Patrick Caulfield

Vintage hardback coffee table book featuring art historical criticism of Patrick Caulfield's paintings. By Waddington Galleries, published in 1997. First edition, 32 pages.

"Caulfield's impatience with being thought of as a Pop artist is understandable when one considers that the unpromising ordinary objects that we encounter in our daily lives--especially the synthetic, artificial, phony examples of debased mass taste that define our environments and condition our own aspirations and desires--serve him principally as triggers to his own flights of fancy, as incitements to the imagination through which the despair of existence can momentarily be swept to one side if not forgotten. Like many of the interiors that he has invented since the late 1960s, the recent paintings are all of anonymous public spaces habitually used by the lonely as places of refuge and even by the more sociable as ersatz private rooms for entertaining friends and acquaintances: the pub as a convivial substitute for the living room, the restaurant as replacement for the dining room."