Kitchen Sink School

This term was coined by art critic David Sylvester in 1954 and referred to a group of British social realist painters popular in mid-1950's who focused their work deliberately on the unglamorous. Sylvester described the artists as painting 'everything except the kitchen sink, no, the kitchen sink too'. Their pictures were populated with drab everyday objects depicting British post-war austerity, notably interior scenes of domestic clutter and detritus. These included commonplace subject matter of daily life like cluttered kitchens, backyards and slum tenements. The School consisted primarily of John Bratby, Derrick Greaves, Edward Middleditch, Leslie Duxbury and Jack Smith. After graduating from the Royal College of Art, they showed regularly as a group at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London during the early to mid-1950's, and in 1956 they were invited by the British Council to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale. Within a decade it had fallen out of favour as Britain began to “swing” into the 1960's.