Patrick Caulfield Screenprint entitled Occasional Table

Screenprint entitled Occasional Table by Patrick Caulfield

General Details
Medium: Screenprint
Dimensions:
Sheet Size: 65 x 79 cm
Image Size: 58.3 x 74 cm

Edition Size:
Edition of 500 with 25 proofs
Number of Screenprint Offered: 455/500
Signed by the Artist: Caulfield
Printed at Kelpra Studio, London
Published by Observer Art, London
Reference: Entry no. 29 on page 84 of the catalogue raisonne entitled Patrick Caulfield The Complete Prints 1964 – 1999 published by Alan Cristea Gallery

Comment on our asking price: 
We have heavily discounted our asking taking into account the signs of damp patches on the white outer border of the image which can easily be hidden by mounting. Blemish-free imprints of this imprint currently retail at £1,500 in London galleries.

Biographical Note on Patrick Caulfield

Patrick Caulfield was born in Acton, West London, although his parents were from the north of England. Inspired by the 1952 film Moulin Rouge about the artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, he spent his free time attending evening drawing classes while serving in the Royal Air Force (1953 - 1956). He later decided to study art full time. He began studying graphic design at the Chelsea School of Art and then transferred to the department of painting.
Caulfield continued his studies from 1960 to 1963 at the Royal College of Art. After graduating, he taught at Chelsea School of Art from 1963 to 1971.
As a student, Caulfield was influenced by the work of American abstract painters such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, but he only experimented with abstract work for a short time. Many of his early works are characterised by thick black drawing or an outline used to bring out the full strength of other colours.
Caulfield visited Greece during his student years and admired the graphic quality of the murals in the prehistoric site of Knossos in Crete. He was of the opinion that the most celebrated art has always had a decorative purpose.
He is noted for his use of hardboard and supports as a cheap and readily available alternative to canvas, along with enamel paints. This choice of materials challenges the traditional separation between painting as a high art form and decorative art as being of an inferior status.
Caulfield received acclaim early on in his career through his participation in Bryan Robertson’s influential “New Generation’ exhibition the Whitechapel Gallery in 1964 and in various international Pop Art Shows.
His first solo exhibition took place in 1965 at the most desirable gallery of the day, Robert Fraser Gallery. Several solo exhibitions followed together with group shows organised by the New Generation of British artists.
He represented Britain at the Fourth Paris Biennale in 1965, when he was awarded the Prix des Jeunes Artistes and the Fifth Paris Biennale in1967 and at the 18th Sao Paolo Bienal in 1985.
One of his closest friends was the abstract painter, John Hoyland, whom he first met at the Young Contemporaries exhibition in 1959. In 1964, he exhibited at the New Generation show at London's Whitechapel Gallery, which resulted in him being associated with the pop art movement. This was a label Caulfield was opposed to throughout his career, seeing himself rather as a formal artist.
Caulfield maintained that his work lay in a tradition which ran from Delacroix through Cezanne to Cubism and artists such as Gris, Braque and Picasso.
From the mid-1970s he incorporated more detailed, realistic elements into his work; After Lunch (1975) is an early example. Still-life: Autumn Fashion (1978) contains a variety of styles – some objects have heavy black outlines and flat colour, but a bowl of oysters are shown both in outline and in highly realistic detail whilst other areas are executed with looser brushwork. Caulfield later returned to his earlier, more stripped-down style of painting.

His last painting, now owned by Tate, is a homage to Georges Braque, and his last print, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon vues Derriere, 1999, constituted a tongue-in-cheek homage to one of Picasso’s most famous paintings. When Alan Cristea, who worked with and represented Caulfield from the early 1970s until his death in 2005, asked him why he had chosen the subject, he famously answered ‘I have been haunted by that painting throughout my life and I needed to exorcise the ghost’.
In 1986 Caulfield selected National Gallery, London paintings for the Artist’s Eye Exhibition: Patrick Caulfield held at the Gallery from 4 th June to 10 th August.
In 1987, Caulfield was nominated for the Turner Prize for his show The Artists Eye at the National Gallery.
He shared the Jerwood Painting Prize in 1995 with Maggi Hambling.
He did not hunger for official recognition and never made the effort to network or cultivate influential contacts, much preferring the company of his painter friends.
However, official recognition came first in 1993 when he was elected a Royal Academician and in the same year was awarded a Senior Fellowship of the Royal College of Art, three years later, in 1996 he was made a CBE and also bestowed with an Honorary Fellowship of the London Institute.
Leading collectors of Caulfield’s work were Charles Saatchi, Sir Colin St John Wilson and David Bowie. On 24 th May 2004, a fire in a storage warehouse destroyed many works from the Saatchi Collection, including three Caulfied paintings.
He died in London in 2005 and is buried in the Highgate Cemetery.
His estate is represented by Alan Cristea and Waddington Custot Galleries in London