Kitchen Sink Realism
Kitchen sink realism (Cuspidor realism ) was an English cultural movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The direction existed in both theater and the visual arts, films and television.
The term “kitchen sink” referred to an expressionist painting by John Bratby that contained a picture of a kitchen sink . The critic David Sylvester wrote an article in 1954 about new trends in English art. He called the article "The Kitchen Sink" in reference to Bratby's painting. Sylvester claimed that there was an increased interest in "domestic scenes" among young artists, with a focus on the simplicity of life. Bratby painted several kitchen objects such as sieves and spoons, but not without depicting them in semi-abstract forms. He also painted bathrooms and made three paintings of toilets.
Other Kitchen sink artists were z. B. Derrick Greaves , Edward Middleditch and Jack Smith . Together they formed the “Kitchen sink school”.
The term was quickly applied to a new type of drama and emerging novels. Kitchen sink was a realistic representation of social life. Country houses and flower fields were out, iron shelves and other domestic furnishings were in; like in John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger , in which such things, such as an iron, were prominent objects on the stage. This was a reaction against the style advocated by Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan . In allusion to Osborne's play Look Back in Anger , a group of British playwrights and writers who portrayed Kitchen Sink Realism in their works and whose heroes were mostly “angry young men” of the working class were referred to as the Angry Young Men movement. Among them were u. a. also the playwrights Arnold Wesker and Shelagh Delaney and the novelists Kingsley Amis and Alan Sillitoe .
literature
- Kitchen Sink School . In: Ian Chilvers, John Glaves-Smith: Oxford Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2009, ISBN 978-0-19-923965-8 .
- Claude Lichtenstein (Ed.): As found. The discovery of the ordinary. Museum of Design, Zurich; Müller, Baden / Switzerland 2001, ISBN 3-907078-40-3 . Exhibition with the sections: British Architecture and Art of the 1950s; Parallel of life and art; New Brutalism; Independent group; Free cinema; Angry young men; Kitchen sink.
Web links
- Kitchen Sink painters at www.tate.org.uk
Individual evidence
- ^ John Walker: Glossary of Art, Architecture & Design since 1945. 3rd edition. London 1992, ISBN 0-85365-639-8 .
- ^ C. Wilson: The Angry Years: A Literary Chronicle: The Rise and Fall of the Angry Young Men. Robson, London 2007, ISBN 978-1-86105-972-7 .