1962), a large canvas on loan from the Sheldon Museum of Art now displayed at the DDP, food spreads across a wide, tilted table in impasto so thick it looks like the mayonnaise and whipped cream it depicts. The geometry is what you see. The paint is what makes you hungry, almost.

“They are above all sensual impulses, a promise, an anticipation,” said Buchhart of the ice cream and sweets. “The geometry and the desire are inseparable.”

Hofbauer pushed the point further, to the extent that the cakes stop being the subject at all.

“What makes this exhibition distinctive is not only the range of works spanning seven decades, from [Thiebaud’s] earliest canvases to his final self-portrait as a clown, but the argument that he was always and fundamentally an abstract painter who happened to paint cakes,” said Hofbauer. “'I'm basically always convinced that my work is abstract,' he said. Order is his medium, difference is his subject.”

That clown portrait, titled “One-Hundred-Year-Old Clown” (2020), was painted a year before Thiebaud’s death, face whitened and costume on — an odd final portrait from a man who maintained he was painting abstractions.

While Thiebaud’s name carries less fame than Andy Warhol’s or Roy Lichtenstein’s, his significance is no less than those contemporaries’, the curators of “The Order of Things” exhibition argued. Thiebaud appeared in two of the first pop art exhibitions, both in 1962 — one in Pasadena, the other “The New Realists” at New York’s Sidney Janis Gallery — though none of the pop artists much wanted the label, according to Buchhart.

“The background [in Thiebaud’s work] is stripped of any historical references, and they only display the human being,” said Hofbauer. “That’s not just one of his achievements, but I would really say, taking into account how you see the pop art movement, he really sets himself apart.”

Those empty backgrounds produce what Thiebaud called a “lonely togetherness.” In “Five Seated Figures” (1965), people sit side by side under studio-like light and never meet one another’s gaze. The exhibition’s own wall text reaches for Edward Hopper. In person, the curators resisted the gloomier half of the comparison.

“And yet this loneliness is never bleak — it is tender,” said Hofbauer. “These are not paintings of despair; they are paintings of presence, of things and people who exist fully, completely in their own world, even when that world touches no other.”

The Culture Project, Hyundai Card’s cultural marketing brand, has brought innovative and experimental names from music, theater, art, dance, architecture and film to Korea since 2011 — Kraftwerk in concert; Stanley Kubrick, Tim Burton and Jean Paul Gaultier in exhibition. Thiebaud, the project’s 31st subject, is perhaps its least flamboyant.

“We invite you to look closely at the works,” said Buchhart in closing. “The frosting on the cakes is also paint, the pie is also a triangle, and the order of things is never quite what it seems.”

BY LIM JEONG-WON [[email protected]]