Signed lower right
This recently rediscovered painting is considered by the artist to be one of the most ambitious and successful paintings of his kitchen-sink period.
At the beginning of the 1950s Greaves painted a handful of pictures of his home town of Sheffield but, despite coming down to London to study at the Royal College of Art, the city is virtually absent from his work. Instead the most important paintings of his Kitchen Sink period depict Italy. For Greaves, in contrast to his teachers such as Minton, Spear and Weight and contemporaries, such as Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff and Edward Middlelditch, London held little appeal as a subject. Greaves felt that it was already teeming with artists. In contrast to the bustle of the modern metropolis, the best of Greaves's early paintings and many of those that followed have a stillness, a sense of quiet calm, in which life is simple, objects are distinct and the presentation matter-of-fact.
In Italy Greaves was impressed by the indivisibility of life and art: 'Art was not confined to museums and galleries. It was all around. Churches and civic buildings contained frescos, there were mosaics on the floor and statues in the streets. He was especially struck by a visit to the Campo Santo in Pisa where the frescos were being restored and he was able to see, first hand, the pentimenti. This under-drawing, although rough, showed how even at a relatively late stage alterations were being made by the artist in response to the surface on which the fresco was being painted. He was excited by the immediacy of it all: When I heard that Giotto was a joker and deliberately dropped paint on apprentices below, I could imagine that, having been a sign-painter!(James Hyman, From Kitchen-Sink to Shangri-La, 2007, pp.53-54)
Crossing the Piazza is a major example of Greaves's work from this period and was painted at Anticoli Corrado, south of Rome. Greaves's visit there was something of a breakthrough. In the present work and Road in Anticoli Corrado (1954) (National Museum of Wales, Cardiff) Greaves dispensed with the horizon, tipped up the picture plane and used the form of the cobble stones to give unity. In contrast to his earlier Italian paintings which possessed a more conventional conception of space and perspective and have a descriptive, mimetic quality, the present work with its flattened space, frontality and rhyming forms that anticipates the formal concerns with pictorial arrangement typical of the artist's later paintings.
Provenance
The Artist
Whereabouts unknown 1957 - 2006
History
Royal Academy, Summer Exhibition, 1954
Looking Forward, South London Art Gallery,1957 (curated by John Berger)