Jack Smith was among those artists whose work was famously labelled by the art critic David Sylvester in 1954, as coming from the ‘Kitchen Sink School’ of postwar realism. Smith, who was becoming known at this time for painting domestic interiors peopled with babies and strewn with their detritus and other everyday objects, soon set about distancing himself from Sylvester’s description. While Sylvester had presumed a faux grittiness in Smith’s domestic paintings, where ‘the kitchen is furnished like a poor man’s kitchen, but the painter might equally have been painting a rich man’s drawing-room’, the artist himself was later to argue that his work actually ‘had nothing to do with social commitment. If I had lived in a palace I would have painted the chandeliers’.1David Sylvester, ‘The Kitchen Sink’, Encounter, vol. 3, no. 6, Dec. 1954, p. 63; Jack Smith, in Julian Spalding, The Forgotten Fifties, Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield, 1984, p. 49.
In September 1956, at London’s Beaux Arts Gallery, Smith exhibited a number of paintings of men’s shirts hanging on indoor clotheslines. The earlier interiors with haphazardly placed domestic clutter gave way now to more structured scenes, where Smith’s objects were invested with clearly symbolic, often Christian, meanings. The centrepiece of this show was his early masterpiece Creation and Crucifixion, 1955–56 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), in which an arrangement of three shirts represented the crucified Christ and the two thieves. The work won first prize in the inaugural John Moores Painting Prize the following year in 1957, thereafter entering the collection of the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. In this series of paintings, Smith said, ‘I wanted to make the ordinary miraculous’.2Smith, in Spalding, p. 49.
The same exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery in 1956 included Two chairs on fire, 1956. As Jack Smith recalled:
There were two paintings, if I remember rightly, called ‘Burning Chairs’. The other one I eventually destroyed. The subject matter was suggested to me by watching a bonfire in a garden. In 1957 I was changing my visual language, so Burning Chairs is one of the last paintings of that earlier period.3Jack Smith, letter to Annette Dixon, former Curator, National Gallery of Victoria, 18 Mar. 1988, artist files, National Gallery of Victoria.
The London art writer G. S. Whittet felt that in such paintings Smith was now
transmuting household objects as subject matter … Smith enlarges, isolates and dramatizes his hanging shirts, his burning chairs, his electric fire, so that the object not the artist is the focal point of vision.4G. S. Whittet, ‘London Commentary’, The Studio, vol. 152, no. 765, Dec. 1956, p. 187.
Writing in The Listener (1956), critic Alan Clutton-Brock noted how ‘Mr Jack Smith can be relied upon to bring out in each of his successive exhibitions some frightening and electric transformation of yet another object of domestic use’.5Alan Clutton-Brock, ‘Round the London galleries’, The Listener, vol. 56, no. 1435, 27 Sep. 1956, p. 472; quoted in James Hyman, The Battle for Realism. Figurative Art in Britain During the Cold War 1945–1960, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2001, p. 184. The Times (1956) argued, however, that
the most significant evolution in Mr. Smith’s new style, is that he is now achieving a greater degree of abstraction in his art, even when he is portraying objects in a quite recognizable way. By doing this, he weds, as all great artists have done, the elements of realism and of abstraction together. For there is a sense in which even the greatest ‘realist’ artists of past centuries have also, in fact, been ‘abstract’, in so far as they have portrayed the visible world not purely in a descriptive, literal way, but – by the use of an analytical intelligence – have ‘abstracted’ from reality those forms and colours which seemed to them most clearly to express the true nature and appearance of the objects they were seeking to depict.6‘Developments in the art of Mr. Jack Smith’, The Times, 19 Sep. 1956, p. 3.
The subject of unwanted furniture being consigned to a bonfire might well be read as a metaphor for Jack Smith’s sudden renunciation of figuration altogether, after 1956. If the emphasis placed upon urban domesticity by realist painters of the 1950s seemed to threaten British art’s traditional faith in the restorative symbolism of landscape painting, so too did the rising hegemony of abstraction. The American Abstract Expressionists featured strongly in the exhibition Modern Art in the United States, which opened at London’s Tate Gallery at the start of 1956, signalling the new primacy of non-representational painting. Writer Martin Harrison noted how ‘Jack Smith’s renouncement of figurative or political content is a paradigm for a major shift in British art’ at this time.7Martin Harrison, Transition. The London Art Scene in the Fifties, Merrill with Barbican Art, London, 2002, p. 90. The abstracted paintings that Smith showed at the Beaux Arts Gallery in 1957, while retaining vestiges of reality in their titles, bore little relation to the artist’s earlier figurative work. The Times (1957) noted how
kitchen-sink realism … has completely disappeared from his present show, its place being taken by a series of abstractions (in the literal sense of the term) drawn from the contemplation of light, water, and space.8‘No more Kitchen-Sink realism in Mr. Jack Smith’s paintings’, The Times, 23 Oct. 1957, p. 3.
The art critic John Russell also summarised this change, remarking that Smith’s art
has abandoned the humdrum subject matter of his earlier work, and discarded even the more idiosyncratic themes (chairs on fire, for instance) of a year or so ago, in favor of the analytical study of light as it passes over still water or an arrangement of bottles.9John Russell, ‘London’, Art News, vol. 56, no. 9, Jan. 1958, p. 50.
From this point onwards, Smith’s work moved steadily towards abstraction.
Ted Gott, Senior Curator, International Art, National Gallery of Victoria
Text adapted from Modern Britain 1900–1960, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2007
