One leaves the Patrick Caulfield exhibition longing to see more

In the wake of the Roy Lichtenstein blockbuster at Tate Modern comes Patrick Caulfield at Tate Britain, and what a contrast! Where Lichtenstein looks increasingly like a one-trick pony, an assessment driven home by the excessively large show, Caulfield emerges as fresh, witty and visually inventive. Undoubtedly this impression is fostered by the size of the exhibition: Tate Britain’s Linbury Galleries have been divided between Caulfield and Gary Hume, allowing each enough space for a highly focused solo exhibition. There are thus only 35 paintings by Caulfield spanning his entire career, and one leaves his show wanting to see more, not suffering from the usual museum overkill. This is an excellently selected and installed exhibition: a much-deserved tribute to one of the neglected greats of 20th-century art.

A victim of the art historian’s lust to categorise and pigeonhole, Patrick Caulfield (1936–2005) is all too frequently lumped with the Pop artists who came to prominence in the mid-1960s.