Patrick Caulfield | Some Poems of Jules Laforgue

Born in Acton, London in 1936, Patrick Caulfield studied at Chelsea School of Art from 1956 to 1960 and returned there to teach from 1963 to 1971. In the intervening years he studied at the Royal College of Art where he was a contemporary of David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj and Allen Jones. He became connected with this generation of ‘Pop’ artists, although his work was very different in style from his contemporaries. At this time, he expressed a great admiration for the work of Fernand Léger and Juan Gris and developed a style using bright, flat colours outlined with a contrasting tone. He frequently chose the traditional subject matter of still life and interiors for his work but interpreted them in a totally modern way. Caulfield found screenprint to be an ideal vehicle for this and he regularly deployed the medium from the 1960s onwards to explore a bold use of line and colour. This in turn informed and complemented his activities as a painter.   

 

His first solo exhibition was held in London in 1965 and his international reputation was quickly established with a string of one-man shows held in the UK and across the world. Retrospectives of his work were held at the Tate Gallery in London in 1981 and again in 2013. 

When invited to make a limited edition book by Petersburg Press, Patrick Caulfield chose to illustrate the poetry of the Franco-Uruguayan poet Jules Laforgue whose work he had first encountered as a student at the Royal College. Caulfield created a series of 22 iconic screenprints that epitomise the artist’s characteristic use of simplified, flat images, strong black outlines and block colour. 

 

'I was introduced to Laforgue’s poetry by a fellow student at the Royal College of Art in about 1962. He had borrowed a translation from the college library and thought I would like it. I did. It seemed wonderfully concise, managing to be both romantic and ironic. I returned the book to the library a long time late. A rather selfish act.

 

Laforgue was my natural choice when I was invited to do a limited edition book. The images I produced are complementary images, not illustrations. Some of the connections are a bit tenuous, others are obvious. I tried to imagine what Laforgue might have been looking at when he thought of the poems, knowing, of course, that certain of the images are totally of another period to Laforgue’s lifetime: poetic licence with poetic licence.'

Quotation taken from Patrick Caulfield: The Poems of Jules Laforgue, Arts Council Collection, 1995