Dressing Wells
The earliest of use of ketchup by a so-called pop artist may be Wayne Thiebaud’s 1961 Dressing Wells. Text- and label-free, it presents dishes of mustard, mayonnaise, and ketchup in aggressive perspective. The condiments read as paint, and that was the point. Thiebaud was struggling to reconcile painterly abstraction with his premonition of a low-brow, figurative future. Dressing Wells was a breakthrough piece, its slathered pigment prefiguring the frostings and meringues that made Thiebaud famous.
Christian Attersee
1965
Leon Ferrari
1982
