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Lot Essay
‘This is his wittiest and most elaborate game yet, a finished painting posing as an unfinished one.’
-Marco Livingstone
‘Much as they entertain the eye – and these are certainly among the most ravishingly beautiful of all Caulfield’s works – these pictorial interjections also have a more serious and pressing function: to warn the unwary to be on guard and to question all the visual evidence being presented.’
-Marco Livingstone
MARCO LIVINGSTONE ON UNFINISHED PAINTING, 1978
'Of all the traps laid by the artist the most extreme is supplied by Unfinished Painting, 1978. It is a very pretty picture, and an appetising one, too, correlating aesthetic enjoyment with sensations of taste and the satiation of the body’s demands. Food and drink are thrust forward with friendly maternal insistence. The picture’s title and presentation of the white-primed and bare canvas areas as a framing device suggest that it is meant as a kind of lesson in how to cook up a successful painting. How helpful, how refreshingly honest of the artist to let us in on his procedure.
Various artists of Caulfield’s generation, including such friends and colleagues as Peter Blake, Howard Hodgkin and R.B. Kitaj, had been exhibiting unfinished paintings in such a spirit of candour. Now could it be that Caulfield of all people – an artist who so hates visitors seeing paintings before they have been completed that he either empties the studio beforehand or turns the pictures to face the wall – had decided to bare his methods with such bold abandon? Of course not. This is his wittiest and most elaborate game yet, a finished painting posing as an unfinished one. A moment of logical reflection would make it obvious that the precision of the central motif could not have been created as a layer of meticulous detail superimposed, like a translucent film of photographic imagery, onto the schematized blocks of colour traced in black outline that radiate outwards from that image. It is simply another style or method, executed according to its own set of rules, that has been chosen by the artist as the convention that most suits his particular purposes at a given moment. As with every one of Caulfield’s pictures, it suggests that an artist’s work necessarily constitutes unfinished business – in the sense that the process it initiates is brought to a close only by the viewer’s thoughtful responses' (M. Livingstone, Patrick Caulfield, Aldershot 2005, p. 106).
-Marco Livingstone
‘Much as they entertain the eye – and these are certainly among the most ravishingly beautiful of all Caulfield’s works – these pictorial interjections also have a more serious and pressing function: to warn the unwary to be on guard and to question all the visual evidence being presented.’
-Marco Livingstone
MARCO LIVINGSTONE ON UNFINISHED PAINTING, 1978
'Of all the traps laid by the artist the most extreme is supplied by Unfinished Painting, 1978. It is a very pretty picture, and an appetising one, too, correlating aesthetic enjoyment with sensations of taste and the satiation of the body’s demands. Food and drink are thrust forward with friendly maternal insistence. The picture’s title and presentation of the white-primed and bare canvas areas as a framing device suggest that it is meant as a kind of lesson in how to cook up a successful painting. How helpful, how refreshingly honest of the artist to let us in on his procedure.
Various artists of Caulfield’s generation, including such friends and colleagues as Peter Blake, Howard Hodgkin and R.B. Kitaj, had been exhibiting unfinished paintings in such a spirit of candour. Now could it be that Caulfield of all people – an artist who so hates visitors seeing paintings before they have been completed that he either empties the studio beforehand or turns the pictures to face the wall – had decided to bare his methods with such bold abandon? Of course not. This is his wittiest and most elaborate game yet, a finished painting posing as an unfinished one. A moment of logical reflection would make it obvious that the precision of the central motif could not have been created as a layer of meticulous detail superimposed, like a translucent film of photographic imagery, onto the schematized blocks of colour traced in black outline that radiate outwards from that image. It is simply another style or method, executed according to its own set of rules, that has been chosen by the artist as the convention that most suits his particular purposes at a given moment. As with every one of Caulfield’s pictures, it suggests that an artist’s work necessarily constitutes unfinished business – in the sense that the process it initiates is brought to a close only by the viewer’s thoughtful responses' (M. Livingstone, Patrick Caulfield, Aldershot 2005, p. 106).