Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1920)

"Thiebaud's art in its Zenlike insistence that we empty our minds and give a lemon, a bird, a cake its full inspection as a thing, is closer to a koan than a crack, and demands time. The Pop resonance of his subjects is apparent, but they come at us slowed down and chastened with a host of ambivalent feelings - nostalgic, satiric, elegiac, longing, inquiring - attached, so that our experience ends calmed down and contemplative: enlightened" (Adam Gopnik, An American Painter, San Francisco, 2000, p. 56).