British painter and printmaker, born in London, where he studied at Chelsea School of Art, 1956–9, and the *Royal College of Art, 1959–63. In 1963 he began teaching at Chelsea School of Art and in 1965 he had his first one-man exhibition at the Robert Fraser Gallery, London. His work has been linked with *Pop art, although when introducing his work in 1964 he invoked, not the currently fashionable mass media theorists, but the Catholic poet and mystic Gerard Manley Hopkins. However, his work shared with artists such as Peter *Blake and David *Hockney a sense that the imagery was ‘in quotation marks’, so undermining the division between abstract and figurative art. The flat colour and black outlines of his painting (in his early work the impersonal surface was achieved by the use of gloss paint on board) were sometimes compared to Roy *Lichtenstein, although the American painter's work was unknown to him when Caulfield first established his style.

Text source: A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art (Oxford University Press)


Do you know someone who would love this resource?
Tell them about it...