Sink & Swim

While Britain's postwar generation of Angry Young Men lash themselves into a low-powered tantrum over the grubby, provincial world they have inherited in the Brave New World of socialism, a group of young realist painters, known as the "Kitchen-Sinkers," celebrate with gusto the seamy world of cluttered kitchen tables precisely because it is "common to everyone." It is a world in which the plumber is hero, being both "a craftsman and a necessity." A good part of the Kitchen-Sink work looks as if a plumber could have painted it, including some still lifes that focus hard on that hardy piece of English enamelware, the water closet. But at its best the new realism has the effect of a pint of bitter--tart proof that Englishmen can still face life with relish.

Changed Scene. Outstanding among the young realists is 31-year-old John Bratby (TIME, March 12, 1956), who was called in to paint Gulley Jimson's big-footed canvases in the film version of Joyce Gary's The Horse's Mouth. "It's illogical and mad," Bratby confessed afterwards, "and springs from God knows where, but when the spotlight's on me, I feel enormously encouraged." Last week the spotlight was on Bratby again, with a show in London's Zwemmer Gallery of 28 new oils, turned out at a stupendous clip in the last seven months. The scene has changed from the gloomy digs he used to occupy with his wife and two children in a house he got rent-free from his in-laws. Recently elected an associate of the august Royal Academy, and sporting a new beard, Bratby has come up in the world. Hit, new background is his own rambling, Victorian house, with cracked swimming pool, in London's Blackheath district. But the exuberant pictures of the disorderly, newspaper-strewn interiors and the sunflower-choked garden (often with the face of a Bratby child peering through the stalks) show that Bratby is still a glutton for life.

Garrulous Raconteur. London's critics hail Bratby as the brightest and best of the Kitchen-Sinkers, and London art buyers snapped up all but a handful of his new paintings. "He can be visually greedy, slightly coarse-grained, literal, shocking in a good-humored, terrier sort of way," says the Times, "and all these qualities tend to be accounted to him as virtues." The Guardian's Eric Newton likes the way "his gluttonous eye devours his surroundings in huge optical mouthfuls, and his restless, untiring hand transfers them to canvas with the garrulous enthusiasm of a born raconteur." Critics applauded the latest addition to Bratby's usual drab cast of bohemian friends and family--Brigitte Bardot. Bratby claims no speaking acquaintance, picked her out of a magazine one day when a model failed to show. Of Bratby's current Bardot pictures, Critic Newton noted: "He has not yet begun (and perhaps he never will begin) to learn how to brood. Profundity is therefore beyond his present reach. [But] daydreaming is at least one step on the way from seeing to brooding."

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