Patrick Caulfield

Patrick Caulfield consistently denied that he was a Pop artist, pointing to the fact that he deliberately avoided images from contemporary culture and gave preference to standard subjects such as landscapes, interiors and still lifes: categories that are so traditional as to seem not only out of fashion but timeless. His primary inspiration, in any case, has come not from America but from Europe, to the extent that he based particular devices and compositional ideas on the work of Cubist and early modernist artists such Juan Gris, Georges Braque and Fernand Léger.

His attraction to an impersonal way of painting – a flat style like that of a sign-painter – has links with the work of another of his mentors, the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte. In spite of Caulfield’s protests, however, it is in this search for an apparent anonymity, as well as in his flirtations with Kitsch, in his witty allusions to other art and in his sophisticated play with style, that his close links with Pop Art lie. It is one of the many ironies of Caulfield’s art that it was through the very blandness and restraint of his favoured techniques, together with the familiarity and even self-conscious corniness of his characteristic images, that he developed a highly personal art capable of conveying with extreme subtlety a variety of moods and atmospheres.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s he produced the first of an extended series of large-scale canvases – many of them around three metres in height – depicting domestic or public interiors including dining rooms, restaurants, bars, offices and holiday homes. In the earliest of these he stripped down his pictorial language to the essential elements of linear drawing over a broad expanse of a single colour.

By the middle of the 1970s he had begun to elaborate this basic scheme by painting some of the elements in conflicting techniques including a precisely rendered Photorealism, trompe-l’oeil illusionism and even passages of broad pseudo-Expressionist brushwork. By pitting one style against another, and by making each one subservient to the overall surface design, he retained his characteristic detachment and horror of self-revelation. The trademark black outlines that had featured in his early works were gradually dispensed with, disappearing altogether by the late 1980s. Caulfield was always a slow and exacting painter. Since the late 1960s he rarely produced more than half a dozen canvases in a single year. Since 1964, however, he also worked steadily and productively as a printmaker, always in the medium of screenprints so admirably suited to his language of flat shapes and intense colour.

Courtesy of Marco Livingstone