Patrick Caulfield (British, 1936-2005)


Untitled household paint and silver paint on board76 x 99.2 cm. (29 7/8 x 39 1/8 in.)Painted circa 1959-60
|ProvenanceThe Artist, from whom acquired byPrivate Collection, U.K.Their sale; Bonhams, London, 28 May 2014, lot 112, where acquired by the present ownerPrivate Collection, U.K.The present lot is accompanied by copies of letters from Pauline Caulfield and Peter Ward, discussing the work.Patrick Caulfield attended the Chelsea Collage of Art between 1956 and 1960. During this period the young Caulfield, like many of his fellow students, experimented with various approaches under a number of influences both domestic and international. Key amongst these were the New York School Painters whose work Caulfield had encountered at the Tate Gallery's 1959 exhibition The New American Painting. Here Caulfield found particular affinity with the paintings of Philip Guston, and his own work began to mimic that of this American titan. However, as his time at Chelsea came to an end Caulfields approach underwent a noticeable shift. He began to work in readily available materials such as household paints and masonite board to counterbalance increasingly academic underpinnings within his work. He adopted simplified imagery, suggestive of objects or iconography not dissimilar to that of his tutor Prunella Clough or Stuart Davis (whose work Caulfield had encountered at the Tate's 1956 exhibition Modern Art in the United States). This new approach may be considered as formative to distinctive, flatly painted iconographic imagery which was to become the lynchpin of his mature style. It may also be supposed that the ecclesiastic form suggested in the central component of Untitled is a precursor of a subject further explored in a group of works, painted in 1967, which include Battlements (Tate Gallery), Stained Glass Window (Musée National d'Histoire et d'Art, Luxemburg) and Parish Church (The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art).