By Shannon Hicks

NEW HAVEN — Patrick Caulfield has never before been featured in a one-man exhibition of his work in the United States. The idea that this artist, who has been working for nearly 50 years and is considered one of the original and most influential of the British Pop artists, has never had his own show on the soil of North America is astonishing.

Through January 9, the Yale Center for British Art is changing all that by presenting a major retrospective of Mr Caulfield’s work. One of the “New Generation” of British painters who rose to prominence during the swinging Sixties in London, today Mr Caulfield is revered as a living legend.

Pop Art was born in London during the 1950s. The genre is punctuated by seemingly simplistic works done with bright colors, and a style that is both realistic and abstract at the same time (think of Warhol’s depictions of Campbell’s Soup cans or Lichtenstein’s cartoon-style “dot” paintings). The origination of Pop in England came as a direct reaction against then-popular Abstract Expressionism’s non-representational art.

Mr Caulfield was in New Haven recently to walk through the Yale Center for British Art show, along with Patrick McCaughey. Mr McCaughey is director of YCBA and was curator of “Patrick Caulfield: A Retrospective” for its New Haven visit. The show includes over 50 paintings, the majority of which are vivid large-scale works dominated by the distinctive black lines for which Mr Caulfield’s work has become famous.

“I could not embrace abstracts,” Mr Caulfield, now in his early 60s, said recently. “I tried everything, and just could not embrace that.”

It was after visiting the monumental “The New American Painting” exhibition at Tate Gallery in early 1959 that Mr Caulfield made an attempt at abstract painting. A collective of paintings by the artist Philip Guston, one of the 17 New York School artists featured in the exhibition, forged a lasting impression on the young Caulfield.

Mr Caulfield made a number of his own abstract paintings loosely based on Guston’s work. But that experiment was short-lived, and seemed to only strengthen Mr Caulfield’s resolve to do away with what he once called the “misty brushstrokes and atmospheric painting” of abstractionism.

Instead, Mr Caulfield turned his attention — and paintbrushes — to the growing interest by English artists to interpret everyday life and its ornaments. That interest was the foundling stages of what became internationally known as Pop Art.

By the time Mr Caulfield visited the Tate show in 1959, he had finished a few terms of evening classes at Harrow School of Art, along with four years of study at Chelsea School of Art, where he first studied graphic design before transferring to the painting department. It was also while at Chelsea that Mr Caulfield met Jack Smith, whom Mr Caulfield would later call “the most influential person” of that period of the artist’s life.

When Mr Caulfield entered Royal College of Art in 1960 — after failing on his own merits but receiving a favor from Chelsea principal and artist Lawrence Gowing — he was already experimenting with decorator’s gloss paint on hardboard (a/k/a masonite).

“I liked the impersonal surface they produced,” Mr Caulfield told Bryan Robertson in late 1998. The writer Mr Robertson and the artist had six lengthy conversations last October and November, the main ideas of which have been pared down into an interesting essay included in the exhibition catalogue. “The deliberate kitsch elements were perhaps a distinctive part of them,” Mr Caulfield explained. The exclusion of people from the majority of his paintings, he also says, was a conscious decision.

The retrospective at Yale Center for British Art offers visitors a look at one of the most distinctive voices of the era of Pop Art. As YCAB director Patrick McCaughey pointed out, “[Caulfield’s] reputation in America has not kept pace with his reputation abroad… He deserves to be far better known and more widely recognized in the United States.”

In fact, when curators were hanging the exhibition last month, Mr McCaughey said, gallery visitors who stumbled into the space devoted to the Caulfield exhibition were stunned to learn the typically large-scale works were done by an English artist.

“People entering the rooms during the show-changing had comments like ‘My God, I never thought British painters actually painted in colors,’” Mr McCaughey chuckled. “These are bright, brilliant works.”

As the exhibition moves from a presentation of works which offer a “drastically simplified view of everyday objects,” said Mr McCaughey, to the pieces done during the Seventies, the influence of photorealism on Mr Caulfield is unmistakable. While the absence of humans generally continues — his paintings look at offices and office parties without employees (“After Work” and “Office Party,” respectively, both of 1977), cafes without diners (“Paradise Bar,” 1974), bars without patrons (“Happy Hour,” 1996), et al — the bold black lines of the artist’s earlier paintings also begin to disappear.

In their place appears a combination of smaller black lines and realistic images inserted into views. “Still Life: Mother’s Day,” done in 1965, on loan from the collection of Leslie and Clodagh Waddington, presents a side table, lamp, telephone and vase, all done in the traditional Pop Art vein. Inside the globe vase, however, is a pink rose that is as realistic as one can get. The aforementioned “Happy Hour,” done just two years ago, is another splendid example of Mr Caulfield’s genre-blending, done without any of his trademark black lines, bold or thin.

One of the things that keeps Pop Art distinct is its tendency for and acceptance of exaggeration. No one gave Andy Warhol a terribly hard time, for instance, because his Campbell’s Soup cans were not exact down to the last detail, yet his images are instantly recognizable.

Similarly, Mr Caulfield pointed out that his own works are not meant to be representative of the layout of every location he paints.

“The works,” he said earlier this month, “are usually something I envisioned, in very simplified forms.”

The painting “Paradise Bar” and its companion piece “After Lunch,” which are positioned alongside each other in New Haven, are perfect examples of Pop Art’s penchant for accepted exaggeration.

“This is my memory of this restaurant,” the artist explained while introducing the pair of works. “I was absolutely amazed by this restaurant. I used to go there for lunch, and would then come back home and try to remember it.”

The exhibition catalogue available at the Yale Center was produced and published on the occasion of the exhibition “Patrick Caulfield,” which debuted at London’s Hayward Gallery earlier this year. The exhibition opened at the Hayward in February, where it stayed for three months. In April the exhibition opened for a two-month run in Luxembourg. It was then presented in Lisbon for 2½ months before arriving in New Haven for an October 27 opening.

The Yale Center’s decision to present Mr Caulfield’s retrospective was done, Mr McCaughey said, “in the hope that it may reestablish Patrick Caulfield’s pre-eminent reputation as a contemporary painter in the US.”

It is an important show for an artist who has been practicing steadily since his decision to become a painter at the age of 15.

“The exhibition in London was not only huge commercially, but also very popular,” said Richard Riley, the British Council visual arts department exhibition officer. The British Council is the co-organizer, along with Hayward Gallery, of the traveling exhibition.

“This first American showing of a solo exhibition of Mr Caulfield’s work comes at the end of a long tour, but it is probably one of his most important shows ever.”