WE WANTED TO BLEED THE SILENCE (FROM SOME POEMS OF JULES LAFORGUE), 1973
signed Patrick Caulfield and numbered AP lower right in pencil
screenprint on paper
40 x 35.7cm (image); (60.6 x 55.4cm sheet); (68 x 63.1cm framed)

From Edition C, with wide margins, signed on the front. One of 20 AP's aside from the edition of 100.
Published by Petersburg Press in association with Waddington Galleries, London.
Proofed by Advanced Graphics, London, and editioned by Frank Kicherer, Stuttgart Books.
(Dempsey 38m)

We Wanted to Bleed the Silence comes from the twenty-two screenprints Patrick Caulfield created in 1973 to accompany Some Poems of Jules Laforgue, co-published in London by Petersburg Press and Waddington Galleries. Initial production of these images overlapped with Caulfield’s return to Chelsea School of Art as a teacher in the Paintings department from 1963-71. The coming together of Caulfield and Laforgue was inspired. Laforgue (1860-1887), the Symbolist whose free verse would so profoundly shape the young T. S. Eliot, wrote a poetry of ennui and deflated romance that found its perfect visual equivalent in Caulfield's flat, unmodulated colour and impassive black contour. The result is characteristically deadpan, and melancholy.

Caulfield’s proximity to Pop art was a source of ongoing frustration for him, regarding himself as a formal artist valuing clarity and deliberation, above the disposable flippancy of Pop. The considered sobriety of much of his work, and its thoughtful, well balanced, precise character, was at odds with Pop’s exuberance. His contemporaries mined advertising, packaging and celebrity, whereas Caulfield looked to Toulouse-Lautrec, Gris, Léger and the European still life, and to the anonymous décor of bars, restaurants and hotel lobbies. His subjects are not consumer goods but generic settings, painted from imagination rather than observation, and almost always emptied of people.