Patrick Caulfield, R.A.

Robert Fraser Gallery, London, where acquired by Colin St John Wilson, 24th April 1969

Chichester, Pallant House Gallery, Patrick Caulfield, Between the Lines, 28th March - 14th June 2009, where lent from the Wilson Collection.

Marco Livingstone, Patrick Caulfield Paintings, Lund Humphries, Aldershot, 2005, p.285, illustrated p.126.

The present condition report has been prepared by Philip Young Conservation, Studio 3 Nutbrook Studio, 33 Nutbrook Street, London, SE15 4JU. The painting was seen at New Bond Street, London. It is in a sound condition with notes in detail below: CONDITION: According to reports from the time, the painting was treated for damage in 1980. This appears to be addressing a crushed corner of the hardboard support. At this time the distorted original timber battening attached through the board on the back was removed and the hardboard attached to a second board. This board now has developed a noticeable warp in the structure across the width. It would appear that as part of the treatment the edges of the board were trimmed slightly. The work was carried out by a conservator who would have known Caulfield and worked closely with him, so the artist may well have been involved with the work carried out. The lower left corner has been crushed and broken with some damage to paint. All edges are subject to some extent of retouching and restoration, presumably this dating from the work carried out in 1980. There are signs that areas of the image have been re-worked by the artist (which he is known to have done on many paintings), notably the upper blue, where the shapes and paint texture underlying the upper paint layers are apparent. In general the condition of the paint is good, with some light surface scuffs and scratches. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present lot.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

By Caulfield’s standards, given his famously slow and exacting rate of production of about five paintings per year, 1964 was an extraordinarily prolific year, yielding no fewer than 14 substantial paintings including landscapes (Santa Margherita Ligure, View of the Bay and View of the Ruins), interiors (Artist’s Studio [Arts Council Collection] and Corner of the Studio), a one-off excursion into animal painting (Pony), and nine still lifes: Bottle & Drape; Perfume Jar; Still Life on a Table; Still Life with Bottle, Glass and Drape (offered in this sale, lot 35);  Red and White Still Life (Birmingham Museums and Art Galleries); Still Life with Candle; Still Life with Green Bottle; Still Life with Necklace and this Still Life with Figs. It was in that same year that he made his first screenprint, Ruins, as part of a commission from the ICA, setting into motion his equally distinguished career as a printmaker. To what can one attribute this uncustomary frenzy of activity and the uniformly high level of accomplishment in these works, completed within 18 months of his graduation from the Royal College of Art?

 The confidence gained from being a full-time professional artist, and from the acclaim of being included in Bryan Robertson’s New Generation exhibition in March 1964, must have acted as a spur to exploring the bold, unabashedly decorative, image-based, highly formal and economical style that he had begun to develop only two years earlier. That the many pictures made in this year conform to highly traditional categories of painting such as landscape, interiors and still life suggests, moreover, that it was precisely by choosing to reinvigorate classes of painting long since abandoned by others as outmoded that the 28-year-old artist recognised the potential for carving out his own distinctive territory.

 Still life proved a rich subject for American Pop artists, including Warhol, Wesselmann, Lichtenstein, Thiebaud and Oldenburg, and to a lesser extent for British artists associated with the movement, notably Blake, Hamilton and the sculptor Clive Barker. Caulfield’s approach to the subject is deliberately at odds with that of any of these artists, particularly with that of the Americans, perhaps as a conscious ruse to distance himself from a label he was always determined to shake off. In their first Pop paintings of the early 1960s, both Lichtenstein and Warhol took inspiration from newspaper ads, whose cheap printed look they emulated, Warhol soon turning to mass-produced supermarket products such as Coca-Cola bottles and Campbell’s Soup cans, which he replicated with methods of stencilling and photo-silkscreening that emulated the procedures of mass production. Wesselmann cut out photographs from magazine advertisements, posters and billboards as collage elements integrated within his paintings. Thiebaud painted ice cream sundaes and synthetic cakes in a painterly style, while Oldenburg made replicas of fast foods in rough plaster painted in garish colours and then as gigantic enlargements of sewn canvas stuffed with kapok. The clear intent in each of these cases was to create a self-evidently modern take on still life, free of the past.

 Caulfield, by contrast, rooted his still lifes in European post-Renaissance painting, relishing the connections with art history and the prospect of reinvigorating those traditions in a subtle, less stridently assertive, manner. As he explained to me in conversation in 1980, seeing other artists use ‘whatever was up to date’ made him want to do something that ‘was more ambiguous in time. Not being old necessarily, something that could actually exist now that was of a timeless nature.’ So it is that he made reference to the Romanticism of Delacroix in Corner of the Studio, to 19th-century exoticism in paintings such as Still Life with Necklace and to the memento mori tradition in Still Life with Candle. A 20th-century artist using fruit as his subject matter would be likely to emulate Cézanne with his applies, rather than a 17th- or 18th-century Spanish bodegón, as Caulfield has here with his choice of figs: perhaps he had in mind Still Life with Figs and Bread c. 1770 by Luis Meléndez (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC). Caulfield was certainly well-versed in Old Master paintings and sympathetic to them: for his Artist’s Eye exhibition at the National Gallery in London in 1986, he featured among other things a still life by Jan van de Velde and Velázquez’s Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary. The selection for him speaks at least in part of a romance with the continuity of painting across the centuries.

The simplicity of style here, as always for Caulfield, is deceptive, masking the sophistication by which he brings together different pictorial languages. The central motif of figs and bowl is pinned to the surface in a sign-painter’s idiom of flat areas of unmodulated colour and black outline, but it also floats on stacked planes of colour set at jaunty angles for decorative effect and to suggest spatial recession. The sky blue trapezoid against which the fruit is silhouetted summons a view through an imaginary window onto a distant cityscape conveyed in a ‘degraded’ modernist linear language such as one might find on 1950s textile designs. Suddenly one feels giddy and disorientated, both viscerally and in terms of the imagery, as if the rug has been pulled firmly from under one’s feet. Lulled into temporary complacency by the decorative appeal of the picture and by its easy relationship with past art, it is at this point that we wake up to the surprising originality and freshness of Caulfield’s subtle vision.

Marco Livingstone