One leaves the Patrick Caulfield exhibition longing to see more

In the wake of the Roy Lichtenstein blockbuster at Tate Modern comes Patrick Caulfield at Tate Britain, and what a contrast! Where Lichtenstein looks increasingly like a one-trick pony, an assessment driven home by the excessively large show, Caulfield emerges as fresh, witty and visually inventive. Undoubtedly this impression is fostered by the size of the exhibition: Tate Britain’s Linbury Galleries have been divided between Caulfield and Gary Hume, allowing each enough space for a highly focused solo exhibition. There are thus only 35 paintings by Caulfield spanning his entire career, and one leaves his show wanting to see more, not suffering from the usual museum overkill. This is an excellently selected and installed exhibition: a much-deserved tribute to one of the neglected greats of 20th-century art.

A victim of the art historian’s lust to categorise and pigeonhole, Patrick Caulfield (1936–2005) is all too frequently lumped with the Pop artists who came to prominence in the mid-1960s. Caulfield always preferred the designation of ‘formal artist’, and looking at his highly intelligent interpretations of landscape, interior and still-life, this description makes absolute sense. He was a master of pictorial logic and paradox, a painter of contemporary life, drawn to the kitsch and everyday, which he formalised and contained in images of classic restraint and romantic lushness. As the critic Christopher Finch observed, Caulfield was a ‘romantic disarmed by his own sense of irony’.

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Unlike the Pop artists, he was little interested in American art (with the exception of Edward Hopper and Stuart Davis), and his lodestar was French modernism. He looked to the decorative brilliance of Matisse and Dufy, and the stylisation of Léger, Braque and Gris. To begin with, he deliberately espoused the exotic and decorative, rather than the traditional landscape and nude of English art, avoiding the brushstroke in his paintings, using a sign-painter’s technique to achieve those distinctively flat glossy surfaces.