This exhibition tries – and wholly fails – to convince that John Bratby is an overlooked great of British painting
What a brilliant ruse for an exhibition. In order to mount its new retrospective of the British artist John Bratby (whose thickly painted images of everyday life won him notoriety in the Fifties, as the leading exponent of the so-called “Kitchen Sink” school of social realism), the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings, invited local people who owned paintings by him to lend their works of art.
The artist had spent his final 16 years in the town, and the gallery, with some chutzpah, decided to “crowd-source” its new show. It was a calculated risk: estimating that there are as many as 3,000 paintings by Bratby, who was enormously (and, some say, disastrously) prolific, still in private collections, the director of the gallery, Liz Gilmore, anticipated that many people would come forward for the institution’s “Bring us your Bratby” day last autumn.
Even so, the response was staggering. In total, the Jerwood received more than 300 submissions, with enquiries from as far afield as New York and Dubai. An independent panel then whittled down the long-list to a final selection of 66 works.