Shadows and surrealism in Caulfield’s career

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21 July


Shadows and surrealism in Caulfield’s career


For copyright reasons, I have not embedded images, but, when possible, included links to where they can be found and, if the reader wishes, opened in a separate window from the comments that I make here.


Introduction

The five-room survey of Patrick Caufield’s work at Tate Britain is a comfortable one to take in, with 35 canvases that begin with the 1960s, the latest one being from the year of his death, 2005. (Caulfield is twinned, in terms of ticket, with an interesting three-room show for Gary Hume.)

Some of Caulfield’s paintings were known to me over the years from the Tate’s collection, but it was good to put them in a wider historical and thematic context, which begins with pieces that make a virtue of a kind of studied refusal to make the subject-matter stand out from the picture-plane (partly by not using shadow).


The first half of the exhibition


A quality of, and using, ‘flatness’

This ‘flatness’ (or absence of relief, of things in perspective) is typified by The Well (1966), where the bits of rock and masonry (with shadow) that one would seek to interpret as surrounding the well-head look, deliberately, strangely proud, as if they are somehow above it, because, although small, they have mass (where the huge dressed stones arranged to form the well do not). Significantly, too, for what I shall go on to explore, we are shown the least of the well, not even over the lip, let alone whatever water lies ‘below’.

The effect also haunts Concrete Villa, Brunn (1963), where the outline of the named building appears to be imposed on a grid of squares (none of which we can actually see complete) and made from the meeting, at right-angles, of tight pairs of parallel lines (a coded reference to parallel lines projecting to meet at infinity ?). The flattened depiction of the building itself makes it appear to be a polygon, rather in the same way that a perspectival cube drawn with just its edges can look like two triangles joined by a central square.


Mixing styles of representation

In Still life with Dagger (1963), Caulfield is more explicit than in The Well as to the different ways of showing the elements of his composition, and has chosen to mix them. He has a jug as an outline (plus Cubist adjuncts), whereas the weapon of the title is painted full colour in semi-relief, but the beads of the necklace next to it, which loop around the handle of the jug, although they are made to project, light reflecting on the real object would, have the grey hue of the double-delineated flat surface. If we just look at this work without analysing it, it should still give a sense of disjunction, even of disquiet, because the conventions have been muddled.

Another work in this room makes us curious, wanting to know what Bend in the Road (1967) conceals, as the lie of the land and the curve suddenly hide the road ahead (if not at, then very near, the vanishing-point). Although, at one level, we may be conscious that it is Caulfield constructing, or marshalling, this terrain, we may be more caught up in our curiosity – that questioning spirit is part of our reaction to later works, wanting to know what lies beyond that door, window, staircase…

If we forget, however momentarily, that Caulfield determines what to show us (and how), as he does with the limited palette (two main colours here, plus dark outlines), we will have a frisson of being denied in and by this work, and that is its raison d’être, to challenge us and our expectations of painting. Just as the luscious mould on fruit and cheeses in a Dutch still-life might direct us to re-contemplate such everyday objects, Caulfield gives us a blind bend in the road to stop in front of and just wonder : if we will not give ourselves up to that, we will not get it, not get the point.


A response to René Magritte ?

That makes these works sound didactic, but they are not, for they are playful at the same time in the way, say, that Magritte is, even if the curator does not cite him as one of Caulfield’s influences. Portrait of Joan Gris (1963) in this room, quite a well-known one, reminds us of Magritte, with its uniform blue background, relieved only by almost floating irregular geometrical gestures either side of the solid Gris, figuratively rendered (although he could equally seem like a cut-out – please see below). No one could say that Gris or Magritte made jokes in art as such, but they utilized compositional ideas to underlie what they were doing – Caulfield likewise.


The figure of Gris, the easily missed man on the balcony in Villa, and a monochrome waiter in After Lunch (1975), leaning in from a recess, are the only figures whom we see, who do not really occupy these spaces, but are in them : only Gris is fully depicted as if living, because the waiter is bored and absorbed, in terms of colour, into his space, and the man on the balcony is just a tiny reminder that this villa is ‘a machine for living’.


Expectancy in these works

When I say that they do not ‘occupy’ the works in which they appear, there is not the same expectancy, as in other canvases such as Foyer (1973), as to where people are, what is happening, but the waiter has done with his activity at lunchtime and is just quiet, the man on the balcony is dwarfed by the building and its construction even as, reading his paper, he pretends not to feel that he is – and, even if the men have further to say, they do not say it. (Even Office Party (1977) gives us the trappings of the office, e.g. the typewriter, and of the party, bottles and glasses, but no one partying, just the saints on the front of the building opposite.)

It is characteristic, then, of Caulfield that he chooses these largely unpopulated spaces, these moments perhaps between (or under*) the moments, a bit in the way of glimpsing a fully lit room as one passes a house, where one can see what is there and where other lit rooms extend, but no sign of the human life that usually gives rise to all this (and for whom all this would then exist). Each of the pieces in this exhibition has, if not always a very strong one, a personality, an identity separate from those whom we hypothesize could shortly enter it.

That, too, is a cognate feeling in Magritte’s canon, even if it does not mean with Caulfield that a train will rush out of the fireplace, or someone on horseback from the wings : each interior (they are largely interiors, or semi-interiors) appears to have a self-awareness – almost a self-consciousness – that, despite the absence of a human observer, it exists. Put another way, the rooms have a presence that it is not dependent on the motive force of human beings, and this Caulfield paints.

Even if it probably oversimplifies, Cubism is nowadays often purported to be a response to, and demonstration of, Einstein’s theories about relativity, whereas the word ‘surreal’ is blithely, in common parlance, applied to anything a bit strange, without reference to the stated aims of The Surrealist Manifesto (or the practice of those in the movement). At this stage in his career, Caulfield is not moved by his interest in Braque to distort dimensionality quite in the way of a Cubist still-life, and Dagger does not closely resemble the work of that school. However, he does give a dream-like sensibility to these rooms, not unlike the feel of the exteriors of, say, Giorgio de Chirico and Paul Delvaux.


Construction and artifice

In Lunch, as if it is an external view (although it seems to be a painting partly behind a fish-tank, complete with blobby goldfish of a Matissean hue, but not delicacy), there is a wholly naturalistic scene, of a typical Bavarian (or Austrian) castle on a lake, which extends, in photographic detail, into the distance.

Apart from the fish, and a lozenge highlight bottom right (which seems to represent light entering with steps down from the restaurant), this is the most diverse range of colour in a largely blue canvas : two near-parallel slanting lines, as if of shadow in the lower and upper reaches (a slightly different, cooler shade above from below), divide the area left to right, and give way to a lighter colour where the waiter’s head emerges.

Topographically (as will be found with other paintings such as Springtime : face à la Mer 1974), the space is difficult to construe : the fish-tank is supported by a long box on a trestle between whose legs, at the right height, one would be able to look through, just as – if it were not too high – the panelling above and behind the painting gives way to a decorative top-board, beyond which we see the roof-space, columns, probably suspension-wires for overhead lamps. This is where the waiter is standing, leaning over the uppermost of the ranch-style boards that partition off that region.


As already implied, he almost appears to be part of the furniture, inert, though seemingly contemplating whatever is ahead, which is unseen. Is what we see, with a table, chairs, a cooking-pot, the kitchen part, and he would normally be serving dishes that are reached over the partition, and then take them into the restaurant proper (unless it is the dining-room of a wealthy private house) ?


An Escherean perspective ?

Countless viewings, the most recent a thorough one, have not exhausted this painting, with its juxtapositions of shadowed portions, stylized fish, and the confusing verisimilitude of the painting that could be the world outside. Here, and remembering Concrete Villa, one almost wonders whether one is looking at solid enough lines of construction that lead to an absurdity, as in M. C. Escher’s impossible spaces, most notably Waterfall, whose waters turns out to be feeding themselves. That is certainly the feeling with Springtime, trying to be sure where steps lead, and how the world inside the building (though we have a feeling of interiority, I believe it to be false on the evidence) can fit together with this view.

Escher’s etchings have a sense of holding reality at bay that fits with these works seeming to hold enquiry at an expectant arm’s length, more so than with the relative stasis of Braque’s or Léger’s compositions, although they do embody what one might call structural tension (or difficulty). So, with Dining Recess (1972) there is familiarly a circular table with six egg-cup-shaped chairs loosely arranged around it (one can see, but only by considering the circles of the bases of table and chairs, that there is human imperfection, not rigidity, in this set-up).

All but the pale, lemony glow of a lamp that has shape but no depth and an indeterminate blue through a high-up window or skylight** (which could be either a certain type of dullish daytime, or a luminescent night sky without stars) is rendered moderately flatly in a sort of slate grey with a chocolate tinge to it, so that one’s eye is drawn to the ‘hotspots’ of the globe of light and to the sky above. Is the electric light really quite dim that it does not seem to illumine and create shadow, or is the uniform greyness (of a kind that Beckettt maybe described in his rotunda pieces, and in All Strange Away and Company) in this non-directional way somehow its product ?

The light being there draws us and draws out questions, as to whether, say, the space is lit before supper, after the table has been cleared, or just as part of the downstairs lighting of an evening, and the latter sensations are implicit in the painting’s form : we can make the view have meaning, and have a feel for where this recess is from the clues (even if the architecture confuses**), but it resists us, it is non-committal, and will not confirm our notions. Again, a sort of challenge to us about what we believe, what we imagine, but without shouting at us that we make those assumptions all the time.



The second half of the exhibition


Still life reinvested ?

In later work (displayed in Rooms 4 and 5), Caulfield has not so much revisited as reinvested the still life. In Still Life : Mother’s Day (1975) and in Braque Curtain (2005), shadows are silhouettes with a life and lively colours of their own, and one struggles to divine a source and direction of light that would act in this way. Again, that disturbing effect as of Dagger, but this time more strongly, where the puzzle is more explicit, and where the bright blue shadows of Mother’s Day, rather than being cast by light shining on those objects, almost seems to project the objects (there is the same appearance in Curtain).


Faux-collage

All of this made more intense by the faux-collage of what appears to be a cut-out rose applied to the fish-bowl, but in fact is painted – a juxtaposition a little like Magritte’s huge flower in a room, or an apple in front of the head of a suited man. Which is why I relate to using a style that makes a flower resemble a cutting from a magazine as a surrealist impulse, because there is that dislocation again.

In fact, it is a double one, the first being the sharply contrasting technique, the second that some of the simplicities of style, used as a matter of choice, may have blunted one to the scope of the artist’s technical mastery. In other words, since he gives us a bowl by its stylized outline (rather than a bowl that, with effects of shade and reflection, looks like a real one), do we tend not to credit that the painter can paint, and thus assume that he must have used collage, whether it is flowers around a doorway that we cannot see into (Entrance (1975)), or detail in a grand portico ?

Flowers are a key theme of painting-as-collage in this exhibition, whether the striking display in Entrance, or the chopped-off study of tulips. Otherwise, it is paintings (such as in Lunch or Interior with a Picture (1985 – 1986)), or fabrics (a Morris & Co. one in Green Drink (1984)). They are part of what makes interiors feel like a still life, pregnant with what might have happened beforehand, or be about to happen.


Lamp-shades

Another part – which gives rise to the title of this account – is lamps, and Caulfield has made series of the same simple scene at different times of day. Here, I do not know whether there are companion pieces, but Window at Night (1969) uses the device of a pendant light, hanging where it is crossed by the first intersection of a three-wide by five-deep paned window, a red cone with a yellow highlight at the lower aperture.

The room itself, with the outline of a corner top right, is wholly orange : as has been commented before, however, the lamp casts its light uniformly, and maybe we are distracted from this by the window furniture, the open transom, and the silhouettes of items on the window-ledge. Window is not, if we do not allow it to lull us by not thinking with and through what Caulfield has done, a representation except in stylized, Caulfieldian terms.


Heightened expectancy

Again, with the possibility that (the outline of) a person might enter, a degree of tension, then, as with that bend in the road, Gris faced by what seem like mobiles, or these expectant interior views such as Dining / Kitchen / Living (1980). In that latter work, we see, left to right, the three named living-areas. On the table in the centre, a mixed rendition of styles that render the scrapbook-style oval, brown casserole with lid, again making us think that it is cut out, and the food (which looks unreal, in some way, as food in some other canvases does, if not hyper-real and cut out, in other cases, as with some chicken bread-crumbed breasts).

Evidence that someone has been here, as in Goldilocks. Once more, except that we are inside rather than out, the sensation that someone might come in at any moment and surprise us. Except that this is a canvas, and what makes us enter into it ? What draws us into it, as in Window, what keeps us aloof from Foyer, hesitating at whether we are interested, and what shuts us out, if we just look quickly, at it or at Well, and ask what the point is ?


Shadow and the light that cast it

Some later paintings provoke us as to what they might mean in a different way, with lamp-shades that interact by superposition and against the laws of physics with the cone of light that they project. It has already been commented that Braque Curtain’s shadows (which is shadow, though, and which the light ?), unless there really are two table-lamps in the split-level aperture, challenge our understanding if we look at the detail.

Nearly top left, the jaunty outline of the shade of a standard-lamp, but no shadow, no light projected above or below, and in its own little patch of complementary colour. Far left, a large, bold pattern, as if a large oddment of material is hanging, a gesture, in dividing the space, that reminds me again of Magritte’s use of pattern and texture, and a complete foil to the sombre black and light orange of the lamps. If this is the title’s curtain, then it separates off from the world where we do not know what is casting what, or what relates them.

Several works, including Bishops (2004), take this playfulness in a different direction, with what is the lamp, and what is the light that it casts (I could have said earlier that light and darkness co-existing was a Magrittean preoccupation in a series of paintings called The Empire of Lights), and they all seem to formulate a series of ruminations on this question, although it was not, on this visit, one that for me was pressing to follow – or even to try to engage much with.


Shadows, light, and construing spaces

In other works again, such as Hemingway Never Ate Here (1999), fathoming the space is not straightforward : bottom right, there is a black right-angled triangle, indicating that (unless it is trompe-l’œil, as our examination may require is to think) there appears to be a corner, in which case the lower part of the wall below the dado-line (or that part of it) must slope backwards. If it does slope, where the dado turns a corner and stops is where a built-in table (looking for all the world like a hovering tray) is home for a partly drunk beer with lime (which I wrongly took for a fading candle at first, as I had not entered the idiom), an apparently empty cup and saucer and a larger piece of lime (?) on the saucer. (Above the dado, a decorated cow’s head, complete with horns, which inevitably makes of think of the titular Hemingway.)

What lies on the other side of the canvas (the dado takes us roughly halfway across) is initially straightforward, a bracket, though not clearly for what, in relief that resembles a treble-clef. The main feature, though, is a large and bright-yellow emission of light that colours the bits of wall under the bracket and of the short section of wall where the dado ends. One might infer that it emanates from the white full-moon shape seen at the top of this seeming doorway with a curved top, or may be from the white object on the level with the tray, but I am unsure : it could be more likely, given how the shadows look, that the source of the light is invisible, in the space, but hidden behind the arch...

Perhaps, also, since we can make out treads (the first with the leach of the light onto it) on the left of the canvas, stairs go up in the direction of where the bracket is (which would then be – if it were not utterly flat, and in relief – a place to hang a basket). The quadrilateral actually seems to be the actually base of a built-in surface, with a window to the left of it (we catch a hook or bracket’s shadow, which looks wooden, and above it could be a thin curtain-rail), and we see to the right of it the top left-hand corner of what looks like a big piece of furniture (not in style with anything else). This could be the entrance to the building, in fact, as the shadows indicate a floor-level recess.

That exhausts my fathoming this work just now – it is deliberately puzzling, deliberately different from the (apparent) simplicity of others such as Window or Foyer, and, unless one can catch it just right, with a willing and accommodating eye, it will frankly make no sense. None, anyway that is easy enough for a casual stroll around a gallery, although it is really no more complex than Villa, but Caulfield has rendered shape in colour, in perplexing light and shadow.


Touches of Dalí in an interior with Magrittean curtains as radiating light ?

Another puzzling work, with which I shall seek to make a finish, is Reserved Table (2000). Much of the upper left and right part of the surface has been rendered with a crenellated comb, as if it were decorative render for ceiling or walls. (Here, the ceiling is not rendered, or distinguished from the walls, and is of a pashy midnight blue.) To the left of the canvas, arcs of light again, the upper one white and in the shape of a cone with one-quarter of a circle inverted on the top, the lower one slightly creamy, and starting conically, but ending with a claw.

We will have taken in the lobster before then, which this shape echoes. In one sense, it is not out of place somewhere that the title suggest is a restaurant, in another it used more decoratively, oddly just placed there, which implies that it is dead (and reminds me of Dalí’s Telephone (1936)). It is, at any rate, on a narrow ledge in front of what appears to be an almost egg-shaped mirror, showing perhaps the other side of it (although we see more of a reflection than the height and position of the putative mirror suggests :

Maybe it is not a mirror, but a black canvas with a depiction of part of a lobster at the bottom. It could even be a serving hatch, because the lobster on the ledge may not match this one, and the egg-shaped space is set into a rectangle that it delineated as proud by a shadow down the side of it, and it is not impossible that the light seen to the other side represents what comes from the kitchen.

As to the table, apart from a curled, metallic bracket, it appears to float, or, rather, it has a seemingly floating tablecloth, in whose starchy material is impressed the form of a circular top. The curves and billows of the cloth are a distinct contrast to the sheen of the rendered, arched alcove above : it is a contrast, because the cloth, as with the shape that balances it on the left-hand side, is very bright so as to seem hyper-real again, and the shadow under the table / cloth seems vague and indistinct, which is a beautiful touch.

As before, a table that has been reserved, but which is not set – were the diners very careful, or is it infra dig in such an establishment to have the table laid on arrival ? The cloth radiates cleanness, as does the whole space, and it is these highlights and juxtapositions of colour and shade that create yet another sense of something that, presumably, is about to happen…


Brief conclusion

In summary, I believe that the painterly qualities that I have discussed are indicative of influences beyond the recognized ones of Braque, Léger and Gris. In particular, I suggest that Caulfield has used some of the techniques of those who, at some time or other, were admitted by André Breton to the role of the Surrealists, notably shadow for disturbing effect, along with the creation of places that, by their patient emptiness, draw our attention to the immanence of their occupation.



What the papers thought...

The Guardian was favourable (about this and the twinned exhibition), The Independent and The Telegraph were less keen.

Caulfield's friend, David Hare, has some things to say about his work that I find perceptive.



End-notes

* An important collection of Russell Hoban’s stories, essays and other pieces is called The Moment under the Moment.

** If we stop to consider what we see of the inside of the roof, it is not certain that we can construe it : I am unsure whether it is like an Escher, where the lines deceive, or whether it was not intended as it looks, with a sloping roof that disappears into a space where our eye cannot follow.




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