Concrete Villa, Brunn

In 1963, just as he was completing his studies at the Royal College of Art, Caulfield made several black-and-white paintings in a square format, of which this is one. As in Engagement Ring [De Beres' Central Selling Organisation, London] and Black and White Flower Piece [Tate, London] of the same year, a single motif is visually pinned to the centre of the surface and held in place against a strict rectilinear grid. All of these paintings played on the potential of decorative values at the time when decoration was considered to be the height of superficiality. 'It was again a reaction against the sort of painting that was being taught ... it was a decorative object', Caulfield later commented. In the previous year, in a group of paintings (later destroyed) featuring a three-dimensional grid in the form of a garden trellis attached to the support, he first understood how an illusionistic image could be placed tellingly against a taut flat background. 'In advertising you have to project or you don't make a sale, and I used that. It seemed worth doing to try to project, and not to expect the spectator to make all the effort'. It occurred to him that the language of commercial art could provide a means of guaranteeing an immediacy for the image: 'It was a reaction which I shared with other people against academic work, the idea of English painting in muted tones where marks were never quite finished. It seemed a reason to use very crisp black lines'.

The first fully resolved paintings to apply these ideas, in Caulfield's own view, are the black-and-white ones made in 1963 during his last term at the Royal College. In all of them a regularly spaced linear pattern, painted on the surface with the aid of masking tape, subdivides the surface in a manner that recalls the traditional squaring-up of a drawing for transfer. This suggests, at least on a subliminal level, that the image has been adapted from another source. The deliberate monotony of the regular pattern linking the four edges stresses the containment of the centrally placed image within, held into position so as to avoid all suggestion of movement or narrative. 'I like to pin down images', he explained, banishing all incident so as to guarantee maximum presence for the objects he has pictured. The surface, composed entirely of black gloss paint on a white ground, betrays no sign of the brush; the outline of each image was drawn in first before the painting of the grid so that no ridges would show through.

The severely geometrical modernist house featured in this painting - prophetic of Caulfield's mature works in featuring 20th-century architecture as its subject - was copied from a black-and-white photograph of the concrete villa at Brunn, Czechoslovakia, designed by O. Stary, which he found reproduced in Decorative Art: The Studio Year Book, edited by C.G. Holme (London: The Studio Ltd, 1932), p. 131. The austerity of the building's design chimed well with Caulfield's taste at that time for the rigorous aesthetics of Mondrian's Neoplasticism and for other rather austere art movements of that time derived from Cubism, such as Purism.

'There's a little figure sitting in Concrete Villa, Brunn which is a self-portrait. That was really because I was in love with that architecture. I thought I'd love to have a house just like that, with tubular steel and iron windows and concrete. That was just a sort of fantasy, but I suppose it meant that I was interested in that period, which I still am in a way. I suppose I saw the degree of control that people tried to attain very attractive.'

We are very grateful to Marco Livingstone for preparing this catalogue entry.