Patrick Caulfield

Still Life with Dagger, 1963, Tate Gallery.

Patrick Caulfield, CBE (29 January 1936 – 29 September 2005) was an English painter and printmaker known for his pop art canvases.

Life and work

Patrick Caulfield studied at the Chelsea School of Art from 1956 to 1960, and at the Royal College of Art from 1960 to 1963,^[1] where his fellow pupils included David Hockney and R. B. Kitaj. After he left, he returned to Chelsea as a teacher.^[1]

In 1964, he exhibited at the New Generation show at London's Whitechapel Gallery, which resulted in him being associated with pop art.

From around the mid-1970s he began to incorporate more detailed, realistic elements into his work, After Lunch (1975) being one of the first examples. Still-life: Autumn Fashion (1978) contains a variety of different styles—some objects have heavy black outlines and flat colour, but a bowl of oysters is depicted more realistically, and other areas are executed with looser brushwork. Caulfield later returned to his earlier, more stripped-down, style of painting.

Caulfield's paintings are figurative, often portraying a few simple objects in an interior. Typically, he used flat areas of simple colour surrounded by black outlines.^[2] Some of his works are dominated by a single hue.

After Lunch, 1975, Tate Gallery.

In 1987 Caulfield was nominated for the Turner Prize and in 1996 he was made a CBE.

On 24 May 2004 a fire in a storage warehouse destroyed many works from the Saatchi collection, including one or more by Caulfield.

He died in 2005 and is buried in Highgate Cemetery.

Notes

References

• Caulfield, P. (1992). Patrick Caulfield, paintings 1963-1992. London: Art & design. ISBN 185490180X

External links

• Caulfield at the Tate Gallery (includes images of many of his pieces)
• Caulfield at the Waddington Gallery (ditto)
• Caulfield biography
• BBC News: Pop artist Patrick Caulfield dies
• Photograph of his gravestone