Patrick Caulfield; painter
Hyfler/Rosner
(Filed: 30/09/2005) The Telegraph
His work:
http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/?lid=279
http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/picture-of-month/showLarge.asp?venue=2&id=10
http://www.waddington-galleries.com/ARTIST/CAUL/B32965.HTM
http://fineart.ac.uk/collection/html/cn_040.jpg
Patrick Caulfield, who died yesterday aged 69, was one of
the finest painters of his generation, yet - in an age in
which critics were quick to classify - he defied easy
definition.
His eclectic paintings displayed a technical mastery which
allowed him to work in a variety of styles within a single
canvas. In his mature work, trompe-l'oeil and photo-realism
co-existed happily alongside simple graphic outlines,
emboldened planes of flat colour and perspectival
complexity. The paintings' unity was created by the power of
Caulfield's imagination and his wry detachment.
This resistance to classification meant that Caulfield's
work was not as widely known as that of some of his
contemporaries, particularly those who saw media
manipulation as an extension of their art. Caulfield was a
painter's painter, an artist whose work revealed great
depths when contemplated, and to those with an understanding
of art, its history and possibilities, his work could
resonate on a grand scale.
Patrick Joseph Caulfield was born at Acton, west London, on
January 29 1936. During the war years his family lived at
Bolton, where Patrick's father worked for the De Havilland
aircraft factory. At the age of 15, Patrick left Acton
Secondary Modern School and worked drilling gas rings in a
factory before moving to the advertising department of
Crosse & Blackwell, where he painted chocolates for display.
He then did his National Service with the RAF.
Inspired by John Huston's film Moulin Rouge, a biopic of
Toulouse-Lautrec, Caulfield commenced his career as an
artist with evening classes at Harrow School of Art whilst
stationed at RAF Northwood. He refused more glamorous
postings in order to continue his classes and to ensure that
he could spend time at the important exhibitions of the
period, notably the Mondrian retrospective and the Tate
Gallery's 1956 Modern Art in the United States, at which he
saw the work of Edward Hopper and Stuart Davis for the first
time.
Having admitted in his interview with William Coldstream at
the Slade School of Art that he did not know the names of
any important British artists, Caulfield won a place at
Chelsea School of Art in 1956. "All the prettiest girls were
at Chelsea," he said.
He studied under Jack Smith and Prunella Gough, and
benefited from the guidance of the principal, Lawrence
Gowing, who created an egalitarian atmosphere in which
Caulfield thrived after the rigours of the RAF. Initially
uncertain about his ability, he entered Chelsea as a
commercial painter, but switched to fine art, while
retaining elements of graphic design in his work.
Before moving on to the Royal College of Art, where he
studied for a further three years, Caulfield used the money
from two prizes he won at Chelsea to travel to Greece.
Inspired by the crude images of Minoan frescoes as well as
by the bright, hard colour and sharp outlines he found on
Crete, Caulfield incorporated a decorative, more playful
feel into his own work.
Whilst at the RCA, in the year below Hockney and Kitaj, he
painted two major works which included the human figure.
Portrait of Juan Gris paid homage to a hero, whilst Greece
Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi after Delacroix was
copied from a black-and-white print, with Caulfield
attempting to render the image as a propaganda poster, which
he felt had been its original intent. Thereafter he was to
confine himself only to the suggestion of human presence - a
space recently vacated, a chair at an angle, a table set.
This was a conscious decision, born of the view that
"Picasso had pulled the plug on interpreting the human
form".
When Caulfield had completed his course at the RCA, Lawrence
Gowing offered him a post as a part-time teacher at Chelsea,
where he taught from 1963 to 1971. In 1964 he was included
in the New Generation exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery,
in addition to making the first of his screenprints. The
silkscreen process, which lends itself to large areas of
flat, sharply defined colour, was ideal for the formal
simplicity of Caulfield's compositions.
Although his paintings appeared simple, this was deceptive
and rarely the desired effect. By his own admission there
were periods when he sought simplicity and others when he
sought complexity; his evolution as an artist was not a
linear process. Caulfield's move from using board to using
canvas in the early 1960s awakened his imagination, as the
material is both lighter and more flexible, pregnant with
possibility.
Having painted initially in a flat, linear mode, Caulfield
became increasingly alive to the potentiality of paint to
create light and shade, and his mature work allowed for more
sculptural interpretation of the depicted scene.
In 1965 he had his first solo exhibition, at the Robert
Fraser Gallery, and the same year was one of four artists
representing Britain at the Fourth Paris Biennale, where he
won the Prix des Jeunes Artistes despite a row concerning
his screenprints, which the organisers did not consider
"hand-made". The following year he had his first overseas
solo exhibition, at the Robert Elkon Gallery in Manhattan,
whilst the Tate Gallery became the first major public
collection to buy his work when they acquired Battlements.
By 1971 Caulfield was in a position to give up teaching. The
same year Penguin published a monograph on his work by the
critic Christopher Finch, whose description of Caulfield as
a "Romantic disarmed by his own sense of irony" was never
bettered. With his increasing control of light and shade,
Caulfield was able to invest the most vibrant monochromes
with subtlety, allowing a richer complexity to inhabit his
world of empty bars, sad cafés and bare foyers.
Caulfield was an urban painter, rarely venturing into the
countryside from his studio, which was based initially on
the fringes of Camden Town and, from 1995, at Archer Street
in Soho. His subject matter was inescapably melancholy, but
was always leavened by his humour and individuality; his
ability to reconstruct the world from within the formal
structure of his imagination rendered the most mundane
objects and scenes memorable.
Primarily a painter, Caulfield enjoyed the challenges and
variety provided by alternative commissions. In 1973 he
produced 22 screenprints for a limited edition book, Some
Poems of Jules Laforgue - he had encountered the work of the
French poet at the RCA. He produced a tapestry, Pool, for
his 1975 show at the Waddington Galleries, in which the deep
azure of the rectangular pool is surrounded by a cheerful
mosaic. In the early 1990s he designed a stained-glass
window, Paper Moon, for The Ivy restaurant in London, and a
large carpet for the atrium of the British Council building
in Manchester. He was always in demand as a designer of
posters, book covers and ceramics. On a grander scale were
his designs for Michael Corder's ballet, Party Game, which
was performed at the Royal Opera House in 1984, and for Sir
Frederick Ashton's Rhapsody, his penultimate work in 1995,
which subsequently transferred to Paris. When the curtain
rose for Party Game there was a spontaneous outbreak of
applause for the set before the dancers had even moved.
In the 1990s Caulfield had introduced greater complexity of
design into his work, taking the juxtaposition of
photo-realism and linear outlines as far as it could go.
Paintings such as Candle-lit Dinner beautifully conveyed the
atmosphere of the subject through the witty interplay of
bulbous lights and fat, curving lines, bright monochromatism
and lilting shade, the precision of the chicken set against
a childlike background of big shapes, overlapping, drawing
the eye of the viewer upwards and down and into the picture
despite its perverse perspective.
In the late 1980s, in paintings such as Glass of Whisky,
Caulfield had forsaken intricacy, imbuing his painting with
a greater starkness. The glass appears almost surreal
standing in its yellow shard against the brown background -
even Caulfield's palette had been subdued to the overall
design - upon which plays the artless geometry of splintered
light.
In his late work Caulfield could move easily from the spare
to the involved. Trou Normand (literally meaning "Normandy
hole", and slang for the resurgence of appetite following a
glass of Calvados) is almost a riot of interlocking colours.
The light from the high windows reflects on the different
surfaces and fabrics; and although there are no glasses to
be seen, this is indubitably the closed world of the
down-at-heel bar. By contrast, Kellerbar has light from a
single source illuminating a bare pub sign and a painted
china spaten which, in their magnificent simplicity, conjure
images of another world.
He was a keen drinker, arriving at his "morning pub" at
opening time for Old Speckled Hen, before moving on to
double Irish whiskeys. After lunch and work, he went to the
evening pub, before returning home to watch television.
Glasses of red wine were a frequent motif in his paintings.
Patrick Caulfield created a unique style as a painter.
Impervious to fashion, he was capable of assimilating the
fluctuations of 20th-century art into his work, of learning
from the modern masters but never merely aping them. His
control of the overall design of a painting was reminiscent
of Ingres, his palette toyed with Matisse and the Fauves,
his reassembling of the world under his own rules reflected
the spirit of Picasso and the Cubists; but he was his own
man - wryly observant, figurative, photo-realist, abstract,
always forging his own identity amidst the white noise of
modern culture.
He was a Royal Academician; a Fellow of the RCA; winner of
the Jerwood Prize (in 1995, with Maggi Hambling); and
nominated for the 1987 Turner Prize for his show The
Artist's Eye, in which he curated an exhibition of his
favourite paintings in the National Gallery. He was
appointed CBE in 1996, and enjoyed a major retrospective at
the Hayward Gallery in 1999.
Patrick Caulfield married Pauline Jacobs, whom he had met at
Chelsea Art School, in 1968; they had three sons. After the
marriage was dissolved he married, in 1999, the artist Janet
Nathan.