Patrick Caulfield

Waddington Galleries, London, where acquired by Mr & Mrs Frank H. Porter, 1969
Their sale, Christie's London, 4th June 2004, lot 116, where acquired by the present owner

London, Waddington Galleries, Patrick Caulfield, October 1969, un-numbered exhibition;
Cleveland, Museum of Art (short-term loan, details untraced);
Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery, Patrick Caulfield: Paintings 1963 - 1981, August - October 1981, cat. no.19, illustrated, with tour to Tate, London;
London, Hayward Gallery, Patrick Caulfield, February - March 1999, cat. no.13, with tour to Musée National d'Histoire et d'Art, Luxembourg, Centro de Arte Moderna José de Azeredo Perdigão, Lisbon, and Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven;
London, Tate, Patrick Caulfield, 5th June - 1st September 2013, cat. no.5.

Christopher Finch, Patrick Caulfield, Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, 1971, illustrated fig.34;
Clarrie Wallis, Patrick Caulfield, Tate Publishing, London, 2013, p.15, illustrated fig.5.

The following condition report has been prepared by Phil Young of Phil Young Conservation, 33 Nutbrook Street, London, SE15 4JU. The painting was examined at Sotheby's store, Greenford. It is in a sound condition consistent with many works by the artist from this period. Caulfield, in common with other artists at this time, often used a relatively brittle priming layer which had a tendency to crack when disturbed by contact. This painting has been subject to some of this cracking and has also been subject to restoration. The below is a general description of the work and not a detailed record of all aspects of the work. STRUCTURE AND CONDITION: The canvas is not lined. It has a number of small Mylar patches applied quite lightly at the back of the canvas in areas relating to cracking at the face. Most of the cracks affect the dark background, with some smaller scattered cracks in the other areas, including a general lighter cracking mostly running vertically. All circular and heavy cracks have been caused by contact. The largest group of concentric cracks is in the lower right, close to the lower right corner of the window. Some of these have been touched in to reduce the white contrast and are not addressed by a Mylar patch. To the right of the second tier of window panes is another, smaller group of circular cracks. More linear isolated cracks are seen scattered over the surface, either singly, below the window latch, or in groups, such as in the lower right corner. At normal viewing distances and conditions the cracks can be said to be barely visible. There is a group of surface marks in the upper left corner and scattered hard scratches into the paint film, such as in the lower right panes, the lower left dark area, and across the lower centre dark area. Some dripmarking is seen in the lower centre running down to the edge with some further drips down the lower left side and in the lower right pane. Retouchings in the cracks are difficult to discern, however there are some visible larger retouchings such as to the upper left of the upper right pane, in the yellow of the lampshade at several points. Elsewhere there are isolated and group spot retouchings over small losses and abrasions. TREATMENT: In the past works by the artist from this time have been lined or marouflaged, in order to hold down the raised crack edges. However, visually there would be little to gain as in normal conditions the painting has a good overall appearance, this is improved when held in a protective frame. The drips and scattered marks can be removed through simple cleaning and the more apparent cracks can be touched in. Philip Young
"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."

Architectural subjects became a dominant preoccupation for Patrick Caulfield within half a decade of his graduation from the Royal College of Art in 1963. Although interiors of domestic spaces and of public sites suggestive of social interaction, such as pubs, bars, restaurants and hotel lobbies, came to dominate, his initial investigations of buildings were at least as concerned with how they looked from the outside. This was the case with Parish Church (fig. 1, 1967, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh), in which an entire building, depicted in the artist’s by then signature linear outline and flatly applied colours, seems to float in an ambiguous space economically rendered as a monochromatic grey ground. A sense of the observer being excluded from the tantalisingly brightly lit interior is still more intensely experienced in Stained Glass Window (fig. 2, 1967, Musée National d’Historie et d’Art, Luxembourg) of the same year, which positions the viewer very much closer to the façade (so that the window seems to be actual size) but still kept at bay from whatever mysterious sacrament may be taking place inside. Seen from below and at an oblique angle, that Gothic window is rendered as a mosaic of self-evidently flat shapes while simultaneously cleverly suggesting one’s precise spatial position in relation to it.

Window at Night makes use of a similar strategy as Stained Glass Window in terms of the position of the large expanse of glass subdivided into a systematic arrangement of individual panes, shown as if brightly illuminated from within and viewed as if from street level below. The visual language is now even more pared down. This time a single ellipse of bright yellow artificial light, passing through a suspended red lampshade, floods a schematically rendered empty room with a warm orange glow evenly dispersed across walls and ceiling as an uninflected flat coat of colour. The implication of a convivial shelter, though called into question by its barren emptiness, is brought into sharp focus by the inky blackness that surrounds it and that is locked into position by the metal framework of the window panes. As viewers we are left in no doubt that we are standing outside at night, probably in the cold, banished even from what might well be a grimly empty interior and left to speculate on what we might be missing out on. Though making sly allusion to the Minimalist grids and monochromatic canvases then in the ascendancy, the extreme simplicity is marshalled here to more human and emotionally resonant ends. The bittersweet atmosphere of solitude recalls and reshapes two of Caulfield’s prime points of reference, the paintings of Edward Hopper and the poems of the French Symbolist writer Jules Laforgue, a selection of which he was soon to illustrate in the form of a limited edition book of 22 screenprints published in 1973. In one of the poems chosen by Caulfield in translations by Patricia Terry, ‘Complaint about a certain Sunday’, the narrator finds himself ‘Oh, alone! alone! and so cold!’ In another, ‘Solo by Moonlight’, he experiences ‘Only the night,/So many clean, deep chambers!’ He responds by ‘peopling’ these rooms glimpsed from afar, imagining himself inside in the presence of a lover, before being reminded that ‘No one waits for me, I’m going to no one’s home./I’ve only the friendship of hotel rooms.’

Caulfield, exceptionally, made two nearly identical versions of this subject, on the same size of canvas, with the same colour scheme and derived from a single cartoon transferred to the primed ground with the aid of a linear drawing made in felt-tip pen on a polythene sheet. The other work, Lit Window (Berardo Collection, Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon), was painted in the same year. All that distinguishes one painting from the other are details of the foliage poking into the lowest of the window panes; even the single central pane of the top register is shown pushed open at precisely the same angle, wittily linking the ‘inside’ to the ‘outside’ of a scene rendered resolutely flat and letting imaginary air flow through a scene of intense and permanent stillness.

 

Marco Livingstone