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My life inspires so many desires! from Some Poems of Jules Laforgue, 1973
Screenprint, 24 x 22 inches
Msu purchase, funded by the Office of the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies, 2002.5.2
© 2002 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London



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Along a Twilighted Sky, from Some Poems of Jules Laforgue, 1973
Screenprint, 24 x 22 inches
MSU purchase, funded by the Office of the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies, 2002.5.1
© 2002 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London

Patrick Cauflield knew with his first screenprint in 1964 that it was the ideal medium for him because of its linear accuracy and its uniform densities of hue and tone. He has used it for all but one of the nearly 100 prints he has made since. When Caulfield created the silkscreens for the book and print suite, Some Poems of Jules Laforgue, he "tried to imagine what Laforgue might have been looking at when he thought of the poems." Caulfield had been introduced to Laforgue's poetry in art school and admired its concision, which he matched with his own in his non-illustrational, but complimentary images. Along a Twilighted Sky, 1973, a line from Laforgue's poem, Complaint concerning melancholy and literary debates, resembles a classic abstraction by Piet Mondrian, though the fading yellow sky seems still and tinged with melancholy because of the enclosing gray. My Life inspires so many desires! is also from the same poem, but evokes a very different mood, one of energetic longing. The bright colors of the green pool-railing and the rich blue sky generate energy, where the gray created torpor in Along a Twilighted Sky. But the driving emotional force of the print comes from the hand-like grasp of the curving horizontal bar by the two uprights, as though in desperation.

Caulfield attended the Royal College of Art in London, and by his last semester there in 1963, he discovered the language of commercial art, finding that it gave his work the punch it needed to establish his own look, and he has kept that look ever since. Simple objects rendered as simplistically as possible with linear exactitude and immaculately flat, undifferentiated color. Still-lifes dominated the 1960s, sections of interiors and exteriors full of patterns, objects, sometimes even including people, took over in the 1970s. Then he returned to simplicity in the 1980s and 1990s, using light and shadow amid flat forms to play with space in a near-abstract version of Cubism. His 1999 British Council retrospective toured in Europe and came to Yale in the United States, but his work is not often seen here.