Dr. Caligari Clock, Wendell Castle

Exhibition Label: "Wendell Castle: About Time," Sep-2008, Lara Kuykendall and Susan Earle The artist saw the 1920 silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari while a student at the University of Kansas. “I was impressed with it but never thought about how I might use it as inspiration until much later,” he recalls. “And I remember the film vividly from that moment, and what I remember about it is not so much the storyline but the visuals. The sets were painted with slashing brushstrokes. The paintings and the furniture seemed slightly askew and abstract. Those two things I wanted to bring into the vocabulary. The clock is blue-it’s the only piece of my Caligari furniture that’s blue, but I thought that so many of those black-and-white films look slightly blue. I avoided looking at the film while I was making the furniture. And I didn’t look at it again until after I was finished with the series.”