Hey, Sacramento art fans: Do you know about the Wayne ‘Thiebaud Triangle’ in New York? | Opinion

For a Sacramentan, hanging out in New York City can easily draw a connection to the arts of our hometown. Of course, Joan Didion rates high in the written word category, spending her last years in her apartment on Park Avenue. From her home, it is a short walk to the “Thiebaud Triangle,” named after Sacramento’s most celebrated artist, Wayne Thiebaud. Thiebaud died on Christmas Day in 2021, but happily, his footprints remain in three locations in the Upper East Side of New York, and it’s fun to retrace them.

No New York tourist map shows the Thiebaud Triangle. That’s because it resides only in my mind. It is one part geography, another part certain hallowed institutions in that neighborhood and yet another part historical. Maybe a few other things as well.

Opinion

This imaginary triangle’s points are as follows:

First is Lady M Cakes, located at 41 East 78th Street, roughly halfway between Park Avenue and Madison Avenue, on a beautiful tree-lined street. There are other locations of Lady M Cakes, but New York’s Upper East Side was the firm’s first U.S. location. Thiebaud would take coffee and pastries at Lady M Cakes, and claimed it inspired him — which is easy to accept when one looks at his paintings of confectioneries, especially “Bakery Case” (1996), “Two Wedding Cakes” (2015) and “Cherry Pie” (2016), not to mention older pieces like “Pies, Pies, Pies” (1961) and “Cakes” (1963).

One look in the floor-to-ceiling glass front of Lady M Cakes and it’s obvious how it could inspire delicious oil paintings by Thiebaud, including the many that appeared on the cover of the New Yorker magazine.

The northwest corner of the Thiebaud Triangle is the Acquavella Gallery, at 18 East 79th Street. This is located between Madison Avenue and Fifth Avenue, which borders Central Park. At over 100 years-old, the gallery is close to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum. (The Met has in its collection Thiebaud’s “Pie Rows,” 1963, among other works of his.) The Acquavella Gallery entrance is a bit imposing, maybe even sterile. But the same cannot be said for the art inside.

A photo of Thiebaud can be found on the gallery’s website along with a list of other artists whose work it represents — including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mary Cassatt, Richard Diebenkorn, Willem de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg (and the even more famous). This is where I first saw Thiebaud’s work with price tags in the millions. Returning to Sacramento after seeing this, with Thiebaud still very much alive in his late 90s, I found that not many realized his works were priced at such lofty heights. Some simply didn’t believe it when told.

Finally, the south end of the Thiebaud Triangle is where the artist once had lunch with the New York Times’ then art critic Michael Kimmelman. This was at Viand, at 673 Madison. It bills itself as a coffee shop, but most would call it a classic café. The menu clearly makes that case, and a look inside will confirm it.

Following a lecture at Sacramento’s Crocker Museum last year, I asked Kimmelman if the lunch meetings he had with Thiebaud in New York City — referred to in his lecture at the Crocker that preceded our conversation — was at the Sant Ambroeus on Madison Avenue. Sant Ambroeus is located very close to Lady M Cakes and the Acquavella Gallery and visited by famous creatives. Kimmelman indicated no, that that was “too expensive for Wayne” (which was surprising with Thiebaud’s paintings at the nearby Acquavella priced in the aforementioned millions of dollars).

Instead, Kimmelman said that Thiebaud preferred Viand, a 20-minute walk south, also on Madison Avenue.

Others are sure to have “Wayne in New York City” stories, likely having nothing to do with geography. But this is mine. Going to or at least walking past the points on this triangle often, I have never done so without thinking of him. (I only met and spoke one-on-one with Thiebaud once, at a Christmas party at a mutual friend’s home in East Sacramento.)

It’d be easy to follow this path: one place which at least in part inspired his (arguably) most famous paintings of confectionaries, another which sold his paintings alongside art’s most noted celebrities and yet another which was a favorite café where he’d meet people to talk shop and maybe a little business. We know he had been to them, and that they made a difference in his life.

The Thiebaud Triangle lives on as a great Sacramentan’s enduring imprint on New York.

John Roberts has run non-profit organizations in Sacramento for 40 years.