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Lot Essay
‘It was really the idea of a panorama. Calling it “view” was paradoxical to the actual image, since calling it that suggested that one had actually seen something and looked at it from a certain angle. Whereas in fact it was a painting about nowhere.’
-Patrick Caulfield
‘I try not to overpaint too much because I like the flat surface. I like the idea that things have been done in the most minimal fashion, that you don’t keep adding.'
-Patrick Caulfield
Painted in 1964, Patrick Caulfield’s View of the Ruins is a poetic rumination on the passing of time, executed in the artist’s trademark graphic style. At once romantic and unsettling, the remains of a mysterious structure stand proud at the centre of the canvas, their forms captured in bold, simplified shapes and set within a rich crimson landscape. Consisting of two stretches of simplified grey wall punctuated by roughly hewn windows, the ruins appear in a precarious state, the upper floors having crumbled away to leave the interior exposed to the elements, while spindly cracks creep slowly across the walls and large pieces of fallen masonry lie strewn across the ground around the structure. Depicting an imagined scene rather than a particular landscape or place, the forlorn, tumbling ruins are imbued with a sense of transience, impermanence and mortality, suggesting a bygone civilisation or dynasty lost to history, the only traces of of their once great power found in the slowly crumbling buildings they left behind. And yet, this powerful feeling of loss and decay is countered by a sense of renewal, as signs of life spring up around the ruins in the form of small tufts of grass and plant-life, as if the landscape is gradually reclaiming the space the building once occupied.
Describing this period of his career, Caulfield highlighted the vast differences in his pictorial interests and those of his contemporaries: ‘All the time I was working on things like the Swiss Chalet, a church, a view inside ruins, a well, a horse, people were doing Pepsi Cola tins, girlie magazine images, American trucks, skyscrapers, whatever was up to date. I was doing something I felt was more ambiguous in time. Not being old necessarily, something that could actually exist now but was of a timeless nature. I do feel that if anything is worthwhile that it’s about its own time, but doesn’t mean that you actually have to reflect the time that specifically. I felt there was more scope in not choosing that kind of subject matter. It was coming mainly from American culture, as far as I could see. In fact I don’t think that was really the sort of life that one was leading anyway. One wasn’t leading the polished chrome, racy life that these images suggest’ (P. Caulfield, quoted in Patrick Caulfield: Paintings 1963-81, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London 1981, p. 16).
While the simplified, generic shapes of the ruins were most likely inspired by memories from Caulfield’s trips to Greece and Italy in the early 1960s, the romanticism of the composition owes a clear debt to the art of Eugène Delacroix, and in particular his painting Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi (1826). As Marco Livingstone has suggested, it was to this nineteenth-century European artistic tradition that Caulfield appears to have been aligning himself within these paintings: ‘In works such as […] View of the Ruins 1964, Caulfield presents his art, with self-depreciating irony, as heir to the Orientalism for which there was such a taste in 19th-century Britain … Far from rejecting tradition, Caulfield seeks to salvage it by taking it up in its most debased form and making it new again’ (M. Livingstone, ‘Patrick Caulfield: A Text for Silent Pictures’, in Art & Design, Vol. 7, No. 5/6, London 1992, p. 11). Shortly after the completion of View of the Ruins, Caulfield embarked upon his first experiments in screen printing, creating a related work Ruins, which appeared alongside the present composition in the artist’s first solo exhibition at the Robert Fraser Gallery in January 1965.
-Patrick Caulfield
‘I try not to overpaint too much because I like the flat surface. I like the idea that things have been done in the most minimal fashion, that you don’t keep adding.'
-Patrick Caulfield
Painted in 1964, Patrick Caulfield’s View of the Ruins is a poetic rumination on the passing of time, executed in the artist’s trademark graphic style. At once romantic and unsettling, the remains of a mysterious structure stand proud at the centre of the canvas, their forms captured in bold, simplified shapes and set within a rich crimson landscape. Consisting of two stretches of simplified grey wall punctuated by roughly hewn windows, the ruins appear in a precarious state, the upper floors having crumbled away to leave the interior exposed to the elements, while spindly cracks creep slowly across the walls and large pieces of fallen masonry lie strewn across the ground around the structure. Depicting an imagined scene rather than a particular landscape or place, the forlorn, tumbling ruins are imbued with a sense of transience, impermanence and mortality, suggesting a bygone civilisation or dynasty lost to history, the only traces of of their once great power found in the slowly crumbling buildings they left behind. And yet, this powerful feeling of loss and decay is countered by a sense of renewal, as signs of life spring up around the ruins in the form of small tufts of grass and plant-life, as if the landscape is gradually reclaiming the space the building once occupied.
Describing this period of his career, Caulfield highlighted the vast differences in his pictorial interests and those of his contemporaries: ‘All the time I was working on things like the Swiss Chalet, a church, a view inside ruins, a well, a horse, people were doing Pepsi Cola tins, girlie magazine images, American trucks, skyscrapers, whatever was up to date. I was doing something I felt was more ambiguous in time. Not being old necessarily, something that could actually exist now but was of a timeless nature. I do feel that if anything is worthwhile that it’s about its own time, but doesn’t mean that you actually have to reflect the time that specifically. I felt there was more scope in not choosing that kind of subject matter. It was coming mainly from American culture, as far as I could see. In fact I don’t think that was really the sort of life that one was leading anyway. One wasn’t leading the polished chrome, racy life that these images suggest’ (P. Caulfield, quoted in Patrick Caulfield: Paintings 1963-81, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London 1981, p. 16).
While the simplified, generic shapes of the ruins were most likely inspired by memories from Caulfield’s trips to Greece and Italy in the early 1960s, the romanticism of the composition owes a clear debt to the art of Eugène Delacroix, and in particular his painting Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi (1826). As Marco Livingstone has suggested, it was to this nineteenth-century European artistic tradition that Caulfield appears to have been aligning himself within these paintings: ‘In works such as […] View of the Ruins 1964, Caulfield presents his art, with self-depreciating irony, as heir to the Orientalism for which there was such a taste in 19th-century Britain … Far from rejecting tradition, Caulfield seeks to salvage it by taking it up in its most debased form and making it new again’ (M. Livingstone, ‘Patrick Caulfield: A Text for Silent Pictures’, in Art & Design, Vol. 7, No. 5/6, London 1992, p. 11). Shortly after the completion of View of the Ruins, Caulfield embarked upon his first experiments in screen printing, creating a related work Ruins, which appeared alongside the present composition in the artist’s first solo exhibition at the Robert Fraser Gallery in January 1965.