Interior with Room Divider

Were he an unnamed Renaissance painter, Patrick Caulfield might well be known as the Master of the Empty Room, so vividly did he place such unpopulated domestic and public interiors at the centre of his art. Though it was only in 1969, six years after he had completed his studies at the Royal College of Art, that he made large canvases of such subjects presented more or less in their actual dimensions, he recognised almost immediately that he had found material to fuel his imagination for the rest of his life. The first such paintings, including Inside a Weekend Cabin (Manchester Art Gallery) and Inside a Swiss Chalet (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid), are essentially monochromatic grounds overlaid with a black linear drawing; they represent places of romantic retreat and escape that nevertheless stubbornly reminded the viewer that humdrum reality had merely been theatrically reconfigured as a place for the mind to wander. The weekend cabin, suffused in a brown, ‘woody’, atmosphere, contains a table incongruously neatly covered with a white tablecloth; clean, tidy and uncluttered, with perfectly straight boards enclosing the entire surface, the space suggests rusticity while retaining a minimalist urban aesthetic. The entirely green Swiss chalet, similarly, insists with slightly comical exaggeration on its Alpine credentials with such details as hard-backed chairs with cut-out heart motifs. Through such means, Caulfield directs the viewer to think about places ‘far away’, only to bring one back resoundingly to reality, just as he leads the eye into the depths of pictorial space and then back to the surface through a networking of interlocking black lines of uniform width.

Interior with Room Divider, like the Interior with Shelf Units he had painted in 1969, takes the spectator into a wholly contemporary and bluntly prosaic space that rejects even the momentary release into fantasy suggested by the ostensibly exotic interiors that had preceded them. The flat, perfectly even colours that describe the walls and dado rail humbly link the painter’s art to the efficient quotidian technique of the painter-decorator. The surfaces of the box-like functional chairs upholstered in leatherette, the maroon wall-to-wall carpet, the light-emitting lampshade of the standard lamp and the ellipse of yellow illuminating the interior of an Anglepoise desk lamp are all represented with the same steadfast clarity. There is nothing in the painting that overtly signifies artistic handling, no visible brushmarks, no gradations of colour or tone. Yet for all its boldness and rejection of the belle peinture tradition, and despite the vividness of the strong colours filling in the drawn shapes as if on the pages of a colouring book, the picture lingers in the mind as a kind of dream image of marvellous subtlety. The atmosphere borders on the melancholic, as so often in Caulfield’s work, the bright red, orange and yellow all tempered by the darker hues that define an artificially illuminated windowless room. The sense of claustrophobia is heightened by the subdivision of an already small space by means of a freestanding compartmentalised room divider of the sort then popular in the pages of interior design magazines and in Habitat and other furniture shops for the aspirational middle classes.

Caulfield here, as in all his work, never expresses condescension towards popular taste or the way people choose to live. The tone is ambivalent. There is a loneliness conveyed by the uncluttered look of an empty room, but the imaginary location is animated by our presence as spectators. The picture conveys both self-denial, as much in its pictorial language as in the lack of creature comforts represented, but also a pleasing serenity in its meditation on the present moment: what in 2015 jargon, ten years after the artist’s death, one might voguishly refer to as ‘mindfulness’. It is left to each of us to respond to the look of the place either as overly clinical and unhomely or as pleasingly clean-lined and modern. The clock on the wall speaks of time passing uneventfully, but also of time standing still, as it must, in a painted image. The scene emits a certain bleakness and lack of comfort, yet remains paradoxically inviting thanks to the precision of the imagery and of the picture’s formal construction and elegant perfection.

Caulfield consistently rejected his deserved place as one of the pioneers of Pop Art in Britain during the early 1960s, or at least denied the suitability of the label. On the occasion of a major Pop Art survey exhibition in 1991, in which his work figured prominently, he described the movement rather disparagingly as ‘Social Realism without emotion’, seeking to distance himself from the blatant embrace of contemporary consumer culture that he felt was Pop’s real subject but not his. There is indeed a particular strength in Caulfield’s paintings with regard to their sense of timelessness, but more than forty years on the pictures speak inevitably, too, of the circumstances and the society within which they were made. Perhaps despite the artist’s own distaste for the idea of documenting contemporary life, Interior with Room Divider, like much of his art, serves as an eloquent metaphor for a society in transition, for shifting taste and for the way we live now.

We are very grateful to Marco Livingstone for preparing this catalogue entry.