Skip to main content

All the benches are wet, the woods are so rusty

Patrick Caulfield; Frank Kicherer; Advanced Graphics ; Petersburg Press; Waddington Graphics

Artwork Details

All the benches are wet, the woods are so rusty
1973
Patrick Caulfield; Frank Kicherer; Advanced Graphics ; Petersburg Press; Waddington Graphics
screenprint on paper
16 1/8 in x 14 3/16 in (41 cm x 36 cm);24 in x 22 1/16 in (61 cm x 56 cm)
Gift of Jack A. and Noreen Rounick
2004/2.80.19

Description

Subject Matter:

Nineteenth in a series of twenty-two, this print accompanies a book of poems by the French poet and art critic Jules Laforgue and 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 shows a cluster of branches coming from the left side of the page, and they are outlined in thick black lines and colored in a deep orange. The background is a solid purple color.

Usage Rights:

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