Pop art besides that old can of soup

COURTESY YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART Caulfield piles pop pot atop pop pot.

A star of British pop art is enjoying an exclusive American engagement at the Yale Center for British Art. Patrick Caulfield: A Retrospective is a small but comprehensive exhibit of the British artist's life work that strives to reestablish in America the reputation that Caulfield has enjoyed abroad since he came onto the scene in the late '50s. The exhibit has a tough goal, though, since what could be more Pop for us, and yet more American, than Andy Warhol's Campbell soup cans?

Patrick Caulfield is most successful in showing the artist's progression through the second half of this century. It's billed as a retrospective, and walking through the gallery you literally look back at the 40 years that are represented. Though the exhibit doesn't boast an abundance of paintings, the ones that are included are excellent indicators of Caulfield's development through the decades. Along the way, he makes references to a bevy of artists, including Magritte, Hopper, Rosenquist, and Warhol. Yet the exhibit also shows that this Brit has a few things to say for himself.

Like his contemporaries in New York in the late '50s and early '60s, Caulfield focused on the everyday object as his subject matter. However, rather than relying on mass-produced images, he looked for a simplified view. "Pony" (1964) depicts this animal painted across a board. The taupe background is only interrupted by a single black line that runs horizontally behind the pony, indicating a direction in energy as its body leans forward. Objects take on an almost cartoonish quality, reduced to a flat outline and a single solid color, as in his "Perfume Jar" of the same year. This can also be seen in one of Caulfield's most recognizable images, "Pottery," (1969) in which rows of pots in various shapes and bright colors reduce the elements to outline and filler.

Caulfield has expressed a deep admiration for the American painter Edward Hopper, and Hopper's influence is evident in Caulfield's work from the '70s. Here the canvases get really interesting, causing the viewer to enter Caulfield's strange world of linear and monochromatic reality. Paintings are blown up to large wall-sized scenes of reductive interiors, where Caulfield shows cafés without diners and bars without drinkers, bringing the background of typical pictures to the forefront. "Dining Recess" (1972) depicts a purple-gray dining area. Black lines show the paneled walls, the table and the chairs. A window at the top of the large composition indicates a beautiful, deep blue, evening sky. Most striking in the picture is a large, white globe light that hangs down over the table. There is an eerie emptiness to the scene, absent of any natural light or truly human elements. In "Town and Country" (1979) there are so many patterns going on, that it's dizzying. This large canvas gives the effect of a frenetically designed diorama box opening up into a world of wooded calm. The works are most successful in their suggestion that different levels of reality can intersect and share space on the canvas.

Caulfield's later work continues to play with the idea of incorporating objects of heightened realism among his flat, linear scapes. But the backgrounds are increasingly opaque and unyielding colors, as in his earliest canvases. Light also gains prominence in these compositions, casting interiors in heightened brilliance and deep shadows from often unseen sources. The geometric shadows have as much weight as the objects themselves. After the dramatic, huge canvases from the '70s and early '80s, Caulfield's latest work is a bit anticlimactic, with little new to say. Luckily, in order to exit the exhibit, you must walk back past all his other paintings; thus you certainly are not left in silence.

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