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Ensayo del lote
Vessels had featured prominently in Patrick Caulfield’s paintings from his student days at the Royal College of Art, for example in Still Life with Dagger 1963 (Tate), and in subsequent large works such as Perfume Jar 1964 and Red and White Still Life 1964 (Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery). Often these serve as a means of suggesting volume and depth in contradiction to the graphic flatness of the canvas on which they rest. At a time when abstract painters and their champions, such as the influential American art critic Clement Greenberg, insisted on respecting what was termed ‘the integrity of the picture plane’, Caulfield enjoyed reminding the viewer that the history of western painting was in fact steeped in a desire to convey an illusion of three-dimensionality. In Large Storage Jars, as in a painting of the previous year, The Well 1966, he demonstrates that one can have it both ways: using a graphic linear language to pin the composition to the emphatically flat monochromatic ground while simultaneously inviting the spectator to imagine peering into an internal void.
The panoramic format and expansive dimensions first employed by Caulfield in 1964, when he favoured working on hardboard, enabled him to create an immersive atmosphere flooded with colour and light. The large sized stretched canvas used here and for related works was chosen deliberately in response to developments in colour field painting and post-painterly abstraction that were then in the ascendancy, but with the overall colour suggesting a spatial domain interrupted by diagrammatic depictions of prosaic objects to which everyone can relate. His chosen language is stripped down to its fundamental elements, a linear contour that describes the shape of each ostentatiously protuberant object and an unmodulated coloured surface that insists on its resolute smoothness as a paper-thin layer of paint applied without visible brushwork. Three of the jars are in the primary colours of red, blue and yellow, the other two in green (a secondary colour) and grey (formed from the admixture of several colours), suggesting a textbook demonstration of the properties of different hues, appearing either to recede or to advance towards us.
Two years after producing this work, Caulfield painted a manic profusion of vessels in bold colours with the title Pottery 1969 (Tate), on a canvas measuring 7 x 5 feet, as a cheeky but affectionate homage to a celebrated painting by William Nicholson, The Hundred Jugs 1916 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool).
This work by Nicholson, normally known for the understated quality of his intimate still-life paintings, appealed to Caulfield’s sense of the absurd. Something of that quality is already present in Large Storage Jars, particularly in the way that the placement of the separate motifs suggests a spatial recession that relates paradoxically to the undifferentiated blue ground, which functions ambiguously at once as the floor on which the jugs rest, as a wall behind them and as a signpost to open space in an imaginary distance. With just a small number of dextrously placed black marks along the upper register to suggest a cityscape far behind the jars in the foreground, Caulfield opens out the pictorial space as an invitation to the imagination. A similar strategy had been employed in one of his most seductive earlier paintings, View of the Bay 1964 (Centro de Arte Moderna José de Azeredo Perdigão, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon), to conjure a frieze of buildings on the quayside of a Mediterranean town. What seems even there to be a visual shorthand for an expanse of architecture is reduced even further here, challenging the viewer to decipher the spidery black marks as a pattern that can be recognised as a representation of a world constructed from bricks and mortar.
Jars and other functional vessels proved to be mainstays in Caulfield’s art, particularly in his editioned screen prints, from Earthenware 1967, Two Jugs 1969, Vase on Display 1971 and Fig Branch 1972 through Jug and Jar of 1974, Signature Pots 1975, Ringed Jar 1978-80 and many others through to the set of eight severely minimal quasi-monochromatic White Ware Prints published in 1990. Their frequent appearances denote not only their usefulness to him throughout his creative life as signifiers of pictorial content, but a degree of obsessive identification with such apparently simple, unadorned inventions created by humans over millennia to meet their daily needs. Large Storage Jars can be understood as one of the earliest iterations of this favoured motif in Caulfield’s art, a foundation and prototype on which the many later examples rest.
The panoramic format and expansive dimensions first employed by Caulfield in 1964, when he favoured working on hardboard, enabled him to create an immersive atmosphere flooded with colour and light. The large sized stretched canvas used here and for related works was chosen deliberately in response to developments in colour field painting and post-painterly abstraction that were then in the ascendancy, but with the overall colour suggesting a spatial domain interrupted by diagrammatic depictions of prosaic objects to which everyone can relate. His chosen language is stripped down to its fundamental elements, a linear contour that describes the shape of each ostentatiously protuberant object and an unmodulated coloured surface that insists on its resolute smoothness as a paper-thin layer of paint applied without visible brushwork. Three of the jars are in the primary colours of red, blue and yellow, the other two in green (a secondary colour) and grey (formed from the admixture of several colours), suggesting a textbook demonstration of the properties of different hues, appearing either to recede or to advance towards us.
Two years after producing this work, Caulfield painted a manic profusion of vessels in bold colours with the title Pottery 1969 (Tate), on a canvas measuring 7 x 5 feet, as a cheeky but affectionate homage to a celebrated painting by William Nicholson, The Hundred Jugs 1916 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool).
This work by Nicholson, normally known for the understated quality of his intimate still-life paintings, appealed to Caulfield’s sense of the absurd. Something of that quality is already present in Large Storage Jars, particularly in the way that the placement of the separate motifs suggests a spatial recession that relates paradoxically to the undifferentiated blue ground, which functions ambiguously at once as the floor on which the jugs rest, as a wall behind them and as a signpost to open space in an imaginary distance. With just a small number of dextrously placed black marks along the upper register to suggest a cityscape far behind the jars in the foreground, Caulfield opens out the pictorial space as an invitation to the imagination. A similar strategy had been employed in one of his most seductive earlier paintings, View of the Bay 1964 (Centro de Arte Moderna José de Azeredo Perdigão, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon), to conjure a frieze of buildings on the quayside of a Mediterranean town. What seems even there to be a visual shorthand for an expanse of architecture is reduced even further here, challenging the viewer to decipher the spidery black marks as a pattern that can be recognised as a representation of a world constructed from bricks and mortar.
Jars and other functional vessels proved to be mainstays in Caulfield’s art, particularly in his editioned screen prints, from Earthenware 1967, Two Jugs 1969, Vase on Display 1971 and Fig Branch 1972 through Jug and Jar of 1974, Signature Pots 1975, Ringed Jar 1978-80 and many others through to the set of eight severely minimal quasi-monochromatic White Ware Prints published in 1990. Their frequent appearances denote not only their usefulness to him throughout his creative life as signifiers of pictorial content, but a degree of obsessive identification with such apparently simple, unadorned inventions created by humans over millennia to meet their daily needs. Large Storage Jars can be understood as one of the earliest iterations of this favoured motif in Caulfield’s art, a foundation and prototype on which the many later examples rest.