TY - JOUR
AU - Sheleg,, Moran
AB - The recent resurgence of critical interest in the practice of painting has brought with it an urgent need to justify painting’s ongoing relevance as something more than a commodity form par excellence. One of the main avenues this line of enquiry has taken is the idea, as old as modernism itself, that painting can somehow shed light on the social conditions of life at any given moment and thus regain a level of criticality. In the digital age, a time in which ‘networks’ mediate our experience of the world and offer a connection to the lives of others, this has meant holding a mirror up to the mechanisms of cultural production and its systems of dissemination, propagation, and (less optimistically) misuse that may otherwise go unnoticed.1 Painting’s ability to do so, as a material thing itself made from the raw stuff of mechanised industry, has long been a sticking point. Traced back to the interrogation of painting performed in Marcel Duchamp’s 1918 canvas, Tu m’ (Fig. 1), in which a set of pictorial conceits serve to lay bare its condition as an assemblage of readymade elements (which, as always with Duchamp, take on a double meaning), this view of painting’s role as a mediator, in its attempt to visualise ‘how marks, or gestures, occupy the space between subjects and objects, or between people and things’, may well move beyond the question of ‘medium’ that has dominated its discussion since the mid-twentieth century.2 Yet it can scarcely address the narrative of painting’s inherent failure (and inevitable conclusion), as highlighted by Duchamp and furthered by many others after him, which has long underpinned this history.3 Of course, Duchamp’s contribution continues to draw conflicting interpretations, due in no small part to its deep ambivalence over almost every facet of art. (Ironically, his formative experience as a painter, however complicated, is widely agreed upon.) Nevertheless, during the 1960s the implications of Duchamp’s apparent flight from painting into the readymade were taken up and canonised by artists working in a range of different contexts, making its significance, as signalled by this work, difficult to dismiss. Fig. 1 View largeDownload slide Marcel Duchamp, Tu m’, 1918, oil on canvas, with bottle-brush, safety pins, and bolt, 69.8 x 303 cm. Yale University Art Gallery. Gift of the Estate of Katherine S. Dreier. (Photo: Yale University Art Gallery) Fig. 1 View largeDownload slide Marcel Duchamp, Tu m’, 1918, oil on canvas, with bottle-brush, safety pins, and bolt, 69.8 x 303 cm. Yale University Art Gallery. Gift of the Estate of Katherine S. Dreier. (Photo: Yale University Art Gallery) In 1964, the British painter Patrick Caulfield made Artist’s Studio (Fig. 2), another painting in which a set of pictorial devices are assembled in a horizontal, frieze-like format. While perhaps unlikely at first glance, the comparison bears considering. Featuring an array of peculiar registers, in both instances it is as though painting’s constitution as a compositional activity is being laid out for scrutiny. Duchamp’s surface teems with pictorial references to the artist’s own backlog of work – here represented by a group of cast shadows, a spectrum of colour samples, a trompe l’oeil hand with pointing index finger commissioned from a sign painter, a row of safety pins holding together the central snag in the canvas, and a bottle-brush that juts out abruptly into real space – which together posit painting as both a material thing and a set of ideas that are always in tension. Its title also enacts this frustrated, and frustrating, relationship, consisting of two propositions missing a relational verb: you (something) me. Variously described as ‘a panorama of the index’, ‘a discourse on painting expressed in painting’, ‘a rupture’ of both art history and colour, and most recently, a painting ‘set… beside itself’, Tu m’ exists as a work of (and perhaps even about) dislocation.4Artist’s Studio, conversely, suggests that a point of convergence, in the form of an actual setting, links the forms, depicted objects, and images of images floating amid its blocky, yellow-and-blue ground. Yet, in this case, that convergence point is no more than the sum of its scanty parts, which together suggest the outline of a specific space, perhaps, but hardly what we might recognise as that originary, mythical locale named in its title. In this way it also suggests a relationship that is in the middle of a breakdown. One could say, in a direct inversion of Duchamp, that it is a work of (or about) relocation. The relocation, that is, of painting back into itself – into that pictorial realm drawn out in the illusion of Renaissance perspective – and the sheer impossibility of that move given all of the assaults made upon it since. Fig. 2 View largeDownload slide Patrick Caulfield, Artist’s Studio, 1964, oil on board, 91.4 x 281.4 cm. Arts Council Collection © The Estate of Patrick Caulfield. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2019. (Photo: © Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre) Fig. 2 View largeDownload slide Patrick Caulfield, Artist’s Studio, 1964, oil on board, 91.4 x 281.4 cm. Arts Council Collection © The Estate of Patrick Caulfield. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2019. (Photo: © Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre) If I begin with what may seem to be a slight and strange thesis, it is not to uphold Duchamp as an influence on, or even as an interlocutor for, Caulfield. Barring the appearance of a pipe in some of his later works, Caulfield seemed to have very little to say, whether directly or indirectly, about Duchamp and his legacy. (If anything, Caulfield’s habitual use of the pipe in certain works may have been an allusion to René Magritte, whom he explicitly referenced in a painting entitled The Mysterious Suspicion – After Magritte of 1974.) There are nonetheless some striking parallels: both artists aligned themselves, however briefly in Duchamp’s case, with a French tradition of painting that their works simultaneously invoke and revoke; both would repeatedly explore its demise, albeit by different means; and both would stage a rather bizarre return to it in their last works. It is not my intention here to make sense of or explain away this coincidence. Nor is this article an attempt to save Caulfield from the relative critical neglect that has left his work for the most part underexplored, at least when compared to contemporaries such as Peter Blake, R. B. Kitaj, or David Hockney. Rather, it is offered as an effort to find another way into the problem of painting as a tenacious trope, particularly since the mid-twentieth century, which might allow us to rethink some of its longstanding clichés. Given the emphasis on gesture that has sporadically marked this history, it seems increasingly important to examine those cases that resist such a reading – that is to say, to closely analyse those practices in which the index of the painterly mark as a sign of subjectivity is so vividly denied. In the case of Duchamp, the terms of this denial have been well established and explicated, if used to arrive at the possibility of its very reversal: the reinstatement of the artist’s authority through the absence of the gesture, by way of the readymade. Here, I propose we explore another possibility: that of the realisation, and perpetuation, of this absence within painting itself. For it is as if Caulfield’s work makes us confront what is really at stake in the undoing of that integral link between painter and painting that defined the practice for many decades after Duchamp’s intervention. Almost everyone agrees that something happened during the 1960s, particularly in the United States and Western Europe, which made it very difficult and undesirable to sustain this link. Even at the time, it appeared impossible to ignore the impending crisis surrounding painting as a sustainable activity in the face of this difficulty, despite some critics’ endeavours to do so.5 What Caulfield’s work suggests, however, is that this unsustainability might actually have been a boon to painting, rather than its demise. Following Caulfield’s first one-man exhibition, held at the Robert Fraser Gallery in London in 1965, the critic John Russell branded him as ‘preeminently a historian who sets himself to discover just how far a great tradition has sunk’.6 When taken seriously, this statement becomes an invitation as much as a potential insult. For it suggests a host of other questions to ask of a painting, such as Artist’s Studio, that seems to be a dead end: primarily, what kind of a history of painting does it suggest? With its ambiguous perspective, confused depth, and intermingling of abstract and figurative elements, Artist’s Studio appears to teeter on the edge of Tu m’ territory without actually entering it. On the other hand, the squiggle in the bottom right-hand corner, where a signature should be, presents itself quite literally as an empty gesture. If this is a version of painting’s past, reimagined by way of its sanctum sanctorum (the studio), then it is one in which the authority of the artist as its central point of gravity appears to have been excised. Or, at least, we are invited by the painting to suspend our disbelief over the impossibility of such an action, if only for a few moments. This is not to say that Caulfield’s works are symbolic. In fact, quite the opposite is true. In them the very problem of painting itself becomes a truism that, through repetition, begins to corrode from within. Caulfield only graduated from the Royal College of Art the year before he painted Artist’s Studio, but as a student had already pinned his colours to the mast of painting’s sinking ship, as it were, with his reimagining of Delacroix’s Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi (Fig. 3).7 Although ambitious, Caulfield’s take on this history painting stood as though a perennial monument to painting’s own ruin. This impression would be made even more vivid by the artist’s almost immediate advancement, or, rather, regression, to the most minor of painting’s historical genres – namely, still life, domestic interiors, and the tavern scene – via an early excursion into printmaking which resulted in a one-off graphic work (commissioned by the ICA and carried out by the Kelpra studio) entitled Ruins (Fig. 4). Showing six partially cracked and chipped grey bricks on a yellow ground, with a few clusters of weeds set behind them, Caulfield seems to have distilled his earlier painting down to its key narrative theme while also setting up a circuitous pictorial analogy for the dilapidated status of painting, as further cemented in View of the Ruins, a large painting made that same year. Instead of a search for its limits, as Russell suggested, even at this early stage one can see Caulfield attempting to make sense of painting’s history by creating something out of its leftovers. This was a project that had very little to do with abstraction or representation per se and a lot to do with the perceived gap between painting’s historical image as the expression of an inward reality on the one hand, and its contemporary status as a medium under siege on the other. Rather than a lack, this gap is shown to be highly productive and its sustenance advantageous. Fig. 3 View largeDownload slide Patrick Caulfield, Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi (after Delacroix), 1963, oil on board, 152.4 x 121.9 cm. Tate, London. © The Estate of Patrick Caulfield. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2019. (Photo: Tate, London) Fig. 3 View largeDownload slide Patrick Caulfield, Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi (after Delacroix), 1963, oil on board, 152.4 x 121.9 cm. Tate, London. © The Estate of Patrick Caulfield. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2019. (Photo: Tate, London) Fig. 4 View largeDownload slide Patrick Caulfield, Ruins, 1964, screenprint on paper, 50.8 x 76.2 cm. Part of the Institute of Contemporary Arts Portfolio, Tate, London. © The Estate of Patrick Caulfield. All rights reserved, DACS, 2019. (Photo: Tate, London) Fig. 4 View largeDownload slide Patrick Caulfield, Ruins, 1964, screenprint on paper, 50.8 x 76.2 cm. Part of the Institute of Contemporary Arts Portfolio, Tate, London. © The Estate of Patrick Caulfield. All rights reserved, DACS, 2019. (Photo: Tate, London) Not all critics gave Caulfield the benefit of the doubt, however. In his review of a small selection of Caulfield’s work, which included Artist’s Studio, shown as part of a group exhibition in 1964, Robert Melville disparaged the artist for ‘practising a pretty nasty kind of cultural slumming’.8 Taking Caulfield’s Still Life with Necklace (Fig. 5), also made in 1964, as intended ‘to take a rise out of suburban art lovers’, Melville’s offence raises further questions about the terms of Caulfield’s troublesome (and troubling) historical excavation – in particular, over the kind of class politics engendered in its ‘straight-faced, dead pan, cool’ demeanour that Melville, like so many others, saw as a shared feature of the Pop Art aesthetic prevalent at the time. Not to mention the gendered trope of the domestic interior, as used in his work towards the end of the 1960s and extensively throughout the following decade. All this gives us cause to pause over the implications of Caulfield’s project as a historical reckoning with painting that also throws up some timely issues around its shortcomings. Rather than a resolution of the problem of painting, Caulfield’s work appears as an engine – if an at-times faulty one – for its continuation in the face of ruin and all the problems this lack of a conclusion brings. Like an engine, this driving force is shown to lie within painting itself as a practice predicated on probing internal relationships, such as how vision works or how space is constructed. Within these perceptual riddles lurk the thornier matters that art history has, since at least the 1970s, sought to uncover in response to the changing tides of artistic practice. The ambiguity of Caulfield’s work in light of this shift may be seen as reason enough for its dismissal. To buy into this, however, would be to miss its nuance. For the clashing images of the artist outlined above, of Caulfield the formalist historian and Caulfield the cultural cynic, should alert us to the fact that something quite complicated is happening beneath the expressionless gloss of his painted surfaces. Something that makes Caulfield’s practice very much of its own time and place, but which also aggravates the inner temporality and locality of painting as a world in itself. Fig. 5 View largeDownload slide Patrick Caulfield, Still Life with Necklace, 1964, oil on board, 91.4 x 213.4 cm. Private collection. © The Estate of Patrick Caulfield. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019. (Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates) Fig. 5 View largeDownload slide Patrick Caulfield, Still Life with Necklace, 1964, oil on board, 91.4 x 213.4 cm. Private collection. © The Estate of Patrick Caulfield. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019. (Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates) Painting’s Interiority Complex Caulfield took up painting at a moment in which its hermeticism, as espoused by the medium-specific, highly self-referential rhetoric of modernist criticism, came under intense fire. Rather than reinstate any confidence in this school of thought, his paintings explore the implications of a hermeticism that has somehow crossed a threshold, carrying within it the dynamics historically undergirding painting but no longer operating in terms of abstraction as it had been conceived of in painting. Instead, Caulfield employed one of painting’s bad objects, the ‘decorative’, by which to explore this change in state.9 Rather than fight painting’s demise into interior decoration, or what Bryan Robertson memorably called ‘Art Deco’, by 1970 Caulfield had become, to all intents and purposes, a painter of interior spaces.10 Painted on an almost life-size scale, his interiors appear to have internalised painting’s own increasing inconsequentiality to the point of overcompensation. Monochrome chalets, empty bars, and nocturnal dining rooms assembled in black outlines diagram spaces which, as one early commentator observed, ‘one could, yet one could not walk into’.11 In front of a Caulfield interior we appear to be facing a modulated sensorium in which everything is at once enticing and off-putting, hyper-realistic and obviously fake – not unlike the printed world of the lifestyle journal in which all sense of hierarchy and the separation of public and private life that defined modernity is levelled in the name of good taste. Never quite free from its historical purchase as a prime avatar of bourgeois or ‘vulgar’ values,12 Caulfield’s paintings, with their impossible perfection, seem to make visible painting’s own inner conflict over this new reality. Take, for example, In My Room (1974, Fig. 6). Here a quintessentially modernist space, replete with Eames lounge chairs, shag rug, and a suspended stove of the kind made popular during the 1950s by companies such as Malm and Preway (and manufactured well into the 1970s), is saturated by a sugary pink. Seeming to elide the distinction between art as a leisurely pursuit and its critical aspirations for cultural status, In My Room evokes both the interior paintings of Henri Matisse and the lustrous colour illustrations filling the spreads of interior design manuals, such as those contemporaneously published by David Hicks.13 Both deal in the construction of hyper-masculine spaces, the kind of modern enclaves described by Margaret A. Morgan as scenes of ‘manly interiority’ signalling a refined brand of avant-garde superiority.14 Yet, in the Caulfield, colour serves to undermine rather than heighten that controlled, lofty view. As David Batchelor has shown, within the highly gendered language of modernism, colour has long functioned as the ‘feminine’ outsider to the sealed-off world of the ‘masculine’ interior, which surfaces as a ‘permanent internal threat, an ever-present inner other which, if unleashed, would be the ruin of everything, the fall of culture’, and therefore requires containment.15 Whereas both Matisse and Hicks would be known as masters of colour in their respective fields of painting and interior design, in Caulfield’s hands neither the interior space nor its colouring seem to carry any formal or metaphorical weight. The objects in the room have no intrinsic properties, but instead are outlines waiting to be filled in or coloured over with a change of the light. It is as if, having become ‘arbitrary’, colour is let loose and left to its own, counterintuitive devices.16 Fig. 6 View largeDownload slide Patrick Caulfield, In My Room, 1974, acrylic on canvas, 274.3 x 274.3 cm. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond (Gift of the Sydney and Frances Lewis Collection). © The Estate of Patrick Caulfield. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019. (Photo: Katherine Wetzel © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts) Fig. 6 View largeDownload slide Patrick Caulfield, In My Room, 1974, acrylic on canvas, 274.3 x 274.3 cm. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond (Gift of the Sydney and Frances Lewis Collection). © The Estate of Patrick Caulfield. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019. (Photo: Katherine Wetzel © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts) This is as much an effect of the painting’s facture as its content. Unlike the procedural technique of the ‘handmade readymade’ employed by Roy Lichtenstein,17 who appears throughout the literature on Caulfield as though his American counterpart, Caulfield’s process was a more protracted and contingent affair carried out through the traditional perspectival grid (as seen in the study for In My Room, Fig. 7). After scaling up his drawing and transferring it with a felt-tip pen to a gridded sheet of transparent polythene that lay over a pre-coloured ground, Caulfield applied white chalk or felt-tip to the opposite side of the clear plastic stencil, and went over the guiding lines with a pencil for a final time so that the chalk or ink left a trace of the overall composition on the canvas. On occasion, the coloured ground would be painted in after an initial area had been applied in this way – particularly if additional coloured areas were required, as in the tinted light sources (the light blue fire, yellow lamplight, chartreuse sky through the window, and illuminated orange window of a far-off building) and the purple recess of In My Room – on top of which the artist would transfer the rest of the drawing section by section, rather than layer by layer, adding his characteristic black outlines as the painting progressed.18 Moving along the canvas in this modular way, the old dichotomy between disegno and colore, or drawing and colour, in which the latter appears as an amorphous addendum to the structural base of the former, seems to lose its legs. In its place emerges an examination of the empty vestiges left behind by interior painting’s past, mining both the colourful, patterned salons of Pierre Bonnard and the near-monochrome quietude of Vilhelm Hammershøi’s living rooms, by way of an already antiquated idea of modernism. Taking its title from a Beach Boys song released in 1963,19In My Room is shot through with an artificiality that suggests something both pompous and naïve. It presents cultural slumming as a form of historical enquiry as a perversion of painting. There is a Russian doll effect to these interiors that makes them at once disturbing and familiar, their surfaces simultaneously superficial and exhaustive. Fig. 7 View largeDownload slide Patrick Caulfield, Study for ‘In My Room’, c.1974, pencil and pen on board, 54.6 x 80 cm. Waddington Custot, London. © The Estate of Patrick Caulfield. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019. (Photo: Waddington Custot) Fig. 7 View largeDownload slide Patrick Caulfield, Study for ‘In My Room’, c.1974, pencil and pen on board, 54.6 x 80 cm. Waddington Custot, London. © The Estate of Patrick Caulfield. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019. (Photo: Waddington Custot) Accounting somewhat for the oddness of Caulfield’s work, as well as for its banality, is the way it suggests painting as a contradiction in terms, as both an irredeemably self-reflexive practice and as a thing constantly subject to its outward perception at any given moment, not only in relation to itself but also as a part of a larger history. This dilemma could be thought of in terms of painting’s interiority complex – not unlike an inferiority complex, but a condition specific to painting rather than people – a recognition of its own increasing insignificance so acute that the result is a stubborn reassertion of an autonomy that can only come up short.20 And it is this complex, truncated in the shallow space of his interiors, that emerges as the driving force behind Caulfield’s lifelong commitment to painting despite (or, indeed, precisely because of) its standing as an accumulated hodgepodge of monolithic conventions, an embodiment of the ‘nightmare’ of art history, to echo the sentiments of Robert Smithson.21 Caulfield was acutely aware of the ongoing and worsening adversity facing painters since the mid-1960s, and uncommonly unequivocal about how to confront it, as made clear in a short response to ‘Painting Today: A Questionnaire’ published in 1979. Speaking in the third person throughout, Caulfield narrates the dilemma of the painter caught up in doubt over his chosen mode. Avoiding pathos with a straight-talking tone, the painter-turned-narrator mulls over the alternatives available to him, from sculpture to new media to performance art, as if considering them seriously. All the while, however, the sense of redundancy of such a pursuit steadily increases before the inevitable conclusion is reached: ‘the only way to solve a “crisis in painting”, if one exists, is by using the language of paint’.22 Routine, non-heroic, and rooted in pragmatism, Caulfield’s words here belie the self-consciousness inherent to such a stance, insisting that he paints because others, namely critics, rely on his practice in order to suggest the possibility of said ‘crisis’. The farcical edge of this observation is doubly pointed given the critical reception of painting on both sides of the Atlantic at the time of its writing. That same spring, Douglas Crimp published his ‘Pictures’ essay, precipitating an onslaught of debate over the perceived debasement and obsolescence of painting as an engaging mode of artistic production seemingly announced by imaging practices in other media, such as photography and video installation, which perpetually delayed the immediacy of experience hitherto offered by ‘modernist abstract’ art.23 While the critical impetus animating such claims for the death of painting has since been seen as indistinguishable from those for its ‘rediscovery and celebration in other forms’,24 Caulfield’s position situates it as a hackneyed but nevertheless productive predicament. Bad-Mannered Mannerism A year before Caulfield’s solo debut at a commercial gallery, several of his paintings were included in the first instalment of The New Generation, a series of annual exhibitions devised by Bryan Robertson and organised under his direction at the Whitechapel Gallery between 1964 and 1966.25 In his introduction to the catalogue, David Thompson hailed this inaugural display, dedicated exclusively to painting, as indicative of British art’s entrance onto an international stage after ‘a long provincial doze’.26 Careful to point out that ‘the advent of a “new figuration” … the much-publicised, ill-named “Pop Art”’, was a homegrown development coming out of the RCA during the previous decade, Thompson also cited the Situation exhibition of 1960, which featured work by twenty British painters of a self-professed American ‘influence’, as dual catalysts for this tidal change.27 Both tendencies would be united in Caulfield’s Landscape with Birds (Fig. 8), one of the four canvases being showcased by the then largely ‘untried’, twenty-eight-year-old graduate. Fig. 8 View largeDownload slide Patrick Caulfield, Landscape with Birds, 1963, gloss paint on hardboard, 122 x 122 cm, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (Wilson Gift through The Art Fund, 2006). © The Estate of Patrick Caulfield. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019. (Photo: Pallant House Gallery, Chichester) Fig. 8 View largeDownload slide Patrick Caulfield, Landscape with Birds, 1963, gloss paint on hardboard, 122 x 122 cm, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (Wilson Gift through The Art Fund, 2006). © The Estate of Patrick Caulfield. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019. (Photo: Pallant House Gallery, Chichester) In this painting, made with gloss paint on board, a simple geometric intersection of coloured blocks outlined in black serves as a ground for the kitschy motif of a set of four birds in flight. This half-nod to a typically English domestic trope, commonly seen in the form of several moulded ducks flying in a line up or down living room and kitchen walls in suburban homes both before and after the Second World War, is embedded in this abstract form as though an inner foil. Reducing the exalted horizon of landscape painting to a decorative adjunct, the blue and yellow L-shapes which turn green at the corners where they intersect also approximate the viewfinder (made by placing the extended thumb and forefinger of one hand to those of the other to form a rectangular window) that art professionals, critics, and amateurs alike use to frame scenes, as well as to pick out details within an artwork under scrutiny. Surrounded by a further framing device and submerged in an outer square of monochrome grey, Landscape with Birds suggests that, already by 1963, Caulfield had realised the salient value of bridging the rift between ‘serious’ painting and superfluous ‘decoration’ that would reach a head by the end of the decade. This synthesis would not be lost on one reviewer, who dubbed such work the output of ‘a Twentyish mannerist’.28 This was a choice phrase, referring less, presumably, to Caulfield’s age than the ‘period evocation’ detected in his paintings by Thompson, namely that of the ‘Odeon-style interior decoration’ of the late 1920s and early 1930s, as well as the ‘Betjemanesque nostalgia for Victoriana’ also permeating the work of contemporaries such as Peter Blake.29 It is difficult to tell how Caulfield’s work would partake in this latter tendency, besides featuring several highly ornamented objects copied from exhibits found in the Victoria and Albert Museum, as seen in Still Life with Necklace (Fig. 5). Although perhaps evocative of Eduardo Paolozzi’s Bunk series and later patterned prints, Caulfield’s work is also quite distinct to the collaging practices of the Independent Group, then still a prominent precedent for his generation. One hesitates to call a work such as Leaving Arabia (Fig. 9), for instance, a collage in comparison. Découpage seems a more appropriate term. Seemingly a nod to Britain’s recent troubles in the Middle East following the Suez Canal crisis, Leaving Arabia absurdly folds this reference into the realm of the ‘decorative’ where everything becomes a ‘device’ for solving compositional problems, as Amy Goldin would suggest of Matisse, rather than (although potentially by way of) a codified set of ‘motifs’ cobbled from popular sources of graphic design, described by Thomas Crow as characteristic of early British Pop.30 Fig. 9 View largeDownload slide Patrick Caulfield, Leaving Arabia, 1961, oil and collage on board, 121.9 x 121.9 cm. Private collection, Switzerland. © The Estate of Patrick Caulfield. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019. (Photo: Susannah Pollen Ltd/Bridgeman Images) Fig. 9 View largeDownload slide Patrick Caulfield, Leaving Arabia, 1961, oil and collage on board, 121.9 x 121.9 cm. Private collection, Switzerland. © The Estate of Patrick Caulfield. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019. (Photo: Susannah Pollen Ltd/Bridgeman Images) Made in reaction to what the artist called ‘academic work, the idea of English painting in muted tones where marks were never quite finished’,31 here a repeated mountain meets a decorative ground of Caulfield’s own invention rendered in what Marco Livingstone has described, in reference to another work of this time, Cornish Riviera, as ‘the typical colours of St Ives abstractions.’32 Yet it is also reminiscent of many posters issued by the Great Western Railway from the 1930s to the 1960s, advertising seaside resorts along the southern coast of England. The orientalising tendency of the decorative, as a peculiar feature of both Britain’s imperialist history and the history of painting, seems woven into the clashing grounds of tartan on which the ascending mountains (that seem to call to mind the snow-capped Atlas Mountain range in Northern Africa, as well as, perhaps, the coastal cliffs of Cornwall) hover, while the colourful, geometric pattern on the right-hand side of the work only seems to exacerbate the ridiculousness of this kind of formalist tourism – a tendency soon to be more fully thematised in Frank Stella’s Moroccans series of striped paintings. Although clearly a piece of juvenilia, Leaving Arabia suggests a process that would preoccupy Caulfield and shape his paintings for at least the remainder of the decade, a process by which the fragmented features of a national identity were being chipped off of the surface of aesthetic culture, their shards landing in painting like flies in ointment. As with many of his contemporaries, Caulfield cut his teeth at an advertising agency before going to art school, an experience he described as menial but a relief from his former job as a factory hand drilling holes into sheet metal. Having begun in the Commercial Art department at Chelsea School of Art and Design, funded by a local grant, Caulfield soon switched to the Fine Art course, where ‘all the action was’. While there, Caulfield was taught by Jack Smith, a painter who had received a large retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1959 featuring many, now somewhat obscure, ‘still lifes with a kind of effect of light crossing them’, as Caulfield later recalled, ‘a bit like lines across a television set, you know, but not as diagrammatic as that, much looser, and thick paint, but a feeling of solidity and light, usually in kind of browns and whites, very low key colour’. In contrast, Caulfield remembered his own paintings of the time as ‘very flat’ depictions of apartment blocks rendered in vibrant colours reminiscent of ‘the pink brick and green window frames … and the white concrete and grey concrete’ of the urban environment he had grown up in.33 Having also seen The New American Painting as Shown in Eight European Countries, 1958–1959 at the Tate Gallery that same year, Caulfield went on to make ‘some paintings of factories in north Acton [his home town], in a meticulous brick-by-brick way’ that approximated the ‘Social Realist’ work of a preceding generation rather than the ‘new American painting’, which did not relate to such ‘canons of traditional aesthetics’, as John Russell described it.34 Here already we see a disregard for current trends and a heightened attention to the outmoded that Thompson later implied as the root of Caulfield’s work. The following year, Caulfield was accepted onto the Fine Art Masters course at the Royal College of Art, which proved to be something of a shock after the ‘old-fashioned’ curriculum and informality of Chelsea. As others have shown, during Caulfield’s time as a graduate student between 1960 and 1963, the RCA was a hub of conflicting artistic outlooks, and ARK, the college magazine, offered a prime means of escape for many of its students from ‘the neo-romantic aesthetic that still dominated the institution’.35 Caulfield himself designed the cover for issue 37 of ARK (Fig. 10), published in 1965, once he had already graduated and following The New Generation show.36 Intriguingly credited as a ‘cover painting’,37 Caulfield’s design is unique in the magazine’s run for having no text whatsoever superimposed on it. Framed within a thin white border, the full-page colour image features a blue, grey, and yellow pattern behind two figures dressed in British military uniform, which doubles as a sky and landscape, suggesting a mountain range or islands spreading out along a coastline. Here again, the struggle between form and content dramatised in Caulfield’s paintings takes on a quaintly pastoral dimension, as though compressing a troubled and unresolved past into an embroidered insignia attached to the lapel of the present. Fig. 10 View largeDownload slide Patrick Caulfield, Cover design for ARK, no. 37, 1965, inkjet print, A1, Royal College of Art, London. © The Estate of Patrick Caulfield. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019. (Photo: Royal College of Art, London) Fig. 10 View largeDownload slide Patrick Caulfield, Cover design for ARK, no. 37, 1965, inkjet print, A1, Royal College of Art, London. © The Estate of Patrick Caulfield. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019. (Photo: Royal College of Art, London) As an image, Caulfield’s painting had seemingly little to do with the magazine’s contents. Yet, as a painting that doubled as a piece of graphic design, it served to tacitly figure the issue of translation as thematised in all the texts printed within. As stated in the editorial, this edition was dedicated to the idea of television as a medium, and as such contained both graphic work by other RCA alumni, such as Ken Sequin and Richard Smith, and written pieces by media professionals, playwrights, theatre producers, and journalists, including Henry Fairlie’s essay ‘The Idiot Box’, originally published in Encounter in 1962.38 Reflecting on the process by which a dramatic script is adapted by a producer for broadcasting, likened to the transformation of ‘a useful vase … into a china ornament – for the mantelpiece’, Fairlie ruminated on how television’s invisible audience inflected upon this process, a particularly apt topic given the imminent debate over theatricality (as the nemesis of painting) raging in American art journals.39 In a tangential vein, ‘The Hidden Hand’ by Christopher Finch, an art critic who would write a short monograph on Caulfield in 1971, explored the old idea of the artist as an ‘agent’ or ‘medium’, ‘through which some external, powerful and significant force operates’. Touching upon Schopenhauer’s ‘philosophical stereotype of the disembodied muse’ in his concept of ‘the Will’ that drives all human actions, Finch delineated the ‘Cartesian dichotomy’ that appeared during the twentieth century which offered artists ‘two basic patterns’ by which to find such a muse: ‘the physical and the mental’, represented respectively in the ‘shifting colourless, heraclitan universe’ of reality imagined by the science of Albert Einstein, and in Sigmund Freud’s ‘entire rag-bag of human aspiration’ known as ‘the collective unconscious’.40 In conforming to neither pattern, Caulfield’s cover seemed to offer a vivid case for the superfluity of this ‘mediumistic’ notion of the artist by imagining the militancy of the ‘avant-garde’ as a set of toy soldiers whose decorous dress alludes to the increasingly decorative status of their rank, which had become wholly apparent by 1965. The use of the term ‘Mannerism’ in relation to Caulfield’s work seems even more significant, and ironic, given both its widespread use in American art criticism by this time and the claim that the paintings showcased in The New Generation could compete with this formidable transatlantic rival. Both Robert Smithson and Peter Hutchinson offered related but conflicting diagnoses of this phenomenon as it was emerging on both sides of the United States at mid-decade, particularly in the paintings of Frank Stella. Whereas Smithson saw a regressive ‘nostalgia’ for ‘the good old 50s when art came from the “unconscious”’ in the bleeds of paint running off the edges of Stella’s metallic stripes, a hallmark of what he called ‘Abstract Mannerism’;41 for Hutchinson, Stella’s use of the ‘framing edge’ outdid the ‘denial of content’ staged in the paintings of Ad Reinhardt (themselves rebuttals to Piet Mondrian’s seemingly ‘unanswerable art’) which made the latter ‘seem full of detail’ in comparison, thus suggesting this kind of ‘Mannerism in the Abstract’ as a potentially endless ‘reversal of values’, creating a microcosmic version of art history that resided in geometric abstract painting alone.42 Obviously it is important not to read Caulfield’s paintings too closely in terms of these arguments, which they predate. In bringing up these examples, however, I mean to historicise what it meant for Caulfield to be called a Mannerist at this time, a term that would take on both a derogatory and a recuperative tenor. When, in 1968, Stella showed his latest series of Protractor paintings, such as Harran II (Fig. 11), at the Kasmin Gallery off London’s Bond Street, Robertson, then still director of the Whitechapel, waded into the conversation by reasserting a national divide of sorts that emphasised how American this tendency was. Although not citing the term ‘Mannerism’ directly, in his review of the show Robertson identified Stella’s new work as exhibiting many of the features associated with it by both Smithson and Hutchinson: ‘unswerving giantism, insistent attachment to an impersonal, tidily applied staining of surfaces, water-based acrylic pigments, and clear colour, untroubled by tonal modification’. Robertson contrasted Stella’s ‘radiant, cheerful, calmly unfussed’ paintings, redolent of luxury commodities and chichi décor, with the comparative ‘dourness’ of the work of Keith Vaughan (see, for example, Fig. 12), a stalwart British artist in his fifties, which was being shown across the road. In attempting to go beyond ‘the old, tired opposition of figurative painting to abstract art,’ Robertson presented this stand-off as a battle of manners, which is to say, of the perceived airs and behaviours of two very different types of painting: where the Stellas ‘[gave] out a heavy perfume of luxury, like Tiffany lamps or twelve yards of golden Thai silk shot with pink and orange’, the Vaughans offered an ‘atmospheric equivalent of naked isolation in the pouring rain and an east wind’.43 Here painting becomes infused by the English preoccupation with class, albeit in the binary sense of corrupt wealth contrasted with heroic poverty, which Robertson compounded by aligning Stella’s paintings with the bourgeois ‘spectacle’ of neon lights and stage curtains. Prefiguring, somewhat, Peter Halley’s later reading of Stella’s work as a ‘postmodernist’ gesture,44 Robertson’s critique served to uphold the tenacious charge against geometric painting as a particularly insidious kind of ornamentation being imported from elsewhere – bringing to mind one critic’s disparaging review of Mondrian’s debut 1937 exhibition, upon his arrival in the United States, as a display that offered ‘so many simple commonplace patterns for bathroom tiles’.45 Fig. 11 View largeDownload slide Frank Stella, Harran II, 1967, polymer and fluorescent polymer paint on canvas, 304.8 x 609.6 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Gift, Mr Irving Blum, 1982. © Frank Stella. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019. (Photo: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) Fig. 11 View largeDownload slide Frank Stella, Harran II, 1967, polymer and fluorescent polymer paint on canvas, 304.8 x 609.6 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Gift, Mr Irving Blum, 1982. © Frank Stella. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019. (Photo: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) Fig. 12 View largeDownload slide Keith Vaughan, Small Assembly of Figures, 1951/53, oil on canvas, 55.9 x 61 cm. Tate, London. © The Estate of Keith Vaughan. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019. (Photo: Tate, London) Fig. 12 View largeDownload slide Keith Vaughan, Small Assembly of Figures, 1951/53, oil on canvas, 55.9 x 61 cm. Tate, London. © The Estate of Keith Vaughan. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019. (Photo: Tate, London) Perhaps the pitfalls of commercial success had rocked Robertson’s earlier confidence in the ‘toughness’ and ‘ambiguity’ of the homegrown work promoted by The New Generation, much of which – such as Bridget Riley’s black and white paintings – had reinvigorated debates over precisely the same problematic tendency towards spectacle for which Robertson later chastised Stella.46 Nevertheless, his assertion that Stella’s ‘huge banded circles swinging outward and thrusting in again like the motifs in Islamic art would also make very agreeable drop curtains for a ballet’ bespeaks a palpable anxiety over the evolving, and difficult to locate, relationship between painting and decoration appearing on all sides.47 Bordering on an unexpected conservatism, Robertson’s words make vivid the underlying uneasiness that came to constitute a working premise for Caulfield even before it was pronounced by such prominent voices.48 That being said, it is important to resist oversimplifying Caulfield’s early work as a straightforward example of what Robertson had already diagnosed in 1964 as the malaise of ‘inheritance’ afflicting young British artists at the time faced with ‘a ready-made vocabulary of abstract form which older generations had to discover slowly and painfully’.49 Not least because of the artist’s apparent awareness that, as Smithson put it in 1973, ‘representations of “stripes” become the logical outcome’ of the ‘formalist’ move back into the studio,50 a move inaugurated by Cubism – one of the primary reference points also repeatedly identified in Caulfield’s work, despite the artist’s own assertion that its use had little to do with citation or emulation. As such, let us consider Caulfield’s Portrait of Juan Gris (Fig. 13) as something other than an ‘homage’.51 Caulfield himself would later explain the work as simply ‘an excuse to use the figure’, presumably at a time when, as a student at both Chelsea and the RCA, he had been discouraged from doing so by teachers and peers still under the spell of gestural abstraction. In light of this, it becomes difficult to disregard the artist’s claim that his choice of Juan Gris was not an expression of his ‘admiration’ for the artist and his work, ‘or even to do with Cubism’ at all.52 As Marco Livingstone has pointed out, Caulfield originally intended Cézanne to be the subject of his portrait, not Gris. Livingstone, by far the most prominent authority on Caulfield’s work to date, identifies this ‘substitution’ of forebears as ‘indicative of the ambivalent emotions embedded within Caulfield’s practice as early as his student days’, during which time ‘he had to find a way of alluding to [earlier French, as opposed to, but maybe as well as, recent American, painting] while creating a distinctly contemporary identity for himself’.53 Yet, such an act of artistic ‘self-creation’ through painting would also involve an undermining of the very tenets of identity formation historically embedded in it as a ‘purely’ visual medium. Just look at the way Caulfield treats Cézanne in a set of small studies for the portrait (Fig. 14), putting him in a three-quarter profile, in front of a grid morphing into a tree, or else with his face covered by a blue square. Rather than imitate his style, as in Vaughan’s clearly derivative compositions, Caulfield positions Cézanne as though trapped in a space devoid of empiricism – a topsy-turvy world in which nature, previously reduced to a set of cones, spheres, and cylinders, finally has its revenge. Similarly, Gris appears suspended in a pastiche of his own pictorial devices, albeit a pastiche in the loosest sense of the term: the chevron-like shapes that surround the figure, although approximating the intersecting planes structuring his own compositions, are clearly of Caulfield’s devising (which also appear in one of his sketches of Cézanne). Fig. 13 View largeDownload slide Patrick Caulfield, Portrait of Juan Gris, 1963, alkyd housepaint on hardboard, 111.7 x 119.0 cm. Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (Wilson Gift through The Art Fund, 2006). © The Estate of Patrick Caulfield. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2018. (Photo: Pallant House Gallery, Chichester) Fig. 13 View largeDownload slide Patrick Caulfield, Portrait of Juan Gris, 1963, alkyd housepaint on hardboard, 111.7 x 119.0 cm. Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (Wilson Gift through The Art Fund, 2006). © The Estate of Patrick Caulfield. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2018. (Photo: Pallant House Gallery, Chichester) Fig. 14 View largeDownload slide Patrick Caulfield, Portrait of Juan Gris (studies), 1963, pencil and crayon on paper, 21.4 x 13 cm (all sheet). Pallant House Gallery, Chichester. © The Estate of Patrick Caulfield. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019. (Photo: Pallant House Gallery, Chichester) Fig. 14 View largeDownload slide Patrick Caulfield, Portrait of Juan Gris (studies), 1963, pencil and crayon on paper, 21.4 x 13 cm (all sheet). Pallant House Gallery, Chichester. © The Estate of Patrick Caulfield. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019. (Photo: Pallant House Gallery, Chichester) This way of citing through sabotage, as it were, might be made sense of if we consider the statement Caulfield offered for The New Generation catalogue, in which Portrait of Juan Gris was reproduced in full colour. Caulfield would be the only exhibitor to offer a quote, in place of his own words, that served to propound the conceptual stakes of his work: But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music, and design in painting, so design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of calling ‘inscape’ is what I above all aim at in poetry. Now it is the virtue of design, pattern, or inscape, to be distinctive, and it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice I cannot have escaped.54 Taken from a letter sent by the theologian and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins to his friend Robert Bridges in the 1880s, this reference to Hopkins’s term for the ‘design or pattern which is the perceptible sign of the unique individuality of a thing’, as literary critic J. Hillis Miller surmised, is both suggestive and cryptic. Couched in an embodied take on the Cartesian cogito, paraphrased by Miller as ‘I taste therefore I am’, the ‘inscape’ appears as a kind of ‘meeting place’ where the ‘extreme tension between inner energy and the restraining outward form’ of an object finds a metaphysical locus in the perceiver.55 One is reminded here of Bridget Riley’s reference, via Beckett and Proust, to the inner ‘text’ which the artist ‘translates’ into visible form, involving a process of symbiosis between two entities – namely, painter and painting – which results in a third, the sensation felt by a viewer.56 Intriguingly, Riley’s own statement for The New Generation would seem to boil this process down to its simplest terms: ‘1 + 1 equals one’.57 In marked contrast to this abstraction, however, Caulfield’s work recalls the analogous and poetic idea of the ‘inscape’ as a locus of contact between the self and the other, as proposed by Jacques Derrida apropos Miller, only to rescind it.58 Hopkins’s ‘inscape’, a word invented to describe the spiritual revelation of our own being as perceived in the patterns of nature, a creative theory not unlike Cézanne’s ‘intuitive science’ as theorised by Maurice Merleau-Ponty,59 stood for Derrida as an opening through which one is offered the chance to ‘taste’ another, and a site where the ‘I’ takes on a multitude of forms.60 While Derrida’s theory evocatively imagines a form of inhabitation that shatters the boundaries between inner and outer states, between a being’s inside and its outside, it ultimately jars with the bad-mannered Mannerism of an artist such as Caulfield. For, immodest in their modesty, Caulfield’s subsequent interiors refuse to give up on the destabilising capacity of painting, or, more appropriately, on painting as a form capable of undoing the certainty of a fixed ‘I’, as much as that of a disembodied and transcendental ‘eye’, while also showing up the limits of this endeavour. All this is to say that in them, rather than maintaining its manners, we see painting come face to face with its own ‘vulgar’ condition as decoration, as interior design without interiority. Rooms Without Views? The absence of interiority inherent to Caulfield’s work has serious implications when thought about in terms of the interior as a loaded historical trope. How is one to look at paintings such as Tandoori Restaurant (1974, Fig. 15) or Dining/Kitchen/Living (1980, Fig. 16), for instance, without worrying over the kinds of spaces these might be and the classed, gendered, and racial dynamics they might hold? The roll-call of avant-garde, male painters mentioned above – Duchamp, Magritte, Matisse, Bonnard, Hammershøi, Cézanne, Gris – seems enough to indicate that a particular kind of subjectivity is being worked out through them, one that would effectively legitimise the kind of mocking, masculine, white, upper-class cultural superiority signalled in Melville's early review. Then again, as a commercially trained artist from a working-class background, it seems odd to condemn Caulfield’s early paintings based on picture postcards of the French Riviera, brought back from a college trip funded by a state scholarship, as contemptibly ironic send-ups rather than aspirational images writ large and gone awry. Fig. 15 View largeDownload slide Patrick Caulfield, Tandoori Restaurant, 1971, acrylic on canvas, 274 x 152.5 cm. Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Wolverhampton. © The Estate of Patrick Caulfield. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019. (Photo courtesy of Wolverhampton Arts and Culture) Fig. 15 View largeDownload slide Patrick Caulfield, Tandoori Restaurant, 1971, acrylic on canvas, 274 x 152.5 cm. Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Wolverhampton. © The Estate of Patrick Caulfield. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019. (Photo courtesy of Wolverhampton Arts and Culture) Fig. 16 View largeDownload slide Patrick Caulfield, Dining/Kitchen/Living, 1980, acrylic on canvas, 179.1 x 179.1 cm. Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Arts, Japan. © The Estate of Patrick Caulfield. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019. (Photo: Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Arts, Japan/DACS) Fig. 16 View largeDownload slide Patrick Caulfield, Dining/Kitchen/Living, 1980, acrylic on canvas, 179.1 x 179.1 cm. Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Arts, Japan. © The Estate of Patrick Caulfield. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019. (Photo: Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Arts, Japan/DACS) Before we brand Caulfield as a lost cause, recall the fact that painting has always thrived on the impossibility of penetrating the surface of the things it draws attention to. By saying that Caulfield’s interiors appear to be without interiority by design is not to say that they hold no capacity for it. Rather, by being paintings of other images – whether of magazine photographs, postcards, objects on display in museums, or a combination of these – they show up the glossing over of such details by the dispassionate settings in which the finessing of perception occurs and is registered as a feature of (‘tasteful’) individualism. An image of the distinctive décor of an Indian restaurant in 1970s London carries a host of associations, from the immigrant experience and the social tensions endemic to it, to the mechanics of cultural exchange and free enterprise, but only as projections on a generic display. It is as if, like stage sets, the spaces in Caulfield’s paintings allow such imagined dramas to gather without pretending to fix them into a resolved scene. Thinking back to the ‘Kitchen Sink’ realism of Jack Smith,61 the belief that painting could somehow convey an underrepresented worldview in material terms, let alone raise consciousness over it, had turned to scepticism by the end of 1950s. Theatre and television superseded its claim in this regard and artists such as Smith moved towards increasingly abstract forms and concepts, finally taking leave of the figurative altogether. At the same time, the end of postwar rationing and the influx of cultural capital from the west created new spaces that housed the social dynamics bred by this shifting situation. The kitchen sink no longer seemed to be the locus of contemporary life as it was experienced on a daily basis, instead giving way to the public house, the cinema vestibule, and the shiny icons of adverts, from which many artists cobbled together a visual vocabulary adequate to this new domesticity, as exemplified in John McHale, John Voelcker, and Richard Hamilton’s Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? of 1956.62 It is to this other world that Caulfield’s interiors belong. In Foyer (1973, Fig. 17), for example, we see an askance view of an empty space waiting to be filled with, or recently emptied of, human presence. Despite the public nature of some of these spaces, the kind of anticipation intrinsic to Caulfield’s paintings is wholly domestic. This is what is so troubling about their seeming perfection, which appears to allow no room for the messiness of life or the bodily effort of laborious activities such as housework. Instead, they seem to be suspended in that in-between moment after the work is done, the food prepared, the house clean, and before the cycle of destruction and repair begins again. Their temporality is that of an inertia analogous to death. In other words, their time is that of the still life. Around the mid-1970s, cracks began to appear across the seamless surfaces of Caulfield’s interiors in the form of highly rendered objects, such as the casserole dish, steak, and dip seen in the foreground of Dining/Kitchen/Living. Virtuosic, but also tacky and inane, they are not fetishistic objects but details that serve a consumptive purpose. It is as if we are being served up the artist’s efforts at photo-realistic illusionism (a mode gaining speed in painting by this time) while being shown the meagreness of his ingredients. Amid the highly ornate décor of a suburban home, the miniature still life embedded within the painting functions in the ‘performative’ mode, to borrow Norman Bryson’s term, staging ‘a radical decentering that demolishes the idea of a world convergent on the person as universal centre’.63 Yet this is a decentring that ultimately fails, for, unlike the seventeenth-century paintings that inform Bryson’s thesis of rhyparos, or the painting of detritus, these replicas come not from ancient universal needs codified in a few perennial forms (wineglass, plate, candle, etc.) that stand outside the context of the scene, but from the commercial elaboration of those forms into image-commodities.64 The metaphysical role of the still life as a leveller is kept in check, framed as a painterly conceit, as in Interior with a Picture (Fig. 18), by which the still life (here based on an illustrated copy of a seventeenth-century painting by Gotthardt de Wedig) is reverted back into a sign of personal property. Fig. 17 View largeDownload slide Foyer, 1973, acrylic on canvas, 213.4 x 213.4 cm. Private collection. © The Estate of Patrick Caulfield. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019. (Photo: DACS) Fig. 17 View largeDownload slide Foyer, 1973, acrylic on canvas, 213.4 x 213.4 cm. Private collection. © The Estate of Patrick Caulfield. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019. (Photo: DACS) Fig. 18 View largeDownload slide Patrick Caulfield, Interior with a Picture, 1985–86, acrylic on canvas, 205.8 x 244.2 cm. Tate, London. © The Estate of Patrick Caulfield. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019. (Photo: Tate, London) Fig. 18 View largeDownload slide Patrick Caulfield, Interior with a Picture, 1985–86, acrylic on canvas, 205.8 x 244.2 cm. Tate, London. © The Estate of Patrick Caulfield. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019. (Photo: Tate, London) The interior, as a space of routine, reverie, and reification, seems to address itself specifically to such a duplicitous pun. It lingers in the idiosyncratic dimensions of Tu m’, a painting commissioned to hang in the apartment of Katherine S. Dreier, Duchamp’s American patron. The ruin of painting and the domestic space in which it occurs here become one. There is another sense of anticipation at work too, one that is ambiguously gendered. Jane Blocker has identified the ‘feminisation of waiting’ as a feature of the melancholia surrounding the discourse on the death of painting, and the working through of this narrative as an anxious need to keep this ‘feminine’ force at bay.65 Yet here it seems welcomed, encouraged, even exploited, in a similar way to how colour is used in Caulfield’s work as a disruption of the homogenous fixity of painting’s own imagined teleology. Offering a readymade arena in which this drama vividly plays itself out, the interior doubles as a space in which painting’s conclusion becomes protracted to the point of impossibility – a place where painting’s interiority complex is externalised, thematised, and aggravated, time and again. As much as this may work to reinforce the parameters of a dated and contemptibly exclusive cliché, it also enacts its undoing by the very same means. Withholding the subject in order to hold on to the object of painting becomes a death knell worth striking, if only to feel its unsettling reverberations for a few lingering moments. Footnotes 1 As discussed by David Joselit in ‘Painting Beside Itself’, October, vol. 130, Fall 2009, p. 125. This article came out of my PhD thesis, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, in which I traced a rather different line through painting's troubled past, via Caulfield and others, to that explored here. I thank Jo Applin for supporting me down this alternative path and Briony Fer for encouraging my initial desire to pursue it. Thanks also to James Boaden and Brandon Taylor for their helpful feedback. It would be remiss of me not to acknowledge my gratitude to the research community at UCL, and to those who offered comments following two papers I gave on some of this material in 2017, in particular Margaret Iversen, Maria Loh, Mignon Nixon, and Tamara Trodd. I dedicate what follows, in loving memory, to Charles Kay and his amazingly abstract, capacious, and fascinating mind. 2 David Joselit, ‘Reassembling Painting’, in Achim Hochdörfer, David Joselit, and Manuela Ammer (eds), Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age (Munich, London, and New York: Delmonico/Prestel, 2015), p. 170. 3 As Hubert Damisch has shown, this is a narrative stretching back to Pliny. Damisch, ‘The Inventor of Painting’ (2001), trans. Kent Minturn and Eric Trudel, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 33, no. 3, October 2010, p. 301. 4 These descriptions appear in Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America’, October, vol. 3, Spring 1977, p. 70; Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp's Passage from Painting to the Readymade, Dana Polan (trans.) (Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 132; Briony Fer, ‘Eva Hesse and Color’, October, vol. 119, Winter 2007, p. 29; and Joselit, ‘Reassembling Painting’, p. 171, respectively. 5 I am thinking here of Clement Greenberg’s dismissal of Duchamp as an ‘avant-gardist’ in opposition to the ‘avant-garde’ proper, a canon sketched out by the critic solely in terms of painting. See Greenberg, ‘Counter-Avant-Garde’, Art International, vol. 15, May 1971, pp. 16–19. As many have noted, this line would be taken up most fervently by Michael Fried. ‘The case against Duchamp’ as made by formalist critics would be thoroughly spelt out by Harold Rosenberg, partly in response it seems to Greenberg, in the following terms: ‘To a “vanguard” that restricts itself to a form of painting and is content to accept the existing cultural situation, Duchamp’s denial of values based on the characteristics of any particular genre (color, to name one) is an important affirmation that a vanguard must deal with basic cultural forces; for example, the replacement of the craftsman by the machine.’ Rosenberg, ‘Duchamp: Public and Private’ (1971), reprinted in Art on the Edge: Creators and Situations (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 20. 6 John Russell, ‘London’, ARTnews, vol. 61, no. 1, March 1965, p. 25. 7 This painting was included in La Salon de La Jeune Peinture at the Paris Biennale in 1965. In his somewhat biased review of the Biennale, Norbert Lynton asserted that in comparison to the French offering, the British section ‘shine[d] out like a jewel’. (Lynton was himself on the selecting committee.) Norbert Lynton, ‘Paris Biennale’, Guardian, 7 October 1965, u.p. One French reviewer, however, similarly commented that ‘Mais ce Britanniques, nous les avons déjà vus à la dernière Biennale de Paris. Il y a chez eux, comme chez l’Argentin Maccio, un dynamisme et un sens décoratif qui ne rend que plus pénible l’insignifiance de leurs imitateurs français.’ George Boudaille, ‘La Jeunes Peinture’, Les Lettres Françiases, 28 January 1965, p. 13. According to John Ashbery too, in another review of the same show, it was English Pop, rather than that hailing from New York or Paris, that showed ‘what has happened to painting’ since Abstract Expressionism. ‘Especially elegant’, Ashbery noted, ‘are two works by Patrick Caulfield: a pony with hard outlines like an illustration in a primer [Pony, 1964], and a sophisticated take-off on Delacroix’s “Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi”’. John Ashbery, ‘Paris Accent on Pop – Little Snap or Crackle’, New York Tribune, 19 January 1965, u.p. See Press Cuttings, La Salon de la Jeune Peinture Exhibition, Paris, 1965, TGA 9712/2/253-254, Tate Archive, London. 8 Robert Melville, ‘The New Generation’, Architectural Review, vol. 135, no. 808, June 1964, p. 448. 9 For more on the pejorative role of the ‘decorative’ in modernist criticism, particularly that of Clement Greenberg, see Elissa Auther, ‘The Decorative, Abstraction, and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft in the Art Criticism of Clement Greenberg’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 27, no. 3, January 2004, pp. 339–64. 10 Bryan Robertson, ‘Art and Art Deco’, The Spectator, 20 December 1968, p. 22. 11 Anne Seymour makes this statement specifically in reference to Caulfield’s Alleyway (1968), but here it serves a general point that could be said of all of Caulfield’s paintings. Seymour, ‘Patrick Caulfield’, in Marks on a Canvas (Dortmund: Museum an Ostwall, 1969), p. 23. 12 See T. J. Clark, ‘In Defense of Abstract Expressionism’, October, vol. 69, Summer 1994, pp. 22–48. 13 See, for example, David Hicks, David Hicks on Decoration (London: Frewin, 1966). 14 Margaret A. Morgan, ‘A Box, A Pipe, and a Piece of Plumbing’, in Naomi Sawelson-Gorse (ed.), Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity (Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press, 1998), p. 59. 15 David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), p. 23. 16 As the artist himself stated: ‘Basically there are two different ways in which I use colour in a painting. There is local colour, which is like saying that ‘wood is brown’, it’s as simple as that. The other kind of colour is illustrating the imagined effect of light so that it could, in contrast to the local colour, seem to be more arbitrary.’ Caulfield quoted in ‘Patrick Caulfield: A Dialogue with Bryan Robertson’, in Patrick Caulfield (London: Hayward Gallery, 1999), p. 30. 17 As described in Brian O’Doherty, ‘Lichtenstein: Doubtful but Definite Triumph of the Banal’, New York Times, 27 October 1963, Section 2, p. 21. 18 Caulfield confirms his use of polythene in ‘Patrick Caulfield: A Dialogue with Bryan Robertson’, p. 30. The rest of his process is described in Marco Livingstone, Patrick Caulfield: Paintings (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2005) p. 83. Before the interiors, Caulfield used preparatory drawings in quite a different manner, and often not at all, as related by Anne Seymour in the catalogue for an early group exhibition of artists’ drawings organised by the Arts Council, which included sixteen studies by Caulfield: ‘Often he works straight onto the canvas or board, sometimes out of his head, sometimes from a model in front of him, and sometimes from a photograph or postcard. Sometimes in his still-life paintings, where the same elements are used again and again, he will use outline tracings made from preparatory drawings, which, though the drawings themselves may get lost or destroyed, he keeps as patterns for a quick transfer of motifs on future occasions.’ Drawing Towards Painting 2 (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1967), u.p. 19 As extrapolated in Livingstone, Patrick Caulfield: Paintings, p. 75. 20 This distinguishes my formulation from that which appears in Jakob Schillinger’s review of the work of Peter Wächtler, entitled ‘Interiority Complex’. In his review, Schillinger makes a claim for Wächtler’s multimedia, and often craft-based, work as an interrogation and amplification of the ‘crisis’ of subjectivity staged by the institutionalisation of the Romantic image of the artist as an ‘outsider’ or ‘dandy’. He does not, however, expand on this idea any further or in relation to painting more specifically. See Schillinger, ‘Interiority Complex: The Art of Peter Wächtler’, Artforum International, vol. 53, no. 3, November 2014, pp. 256–61, 300. 21 Robert Smithson, ‘Sonsbeek Unlimited- Art as an Ongoing Development’ (c.1972), unpublished essay, quoted in Ron Graziani, Robert Smithson and the American Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 161. 22 Patrick Caulfield, ‘Painting Today: A Questionnaire’, London Magazine, Vol. 19, no. 1, 1 April 1979, p. 27. 23 Douglas Crimp, ‘Pictures’, October, vol. 8, Spring 1979, p. 76. 24 As pointed out by Katy Deepwell, among others, in ‘Claims for a Feminist Politics in Painting’, in Anne Ring Petersen et al. (eds), Contemporary Painting in Context (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2010), p. 143. 25 See The New Generation (London: Whitechapel Gallery in association with the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation, 1964). Caulfield was one of the ‘young’ artists also featured in the fourth section of Bryan Robertson et al. (eds), Private View (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1965), pp. 276–77, where he appears alongside two early paintings and a short passage written by Robertson in which the curator asserts: ‘Patrick Caulfield’s work is disquieting to an English audience not yet accustomed to the partial reaction against la belle peinture, for the surfaces of his paintings push even beyond the anonymity of a matt surface into that deadpan level of deliberate inexpressiveness one finds in pub signs.’ 26 David Thompson, ‘Introduction’, in The New Generation, pp. 7–8. 27 Thompson, ‘Introduction’, p. 8. Also see Roger Coleman, Situation (London: RBA Galleries, 1960). 28 Nevile Wallis, ‘New Generation: 1964’, The Spectator, 2 April 1964, p. 18. 29 Thompson, ‘Patrick Caulfield’, in The New Generation, p. 20. 30 Amy Goldin, ‘Matisse and Decoration: The Late Cut-Outs’ (1975), reprinted in Robert Kushner (ed.), Amy Goldin: Art in a Hairshirt, Art Criticism 1964–1978 (Stockbridge, MA and Manchester: Hard Press Editions and Hudson Mills Press, 2011), pp. 150–51; Thomas Crow, The Long March of Pop: Art, Music, and Design, 1930–1995 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 83. It is interesting to note that the year after Caulfield made this work, David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia was released. The poster advertising the film depicts a chain of mountains in the background that bear a striking resemblance to those in Leaving Arabia. 31 Caulfield quoted in Livingstone, Patrick Caulfield: Paintings, p. 19. 32 Livingstone, Patrick Caulfield: Paintings, p. 19. 33 Caulfield quoted in ‘Transcript of National Life Stories, Artist’s Lives, Patrick Caulfield interviewed by Andrew Lambirth, 1996–1998’, The British Library, London, p. 49. 34 Russell quoted in The New American Painting (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1959), p. 14. 35 See, for example, Brian Wallis and Lawrence Alloway, This is Tomorrow Today: The Independent Group and British Pop Art (New York: P.S.1, Institute for Art and Urban Resources, 1987); and Alex Seago, Burning the Box of Beautiful Things: The Development of a Postmodern Sensibility (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). Crow, The Long March of Pop, p. 95. 36 As Alex Seago has argued, ARK ‘was never a typical student magazine’, being both more expensive to produce and more open to contributions from non-students than the average. Seago, Burning the Box of Beautiful Things, p. 33. Although identifying Caulfield as one of the painters associated with ‘Pop’ who ‘vehemently rejected’ the label in order to ‘disassociate themselves from the anti-intellectualism of street-level culture’, Seago makes no mention of Caulfield in his account of the significance of the magazine during the 1960s, probably because the issue to which Caulfield contributed falls just outside the designated years of 1960–63 that form his focus. Seago’s PhD thesis, which examined ARK in more detail, concentrated on an even shorter span (1960–62). 37 ‘Contents’, ARK, vol. 37, Autumn 1965, p. 1. 38 See Laurence Anthony, ‘Editorial’, ARK, vol. 37, p. 6. 39 Henry Fairlie, ‘The Idiot Box’, (1962), ARK, vol. 37, p. 11. 40 Finch is in error here: the ‘collective unconscious’ was in fact a concept outlined by Jung and retroactively applied by him to some of Freud's work. Christopher Finch, ‘The Hidden Hand’, ARK, vol. 37, p. 45. 41 Robert Smithson, ‘Abstract Mannerism’ (1966–67), in Jack Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1996), p. 339. 42 Peter Hutchinson, ‘Mannerism in the Abstract’ (1966), in Gregory Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1995), p. 190. 43 Robertson, ‘Art and Art Deco’, p. 22. 44 Peter Halley, ‘Frank Stella … and the Simulacrum’ (1986), in Collected Essays 1981–1987 (Zürich and New York: Bruno Bischoffberger Gallery and Sonnabend Gallery, 1988), p. 142. 45 Emily Genauer quoted in Barbara Haskell (ed.), Burgoyne Diller (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1990), p. 112. 46 Robertson had appeared, photographed by Philip Jones Griffiths in front of Riley’s Fall (1964), in a feature on what Philip Purser called ‘The Attitude’ of leading cultural figures in Britain said to be dictating contemporary tastes. Purser, ‘Towards a Definition of the Attitude … nailing a few of the taste-makers’, Queen, 6 May 1964, pp. 54–55. The caption accompanying the photograph reads: ‘Patron: Bryan Robertson, right, 38, gifted writer on art, lived for the traditional spell in Paris as “real left-bank beat”. He is now very respectable. Director of the Whitechapel Gallery since 1952, an OBE, and at the time of writing third favourite for Sir John Rothenstein’s job at the Tate. Regular broadcaster (The Critics) and a good speaker.’ 47 Ironically, at the time of writing this review Robertson was working as a consultant for the Royal Ballet. 48 As Caulfield would relate to Anne Seymour in around 1969, he ‘tried to fight the idea that if a thing is decorative, then it is sub-standard’. Seymour, ‘Patrick Caulfield’, in Marks on a Canvas, p. 19. 49 ‘Preface by Bryan Robertson’, in Young Contemporaries (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 1964), p. 6. 50 Robert Smithson, ‘Frederick Law Olmstead and the Dialectical Landscape’ (1973), in Flam, Robert Smithson, p. 162. 51 Livingstone, Patrick Caulfield: Paintings, p. 28. 52 Caulfield quoted in Livingstone, Patrick Caulfield: Paintings, p. 26. 53 Livingstone, Patrick Caulfield: Paintings, p. 28. 54 The New Generation, p. 24. 55 J. Hillis Miller, ‘The Creation of the Self in Gerard Manley Hopkins’, ELH, vol. 22, no. 4, December 1955, p. 301. 56 Bridget Riley, ‘Painting Now’ (1996), in Robert Kudielka (ed.), The Eye’s Mind: Bridget Riley, Collected Writings 1965–2009 (London: Thames and Hudson, 2009), p. 291. 57 The New Generation, p. 88. 58 Jacques Derrida, ‘Justices’, in Barbara Cohen and Dragan Kujundžić (eds), Provocations to Reading: J. Hillis Miller and the Democracy to Come (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. 228–61. 59 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’ (1945), reprinted in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 17. 60 Derrida, ‘Justices’, p. 238. 61 This term was first coined in David Sylvester, ‘The Kitchen Sink’, Encounter, vol. 3, December 1954, pp. 61–64. 62 For an in-depth analysis of the source materials used in this work, see John-Paul Stonard, ‘Pop in the Age of Boom: Richard Hamilton’s Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?’, The Burlington Magazine, vol. 149, no. 1254, September 2007, pp. 607–20. 63 Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (London: Reaktion Books, 1990), p. 145. 64 As made even more vivid by the depiction of detritus seen in the screenprint Found Objects, 1968. 65 Jane Blocker, What the Body Cost: Desire, History, and Performance (Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), pp. 74–82. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Holding Out from Within: Patrick Caulfield’s Interior Paintings
JF - Oxford Art Journal
DO - 10.1093/oxartj/kcy027
DA - 2019-03-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/holding-out-from-within-patrick-caulfield-s-interior-paintings-A8BuYfZyQL
SP - 21
VL - 42
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -