Free lunchtime talk by Dr Gregory Salter on the Kitchen Sink School of artists and masculinity in 1950s Britain.
Dr Gregory Salter is coming to the Millennium Gallery on Thursday 10 December for a lunchtime talk on kitchen sink painting and masculinity in 1950s Britain. It's a 45-minute session, running from 1:00 to 1:45 PM, so it's one of those things you can slot into a lunch break if you're working in the city centre.
Salter focuses on the 'Kitchen Sink School'—artists like John Bratby and Jack Smith who brought ordinary people and everyday life from the kitchen onto the canvas. The talk looks at how they grappled with changing ideas about masculinity in 1950s Britain, turning to their own families and homes as subject matter in the years after the Second World War, when the nuclear family became both an ideal and a social norm. Their paintings reveal the shifting relationship between men, women and domestic work, and navigate the tensions between the emerging model of the companionate father, the continuing expectation that men should be breadwinners and the growing anxieties about a disappearing 'traditional' masculinity in a society rooted in conformity and mass culture. The session is illustrated among other works by Jack Smith's The Pink Shirt (1956).
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Salter has been a Lecturer in Art History at Birmingham since 2016, following a PhD at the University of East Anglia in 2013 and time at the Geffrye Museum of the Home in London, so he's coming to this with a proper academic background in the subject. The talk is free, with general admission and an option to donate, and it's held at the Millennium Gallery, 48 Arundel Gate, City Centre, Sheffield S1 2PP.
