To subscribe to Afterall journal, starting with this issue, please click here.
Alternatively, if you wish to purchase this article individually, you may do so via JSTOR. Please follow the instructions on this page.I know that I've seen this painting somewhere before. The jovial mix of a flat-coloured, hard-lined interior with the pitch-perfect mountain view through the window. I go home; I rifle through my shelves to get to that 'a-ha' moment. I reach it when I pull out the Routledge Companion to AestheticsAfter Lunch from 1975, owned by Tate Modern in London. (2001), a hastily purchased book meant to help my transition into art school. There it is on the cover, all cool and funny with a small trapezoid of Romanticism pushed to its left edge: Patrick Caulfield's
Shortly thereafter I realise that this, too, is hasty. I feel as if I know it in some other way. Of course, the black-outlined chairs and brightly painted café recall some easily retrieved examples of American pop art, but that is not enough. What about that strange light under the table? I guess that is the door out of this place, but I cannot leave yet with the rest of the interior still to explore. The aquarium: the small globs of bright orange double as fish and suggest a tightened-up version of Matisse's fish bowl. I finally realise that it is that scene out of the window. It is not that I actually have been to the Château de Chillon in Switzerland, but I am sure that it, or something nearly identical, appeared in one of the many jigsaw puzzles that my family worked on together in the holiday season during my childhood.1 Such images were an escape from the snowed in, not-so-idyllic suburbs of Chicago, and marked a destination in two senses: to get to
