Seen in Storage: Patrick Caulfield

Patrick Caulfield (b.1936 – 2005)
Small Window at Night
Screenprint
39.5 x 29.25 in.
Gift of Fred Nederlander

Patrick Caulfield was an English painter and printmaker renown for his bold paintings that often incorporated elements of photorealism. He flattened ordinary objects, rendering three-dimensional perspectives on a flat plane. Interested in surrealist painters such as Giorgio de Chirico, Caulfield took a playful approach to his paintings.

Since 1963, Caulfield has infused sense of curiosity into empty architectural spaces. In particular, his early oil paintings in the ’60’s placed the viewer in the dark outside a building, obscuring everything but the brightly lit interior, leading us to venture into the activity within. Small Window at Night follows such theme explored by Caulfield; however, in this work, the viewer is standing in the interior, looking at the dark emptiness of night through the window. The vertical pink and blue stripes are divergent from a mundane interior, but instead hints at the opening of a Punch and Judy booth of traditional puppet shows. The vivid colors thus bring to mind childhood memory and nostalgia.

As a viewer in the time of COVID-19, I find this piece rather unsettling. For me, the colors are saturated to muddied, candy-like pigments; against the darkness of the sky, the painting lies at the edge of uncertainty and eeriness. The verticality of stripes imprisons me in the artwork’s interior and the youthful colors conjure up childhood memories I revisit with stay-at-home orders. Looking out the window implies hope, yet the dark blue seems gloomy and cheerless.

Caulfield’s work reminds me of Roger Brown’s Hi Rise Sunset, 1976. In Brown’s work, the experience of the viewer observing silhouette figures in individual windows reveals anonymous intimacy. In the two works, the viewer may relate to the sentiment of being confined indoors while looking forward to human interaction and contact.

Small Window at Night was originally one of a set four designs and a maquette for a print entitled Window at Night, while considered a complete painting in its own right.

Adrienne Lee ’21