Wayne Thiebaud’s lushly painted representations of American bakery, delicatessen, and restaurant food displays challenge our preconceptions about what we should consider worthy subjects for fine art, and reveal the fluid boundaries between representation and abstraction. The ostensible realism of "Three Machines" obscures its artifice. As Thiebaud observed, “Realism . . . seemed alternately the most magical alchemy on the one hand, and on the other the most abstract construct intellectually.”

Thiebaud’s nearly anthropological renderings of American popular culture reveal larger truths. Gumballs are the common denominator of penny candy—a sort of atomic particle of American consumer culture. They also represent, in microcosm, a common cycle of American consumerism, which spans from an imagined ideal, to the pleasure of possession, to a state of diminishing returns, and finally to a sense of loss—until the cycle begins again.