Thus, she would come, escaped, half-dead to my door

Accession Number
2004/2.80.11

Title
Thus, she would come, escaped, half-dead to my door

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
Eleventh in a series of twenty-two screenprints by British Pop artist Patrick Caulfield, this print accompanies a book of poems by the French poet and art critic Jules Laforgue. An almost identical scene is depicted in the previous print in this series "Oh! If one of them, some fine evening, would try" (UMMA 2004/2.80.10).
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 poet's 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 depicts a wall-mounted coat rack, depicted with black-outlined grey zig-zag bars that connect to three yellow spheres above, and two red spheres below. There is a light grey shape hanging over the center sphere. The background is uniformly colored a peachy-beige. The print is signed and editioned in pencile (l.r.) "Patrick Caulfield AP".

Primary Object Classification
Print

Primary Object Type
artist's proof

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)
artists' proofs
coatracks
poetry
portfolios (groups of works)
screen prints

2 Related Resources

Home
(Part of 6 Learning Collections)
Visual Adaptations of Poetry
(Part of 2 Learning Collections)

& Author Notes

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