Amidst the wood-paneled halls and Gothic windows of Two Temple Place, a surprising exhibition has taken up residence in one of London’s most lavish mansions. Lives Less Ordinary: Working-Class Britain Re-Seen aims a critical eye at representations of British working-class life in art from the 1940s to today. The show’s provocative placement in such opulent surroundings immediately signals its unconventional approach.
Challenging the “Middle-Class Gaze”
The exhibition argues that working-class subjects have long been portrayed through a distorted “middle-class gaze” in British art. Working-class artists, it contends, have been pigeonholed or overlooked, their authentic voices stifled. To rectify this, Lives Less Ordinary spotlights art that supposedly captures the genuine essence of working-class identity and experience.
But Is There a Single Working-Class Identity?
Yet as admirable as this corrective aim may be, the show quickly reveals the quixotic nature of pinning down any monolithic working-class identity across 80 years of dizzyingly rapid social and economic change in Britain.
Take the much-vaunted Kitchen Sink school of social realist painting in the 1950s. Surely this movement, with its gritty scenes of postwar austerity, exemplifies an unfiltered working-class perspective? Not so fast. As artist Jack Smith’s deceptively bourgeois-looking 1954 Interior with Child suggests, kitchen sink realism was as much an avant-garde artistic approach as a class-specific style.
Forgotten Gems and Romanticized Struggle
Lives Less Ordinary does perform a valuable service in unearthing some unjustly overlooked working-class gems, like Ceri Richard’s Matisse-esque Yellow Interior from 1950. No one would know this luminous, faceless figure study had anything to do with class without the wall text’s heavy hint.
More convincing are Chris Killip’s haunting 1980s photographs of “seacoalers” eking out a medieval-looking subsistence by scavenging coal washed up on the Northumberland coast. Yet for all their stark poetry, don’t these images risk romanticizing hardscrabble lives on the fringes?
The Best Bits Drop the Ideological Baggage
The exhibition is at its best when it sheds its ideological blinders and simply lets powerful art speak for itself. George Shaw’s bleak yet lyrical suburban landscapes, finding ghostly beauty in the Tile Hill council estate where he grew up, are exemplary.
Here is modern Britain, working-class or not, as true as it comes.
Jonathan Jones, The Guardian
Ultimately, while Lives Less Ordinary offers a stimulating survey of 20th and 21st-century British social realist art, its inadvertently reveals the limits of viewing this work primarily through the lens of class. The strongest pieces, like Shaw’s unsparing Tile Hill series, touch something universal that transcends sociological categorization. They speak to the human condition in all its grit and grace.
- Kitchen Sink painters aimed to capture everyday postwar life, but didn’t necessarily reflect an unfiltered working-class view
- Lesser-known works by working-class artists like Ceri Richards are a welcome rediscovery
- Chris Killip’s seacoaler photos balance stark realism with poetic romanticism
- George Shaw’s Tile Hill suburban landscapes find beauty in bleakness
