Patrick Caulfield: Poems of Jules Laforgue

This exhibition brought together a nineteenth-century poet with a twentieth-century artist, best known for his work as a Pop artist.

The twenty-two brightly coloured screen prints in this exhibition were made for a book of poems by the French poet, Jules Laforgue (1860-1887). They are not illustrations to the text, but complementary images, where the melancholy atmosphere of Caulfield’s interiors finds a direct counterpart in Laforgue’s poetry, whose work Caulfield had admired since first reading it in 1961.

Patrick Caulfield writes: ‘The images suggest the things I have imagined the poet seeing when he wrote the poem: a banal starting point for a quasi-romantic excursion. Where I have used images not contemporary to Laforgue, it is to suggest the freshness of his poetry today.’

Patrick Caulfield was born in London in 1936. He has exhibited widely, most recently at the Hayward Gallery in 1999 and he is probably best known for his still lifes and interiors, with strong, flat colours outlined in black.