Patrick Caulfield RA (1936-2005)

We have available a Patrick Caulfield painting produced in advance of the print series; poems of Jules Laforgue called “Crying to the Wall: My God! My God! Will She Relent”. The gouache measures Height 16 & 3/4; inches x Width 14 & 3/4; inches. (H42.5 x W37.5 cms.), was executed in 1970 is in excellent condition and is priced £26950 plus ARR subject to prior sale (Item 122).

Patrick Caulfield was born in 1936 in London where he grew up. He studied at the Chelsea School of Art from 1956 to 1960, and at the Royal College of Art from 1960 to 1963, where his fellow pupils included David Hockney and R. B. Kitaj. He returned to Chelsea as a teacher from 1963-1971.

In 1964, Patrick Caulfield’s career as a print maker began and “Ruins” was presented at the 4th Paris Biennale and won the unofficial prize for young artists. He exhibited at the New Generation show at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, which resulted in him being associated with pop art and his first solo show was at the Robert Fraser Gallery in London in 1965.

From around the mid-1970s Patrick Caulfield began to incorporate more detailed, realistic elements into his work, After Lunch (1975) being one of the early examples. Still-life: Autumn Fashion (1978) contains a variety of different styles with some objects having heavy black outlines and flat colour. He did also depict some works more realistically for example “a bowl of oysters” but then returned to his earlier, more stripped-down, style of painting.

Patrick Caulfield’s paintings are figurative, often portraying a few simple objects in an interior. Often he used flat areas of simple colour surrounded by black outlines. In 1987 Patrick Caulfield was nominated for the Turner Prize and in 1996 he was made a CBE.

Patrick Caulfield often works on a grand scale with regard to his paintings; however his prints principally did not need to be large, because he is evoking a mood through the depiction of a single object or of a strictly focused domestic scene.

He participated in many group exhibitions including the Royal Academy of Arts, London (1987), and ‘Pop Art’, also at the Royal Academy of Arts; touring to Museum Ludwig, Cologne and Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (1991-92). He has also had retrospectives of his work at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, touring to the Tate Gallery, London (1981) and at the Serpentine Gallery, London (1992-93). Additionally a major retrospective of his paintings, organised by the British Council, was shown at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1999. This then toured to the Musée National d’Histoire et d’Art, Luxembourg, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut (1999-2000).

Images of familiar things in Caulfield’s inimitable style are abundant in a series of works for ‘Some Poems by Jules Laforgue’. They add up to an inventory of absences, isolating into sharp focus the most banal objects provoking reflection in the emotions stirred in the viewer. Patrick Caulfield was somewhat of a unique artist for his generation contemplating the humour of life with style, courage and intelligence. He died in London in 2005 and is buried in Highgate Cemetery.

Name	Dimensions	Price
Clock		£26950
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