20th-Century Artist-Writers
Englishman John Bratby and Spaniard Antonio Tàpies
Early 20th-century expressionist artist Bratby and mixed-media artist Tàpies added components of writing to their repertoires.
Q. Which artist was the most prominent member of the Kitchen Sink school?
A. John Bratby
Bratby (1928-1992) was an English painter who became famous for an expressionistic style popular in the late 1950s known as "kitchen sink realism" after creating a painting depicting a kitchen sink. Bratby painted many kitchen subjects. He turned practical utensils like sieves, spoons, beer bottles and trashcans into semi-abstract shapes. He applied paint thickly, sometimes right from the tubes, and used bright colors to give these kitchen contraptions an almost three-dimensional effect. He also painted bathrooms, toilets and everyday urban scenes.
Art critic and modern-art promoter David Sylvester wrote an article about trends in British art entitling it "The Kitchen Sink" in reference to Bratby's picture. Sylvester emphasized that these kitchens were ones “in which ordinary people cooked ordinary food and doubtless lived their ordinary lives.” Sylvester argued that there was a new interest among young painters in domestic scenes, featuring a more realistic representation of social life, perhaps the banality of life, even domestic squalor. This new “Kitchen Sink” genre was an attempt for art to become an overt comment on social realism. The Kitchen Sink school was at first hailed as a form of gritty realism [in Bartby's own words "a grim ugly reality"] but was later dismissed and ultimately eclipsed by the rise of Pop Art in the 1960s. Today it is hard to imagine that Bartby's paintings of toilets and kitchen utensils were once considered vulgar and controversial.
But Bratby was popular enough in his day to be commissioned in 1958 to paint the giant mural in the film “The Horse’s Mouth” about what it means to be an artist. The movie is based on the very popular novel of the same name (1944) written by Joyce Cary – himself an artist – about broke but charming artist Gully Jimson who would do almost anything to find surfaces on which to create his art. Alec Guinness plays the artist , a bearded eccentric perhaps not unlike the artist John Bratby himself. Bratby was a successful novelist, too, writing and illustrating “Breakdown" after an unhappy six months spent in Rome. The novel is about a painter whose art and personality were remarkably like his own.
“Still Life with Chipfryer” (1954) can be seen today at the Tate Museum in London.
Q. Which artist wrote an influential essay in 1970 entitled “Nothing is Mean”?
A. Antonio Tàpies
The first paintings of Spanish self-taught artist Antonio Tàpies (b. 1923) were collages created from scraps of newspapers, tin foil, and string. Later he created works mostly done in gray interrupted only by scrape-marks, bright greens and reds, graffiti like semicircles and triangles, and large malformed letters like O’s and X’s. Then he started adding mixed media into his work, for example, adding clay and marble dust into his paints and working in thick gritty impasto, including pieces of rope, and then attaching more substantial objects like pieces of furniture. It was with these pieces that he gained notoriety.
Devoted to making the insignificant significant, Tàpies wrote about his feelings regarding the value of commonplace materials in artwork in his 1970 essay, “Nothing is Mean.” He is also the author of several books, including "Art Against Aesthetics," in which he espouses beliefs typical of the modern artist like the importance of spontaneity and improvisation in art and the need to reject tradition. He also wrote an autobiography entitled "Memoria Personal."
His life and work are memorialized in the Fundació Tàpies museum in Barcelona. A typical work like “Gray Relief on Black” (1959) can be seen at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Sources:
- Bailey, Colin J. The Art Quiz Book: 2000+ Questions on Painters and Paintings. Station Press: Scotland, 1995.
- Grove Dictionary of Art. Oxford University Press, 2007.
