Signed and dated upper right
Provenance
Helen Lessore / Beaux Arts Gallery, London
Cambridgeshire County Council, purchased from the above in 1953
deaccessioned 2007
History
Derrick Greaves, Beaux Arts Gallery, London, 1953
Literature
James Hyman, From Kitchen Sink to Shangri-La, Lund Humphries, London 2007 (illustrated p. 66)
One of the few major paintings from Derrick Greaves's kitchen-sink period not in a public collection, having been deaccessioned by Cambridgeshire Council in 2007.
The Cart (1953) was included in Greaves's first solo exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery in November-December 1953 and was painted whilst the artist was living in Italy on an Abbey Major Scholarship between 1952 and 1954.
Greaves's most celebrated paintings of the 'kitchen-sink' years of the mid 1950s owe much to his years of studying painting at the Royal College from 1948-52 and his subsequent scholarship to the British School in Rome. At the Royal College Greaves was taught by Ruskin Spear, Carel Weight and John Minton. Greaves free stretchers. Soon Greaves adopted a way of painting, promoted by the college, 'that showed you were serious': 'one could pick up a range of mannerisms from one's tutors' including John Minton's 'way with Modernism', Rodrigo Moynihan's 'suave portraiture' and Ruskin Spear's 'post-Sickertian dabbing and splodging
Italy proved a revelation. Reproductions had given Greaves no sense of the works in their setting or their scale:
'At the Royal College I thought of painting as easel paintingIn Italy pictures filled whole walls: horses, dogs, figures were life size. The difference between size and scale affected me profoundly.' He also felt there to be a visual togetherness between people and place, a harmony brought about by the continuation of the past into the present. This was a quality Greaves recognised but did not himself feel in England, hence the fact that his scenes of people outdoors were almost exclusively painted in Italy.' (Derrick Greaves quoted in James Hyman, From Kitchen Sink to Shangri-La, Lund Humphries, London pp. 53 - 54)
In colour, texture and subject matter, The Cart (c.1953) also illustrates Greaves's admiration for paintings on the sides of the Italian carts used by the agricultural workers. Greaves saw such carts when he visited Guttuso's birthplace, Bagharia in Sicily, and recognised their influence on Guttuso in both their colour and presentation of narrative. Guttuso, the leading Italian social realist painter, impressed Greaves with the scale and style of his works, and repelled him with his emotive, expressionist approach. The influence of the Italian carts is displayed in Greaves's work through the use of colour, texture and subject matter.
Appropriately, it was the strength of Greaves's paintings of Italy that informed his selection by the British Council for the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of 1956, where he showed four of his Italian paintings. This was the only occasion when the four 'Kitchen-Sink' painters exhibited together outside Britain and was their crowning moment. However, even then, it was clear that John Bratby, Derrick Greaves, Edward Middlelditch and Jack Smith had little in common. True they studied at the Royal College and exhibited at the Beaux Arts Gallery, but there was no shared aesthetic or common manifesto. If they shared anything then it was a suspicion of elegance, which was exemplified in their drawing with a shared preference for charcoal rather than pencil to give a greater forthrightness and engagement. As Greaves later recalled: 'We were all discontented, kicking against the pricks. The bit was too tight on the drawing. We wanted to be free.'
Their motivations, political or otherwise, were very different, as Alan Bowness recognized at the time: 'The term 'social realist' has been wisely dropped - it might be used for Greaves, but can only damage the others, whose interests, I should have thought, are far removed from the political. One must remember that these painters belong to the same generation as the novelists and poets of the Wain-Amis-Gunn-Larkin group, and they share many of the same preoccupations. Jack Smith seems to possess the writers brand of humanism to the full; Bratby has done some real Lucky Jim paintings; and Middleditch is the poet among the painters.' (Alan Bowness, 'The Venice Biennal', Observer, 24 June 1956).