Summer landscape

In a landmark study published in Encounter in December 1954, art critic and curator David Sylvester noted how:

We have a pretty clear idea of the prevailing tastes of the generation of painters who have come of age since the war. They are fond of painting big pictures – often bigger than seems necessary – as if to do so were a matter of principle. They like laying it on thick when it comes to surface texture, as if they wanted to make painting a form of low-relief, often using the palette-knife to build up a heavy crust of paint, variations in the thickness of which take the place of variations of tone and colour, or dribbling paint straight from the tube on to the canvas. And beyond these characteristics common to so many young painters both abstract and realistic, the latter have another to themselves. It resides in their choice of subject matter when they are painting still lifes and interiors … The post-war generation takes us back from the studio to the kitchen … and even the baby’s nappies on the line.¹David Sylvester, ‘The Kitchen Sink’, Encounter, Dec. 1954, pp. 61–2.

With this analogy between the prosaic subject matter chosen by a group of contemporary British artists and the mundanity of domestic dishwashing, Sylvester defined and typecast a number of artists as Kitchen Sink painters. These included John Bratby, Jack Smith, Derrick Greaves and Edward Middleditch, who had all studied at the London’s Royal College of Art together, and who all subsequently exhibited at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London run by Helen Lessore (where they became known as ‘the Beaux Arts Quartet’). The four artists also exhibited together at Heffers Bookshop, Cambridge, in February 1955.²‘Four painters of the everyday. A Cambridge exhibition’, The Times, 15 Feb. 1955, p. 10. On the four artists see also ‘The Beaux Arts Gallery and some young British artists’, The Studio, vol. 154, no. 775, Oct.1957, pp. 110–13. It was noted in The Times that the paintings by these artists had ‘excited such fervent admiration, and such appalled distaste – and often for reasons of a sociological nature which seem to have little to do with the art of painting’, reflecting criticism of their questionable subject matter such as unkempt flats, dirty linen and even toilets.³‘The realism of Mr John Bratby’, The Times, 27 Sept. 1955, p. 3. For some critics, this was taking Social Realism, the painting of the prosaic reality of everyday life, too far.

A similar polarising effect was observed concerning Middleditch’s solo exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery in February 1956, where the critic for The Times felt that

in his art will be found all that is admirable, and all that may be deplored, in the work of the ‘Realist’ painters. Admirable are the attempts to come decisively to grips with nature, the unfeigned interest in the sights of daily life, the boldness of attack, the vigour of execution. Less attractive are the sometimes Brodbingnagian inflation of the picture to a scale disproportionate to its sometimes Lilliputian theme, the summary treatment verging on poster art, the drabness of colour, the superficiality of drawing.⁴‘The “politics” of painting. Mr Middleditch’s position, The Times, 14 Feb. 1956, p. 10.

Middleditch’s Summer landscape, 1955, was a classic example of this; a canvas of imposing size depicting in extreme close-up a small patch of interlocked grasses, flowers and leaves whose seemingly impenetrable mass dwarfs a wind-gnarled tree seen in the middle distance. In contrast to the Times critic’s reference to ‘drabness of colour’, Summer landscape’s palette is a vivid double act of golden yellow and deep lapis lazuli blue. Its composition reflects what The Times had dubbed in 1954 Middleditch’s

‘micro-landscapes’ … casual glimpses, familiar enough though seldom considered in the least worthy of attention, of small things looming for a moment enormous in the front of the field of vision.⁵‘Landscape painting. Mr Edward Middleditch experiments’, The Times, 24 Mar. 1954, p. 12.

This ‘great yellow “Summer Landscape”’ was selected as ‘Picture of the month’ by Apollo magazine in March 1956.⁶Perspex, ‘Current shows and comments. Surfaces and symbols’, Apollo, vol. 63, no. 73, Mar. 1956, pp. 69–70. The painting was reproduced in Apollo and also in Burlington Magazine in the same month, where it was noted that the Felton Bequest had acquired the work for the NGV. ‘Some of [Middleditch’s] work has the slightly precious quality of Japanese arts’, the Burlington critic observed, ‘but at other times he can express himself with a vigour almost akin to van Gogh’.⁷D.L.A.F., ‘Current and forthcoming exhibitions’, The Burlington Magazine, vol. 98, no. 636, Mar. 1956, p. 99.

The chromatic lyricism of Summer landscape and other pastoral and nature studies that Middleditch created in the 1950s challenged his categorisation as an artist of the Kitchen Sink School.⁸John Minton satirised the contemporary obsession with seeking left-wing and social realist agendas in the work of these young artists. In an article on Greaves, Middleditch and Smith in 1955: ‘Here are presented three young painters; self-aware, ambitious. Doom being in, and Hope being out, the search among the cosmic dustbins is on, the atomic theme is unravelled: the existentialist railway station to which there is no more arrival and no more departure … Is it valid? Does it relate? Is it socially significant? The critics cry, and in answering themselves fil their columns’. John Minton, ‘Three young contemporaries’, Ark, no. 13, 1955, p. 12. This ambiguity was noted by the critic for the Studio, who wrote of his 1956 exhibition:

Elbow room is a necessity to this young painter, and his landscapes and still lives gain in impressiveness by their scale and their bold monochrome brushwork. It has become usual to describe Middleditch as a realist yet it is a term that describes his ready acceptance of a given viewpoint only when it suits his purpose’.⁹G. S. Whittet, ‘London Commentary’, The Studio, vol. 151, no. 758, May 1956, p. 155.

While Middleditch did paint his share of gritty urban and domestic scenes, these were outweighed by his predilection for landscape and botanical still-life motifs. As a critic remarked on his contribution to a group show in London in November 1956:

Mr Middleditch has always seemed to be in a rather less exasperated humour than some of his associates, and recently his work has been getting progressively gayer and lighter. The two flower-pieces, which are all he is exhibiting here, are now in fact quite unashamedly hedonistic.¹⁰ ‘Realists all: British painters at Adams Gallery’, The Times, 8 Nov. 1956, p. 3. The artist’s dealer at the Beaux Arts Gallery, Helen Lessore, argued in 1988 that: ‘It is strange that he was ever included in … the group labelled by David Sylvester “The Kitchen Sink Painters”, who for a time waived the flag of Social Realism. Middleditch has never been interested in Realism, social or of any other kind, nor in any “cause”, or movement, or fashion. He is purely a poet of appearances, which makes it very difficult to find any just or useful words to say about his art’. Helen Lessore, ‘The work of Edward Middleditch’, in Helen Lessore and Lynda Morris, Edward Middleditch, The South Bank Centre, London, 1987, p. 3. Middleditch’s association with the Kitchen Sink School has recently been questioned also by Martin Harrison: ‘One of the more problematical terms in art discourse, realism has tended to be applied to British art of the Fifties as though it were synonymous with the Social Realism postulated by the [Marxist] critic John Berger … In retrospect Edward Middleditch and Derrick Greaves seem scarcely to qualify as Kitchen Sink painters’. Martin Harrison, Transition. The London Art Scene in the Fifties, Merrill Publishers and Barbican Art Galleries, London, 2002, pp. 74, 86.

Ted Gott, Senior Curator, International Art, National Gallery of Victoria