Les Demoiselles d'Avignon vues de derrière
Patrick Caulfield, a painter and printmaker since the 1960s, shares Pop art's detached and ironic view of the world in his pictures, which mix vivid, everyday scenes with bold designs. The Tate has built up a broad collection of his graphic work. This new screenprint is a play on Picasso's famously confrontational painting depicting prostitutes, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which marked the beginning of Cubism. Caulfield has reversed Picasso's image so that instead of viewing the women frontally, we peer at them from behind. The reversal of this image is both a visual pun on the printing process, which reverses the original design, and a verbal pun on the French word derrière, which means rear end.
