Lunchtime Talk: Kitchen Sink Painting and Masculinity in 1950s Britain

Discover how artists in the group known as the “Kitchen Sink School”, and John Bratby and Jack Smith in particular, grappled with changing ideas about masculinity in Britain in the 1950s. These artists turned to their families and their homes as subject matter for their art in a moment when the nuclear family became both an ideal and a social norm in the years after the Second World War.  

Their paintings reveal the changing relationship between men, women, and domestic work. They also navigate tensions between the emerging model of the companionate father, the continuing expectations that men would be breadwinners, and the growing anxieties about what was perceived as a disappearing ‘traditional’ masculinity in a society increasingly rooted in conformity and mass culture. 

Learn more about the Kitchen Sink School and take a closer look at what these paintings can tell us about family life, gender and what it meant to be a man in 1950s Britain. 

Dr Gregory Salter has been a Lecturer in Art History at Birmingham since 2016. Before that, he completed a PhD at the University of East Anglia in 2013, took on a post-doctoral role at the Geffrye Museum of the Home in London between 2013 and 2015, and taught at the Queen Mary, University of London, the Courtauld Institute of Art, Birkbeck, University of London, and CAPA: the Global Education Network. He is originally from Middlesbrough and attended a state comprehensive school before going to university. 

This talk forms part of the programme of events complementing the exhibition Good Morning: A Day in Art by Chantal Joffe & Ishbel Myerscough which is on display at the Millennium Gallery from Thursday 15 October 2026 to Sunday 17 January 2027.