You'll be sick if you spend all your time indoors

Accession Number
2004/2.80.6

Title
You'll be sick if you spend all your time indoors

Artist(s)
Patrick Caulfield

Artist Nationality
British (modern)

Object Creation Date
1973

Medium & Support
screenprint on paper

Dimensions
16 1/8 in x 14 3/16 in (40.96 cm x 36.04 cm);24 in x 22 1/16 in (60.96 cm x 56.04 cm)

Credit Line
Gift of Jack A. and Noreen Rounick

Subject matter
Sixth in a series of twenty-two, this print is included in a book of poems by the French poet and art critic Jules Laforgue and accompanied by screenprints by British Pop artist Patrick Caulfield. Admired by the artist, Laforgue was a nineteenth-century symbolist poet who was one of the inventors of vers libre or "free verse" poetry. This new form of poetic verse relied on the phrase as a unit rather than constraining the poetic verse to set numbers of syllables. Laforgue’s poetry became important for later poets like T.S. Eliot because of its blending of observations of everyday life with poetic associations. In this book, Caulfield used the long-dead poets verses as inspiration for twenty-two scenes, created in colorful screenprint. Of these prints, Caulfield noted that “They are not illustrations but complementary images. There are few visually descriptive lines in Laforgue. The images suggest the things I have imagined the poet seeing when he wrote the poem…”

Physical Description
This print has a series of thick black lines arranged vertically in regular intervals, that are stoped at the top by a doubled diagonal line.  At the top center, there is a heart shape, outlined in black and colored in with a bright blue. The whole print, save the blue heart, is a dark hunter green.

Primary Object Classification
Print

Primary Object Type
color print

Collection Area
Modern and Contemporary

Rights
If you are interested in using an image for a publication, please visit http://umma.umich.edu/request-image for more information and to fill out the online Image Rights and Reproductions Request Form.

Keywords
Pop (fine arts styles)
artists' books (books)
doors
hearts (motifs)
lumber
poetry
portfolios (groups of works)
screen prints

13 Related Resources

Home
(Part of 6 Learning Collections)
Visual Adaptations of Poetry
(Part of 2 Learning Collections)
Causes of Disease
(Part of: History of Medicine - American Association of Historians of Medicine (AAHM))
Sickness and Suffering
(Part of: History of Medicine - American Association of Historians of Medicine (AAHM))
Graphic and composition
(Part of: Design)
Pioneer HS Short Stories Unit
(Part of: For Educators)
C / C Teaching Guide : Perspectives on Health and Health Care 
(Part of: Resources Made by Isabel Engel)

& Author Notes

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