Kitchen Sink painters

The Kitchen Sink painters were a group of British artists working in the 1950s who depicted ordinary people in scenes of everyday, often drab and unappealing life. The term was first used by the critic David Sylvester as the title of an article in the December 1954 issue of Encounter, alluding to John Bratby's paintings of kitchen sinks, and ironically points to the artists' desire to show the most mundane and down-to-earth aspects of working-class domestic life: cluttered kitchens, cramped flats, dirty dishes and objects of daily use. The group included John Bratby, Jack Smith, Edward Middleditch and Derrick Greaves, whom the critic David Sylvester brought together under this label in the mid-1950s. Their style was marked by thick, vigorous brushwork, a muted palette and a pronounced social orientation. The movement was part of a broader tendency in British culture of the postwar decade, the so-called social realism and the literature of the Angry Young Men, which addressed themes of class, everyday life and social inequality. The work of the Kitchen Sink painters was set against both abstraction and salon aestheticism and represented British art at the Venice Biennale of 1956. Later some members, notably Bratby, moved away from this manner.