“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
Born in 1860, the Symbolist poet Jules Laforgue was a pioneer of free verse poetry in nineteenth-century France. Frequently credited as a major influence on the writings of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, the present lot highlights the enduring reach of Laforgue’s words. In this portfolio of twenty-two screenprints, Patrick Caulfield takes Laforgue’s poetry as a departure point for each composition. Rendered through the artist’s characteristic use of graphic line and bold colours, Caulfield reimagines the sights that might have inspired Laforgue’s writing for a modern audience. To further emphasise his admiration for Laforgue’s work, Caulfield directly lifts lines from Laforgue’s poetry to form the titles of the individual prints within this portfolio. For example, Watch me eat, without appetite, à la carte is taken from Laforgue’s Complaint About a Certain Sunday, and Caulfield’s print envisages the poet to be seated at a restaurant when he composed these lines. Similarly, the screenprint All the benches are wet, the woods are so rusty takes its title from the poet’s The Coming Winter, with Caulfield depicting leafless orange branches in a bid to recreate the sort of environment he assumes would have inspired Laforgue. Indebted to Laforgue’s written words, Caulfield’s screenprints form a visual poem dedicated to the literary pioneer, as suggested by the portfolio’s title.